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Opera 8 Released 676

Posted by CmdrTaco from the all-nine-users-cheer dept.
bonch writes "After a series of beta releases, Opera 8 final has now been released. Read the announcement complete with download links. The new Opera sports a streamlined interface and several rendering improvements."
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Opera 8 Released More

Opera 8 Released

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  • The question every firefox user is asking: Does it render slashdot correctly?

    • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:4, Funny)

      by aicrules ( 819392 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:28AM (#12280680)
      Unfortunately none of the nine users of this product were available for comment at the writing of this story.

    • In all honesty (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:29AM (#12280698)
      In all honesty, for the past 3-4 weeks firefox has been rendering slash properly for me.
      v1.0.2
      Anyone else out there, or am I just lucky?

    • Why shouldn't it? After all isn't slashdot an Opera friendly site!
    • I use firefox and I'm not asking that question.

      You're grossly misinformed.

    • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AuSerpent ( 5434 ) * on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:35AM (#12280765)
      The real question every firefox user has is does it have an adblock replacement yet. The filter thing they have just isn't good enough. I know this is a heated subject on the Opera forums. Talks of social agreements and ads and the like but I fail to see how it's any different than a popup blocker.

      I paid for Opera 7.5 and can use the 8+ series without paying for an upgrade (it's considered an upgrade to 7.54 since there was no 7.6) but I am having a hard time living without a nice adblock utility and therefore use firefox 99% of the time. I am glad to see version 8 has nice XMLHTTP request support though which was my only other reason for not using opera.

      • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "The real question every firefox user has is does it have an adblock replacement yet."
        There are SEVERAL ways to block ads with Opera. So it doesn't work exactly like AdBlock, but so what?

        And yes, it is different from a popup blocker. Popups take over the UI and cause problems. Normal ads are embedded in the web page.

      • Google "adblocker.css" - jor has had a terrific adblocker since v5 or 6.

      • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tiger the Lion ( 808669 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:13AM (#12281153)
        For adblocking, you should try Proxomitron [proxomitron.info]. I've found this to be a god-send for browsing - blocks ads, popups, etc, etc. Plus, the blocklists are constantly being updated by dedicated users, and can be found at CastleCops [castlecops.com]. For Linux, try Privoxy [privoxy.org].

    • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:5, Funny)

      by Fiver- ( 169605 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @10:47AM (#12282250)
      I thought every Firefox user was asking "what features can we steal from this version of Opera?"

      • Re:The question every firefox user is asking (Score:5, Informative)

        by kngthdn ( 820601 ) * on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @01:10PM (#12284054)
        At first Opera annoyed me, but over time I've really come to depend on it. It can do a few things the other browsers can only dream of.

        - It renders Slashdot fast and correctly!

        - The popup blocker *really* *works*!! Seriously. Firefox has been letting extra-evil ones through lately. Visit drudgereport.com for examples. ;- )

        - I has something called "spatial browsing" that makes keyboard surfing possible. I hold down shift, and the arrow keys navigate through links based on their location on the screen. Firefox can't do this at all.

        - Mouse gestures let me surf faster and with less effort. Firefox has a plugin, but Opera actually invented it.

        - The rewind button doesn't just go back a page, it goes back the last significantly different place I was.The fast-forward button works even when you haven't gone back yet. It reads the page and detects where to go. Firefox has nothing like this. I'm not sure how I lived without it. If I press fast forward while I'm looking at an image, it goes to the next image in the directory! Weird.

        - It lets you turn http referers off. Slashdot has absolutely no idea what page sent me here...

        - It has IRC built in. That's cool, but I don't use it much.

        - The mail client is the best I've ever seen. It's checks and sends from all 5 of my accounts, with Mailbox Oneness never before achieved by mortals.

        - The download manager is excellent. Quick-download is handy.

        - Literally every single part of the interface can be customized by editing the INI files. I've made mine look almost exactly like the KDE browser, Konqueror.

        - Pressing F12 lets me change my settings rapidly. You have to see this one to really like it. No more messy settings boxes. Sometimes you just want to turn javascript off for a few seconds.

        - Deleting cookies isn't a big deal. I click "Tools->Delete Private Data" and click okay. That clears history, cookies, etc all at once. Why can't Firefox do that?

        - It uses a *huge* amount of RAM. Right now it's using 51MB! This sounds bad until you try it; the speed is amazing. Firefox worrys too much about memory and runs slower as a result. Firefox isn't slow, it just isn't this fast.

        - I've tried lots of password-remembering thingies, but the Wand is the only one that's really appealed to me. I just press ctrl-enter and it fills forms in and submits them. It's great for things like forums, where I couldn't care less if my password is stored on my disk.

        - It can do cool tricks, like let you move tabs between windows. I hate tabs anyway, though, so I never use this. ; )

        - If you accidentally close a window, it keeps a list of recently closed windows, so you can reopen it! Very nice. What are the Firefox developers waiting for?

        - If Opera or Windows crashes, when you reload Opera, it can restore all your windows just the way they were. This is unspeakably cool.

        - One of my favorites is that it lets you associate letters with search engines. I type "g whatever I want" into the address bar, and it automatically searches Google. If I type "e something"' it searches eBay! Cool, eh? Who needs the Google bar? Actually, it has that too. It has search bars for 14 different engines.

        - It has support for user stylesheets. This is very impressive. I can't do it justice trying to explain it here. It's cool.

        - You can save "sessions" and open them up later...windows, settings, everything...perfectly intact.

        - Loading PDFs doesn't lock up Opera. Firefox literally becomes unresponsive.

        I could go on all day, but I won't. I just love really love this browser!

        That said, it takes some effort to get it configured so it doesn't suck, and is probably way beyond the masses. Firefox is halfway decent (but buggy...), and most people (read: "lusers") should be using that.

        Oh, and don't whine about gmail support. Opera supports Ajax fully, and there is no reason why gmail shouldn't work, and it used to. Blame google for forcing Opera users to use the crappy basic HTML interface. That's not Opera's fault.

  • Mac version 8.0b1 also released recently (Score:5, Informative)

    by ubiquitin ( 28396 ) * on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:28AM (#12280685) Homepage Journal
    release date on the dmg download for the Mac is April 18.
    Two comments:

    1. It is very fast.
    2. Keychain integration, so all the web site passwords from your other keychain-enabled browsers (firefox, safari, etc.) on your Mac will be remembered.
    • That's great that they keep the Mac version in sync with the windows version, but the poor OS/2 version is still stuck at 5.12 :(
    • Firefox support keychain integration? Hmmph. I've not been able to find this support - it stores all my passwords and certificates in its own storage, completely separate from the Apple Keychain, and also completely separate from the Thunderbird certificate store (which is a royal PITA if you use dual-use certificates for both identifying yourself to SSL-capable web solutions as well as for signed/encrypted email).

      Any clues on how to get Firefox to use the Apple Keychain?
    • Hopefully they'll support transparent Flash SWF files. Version 7 for the Mac still doesn't seem to.

  • The missing links (Score:3, Informative)

    by erykjj ( 213892 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:29AM (#12280693)
    Here are the links to the Opera [opera.com] web site and downloads [opera.com].

  • screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

    by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:29AM (#12280696) Homepage
    screen shots here [opera.com]

  • So far, so good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wyckedone ( 875398 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:31AM (#12280719) Homepage

    Opera 8 works really well. I haven't had any issues so far. The speed seems on par with Firefox.

    One impressive point is that Opera stays up on their security patches [secunia.com]. Version 7.0 only had 35 issues since 2002 and they were all patched relatively quickly.

  • Better links. (Score:5, Informative)

    by frostman ( 302143 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:31AM (#12280721) Homepage Journal
    The linky got me a proxy error, so here are some others.

    Product page [opera.com] with download links etc.

    The Register [theregister.co.uk]

    The Google [google.com]

    ...and what is up with OperaMan? [opera.com]

  • all-nine-users-cheer dept ?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:32AM (#12280726) Homepage Journal
    Bwa-ha-ha-hem....

    I know that Firefox is all the rage these days, but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....or did I miss a slash-think programming update, the one where we're supposed to badmouth and laugh at Opera?

    News for nerds, editors opinions that don't matter

    • but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....

      As one of the "faithful base" (this message is being posted with Opera), I am becoming disenchanted with the direction that Opera Software is taking. Opera is becoming more bloated and more buggy with each release. Instead of fixing bugs, new features are being added, new features that themselves contain additional bugs. Why do I need yet another mail reader in my browser?

      On the other hand, I can get FireFox to have similar functionality to Opera only by

      • Re:all-nine-users-cheer dept ?? (Score:5, Informative)

        by hkmwbz ( 531650 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:15AM (#12281174) Journal
        "I am becoming disenchanted with the direction that Opera Software is taking. Opera is becoming more bloated and more buggy with each release."
        Huh? Opera 8 has had the longest period of testing ever. And even with all the built-in features it's still smaller and faster than Firefox.

        Opera 8 is even faster [howtocreate.co.uk] than previous versions as well. I have no idea how you can be talking about "bloat" and "more buggy", when clearly, they are fixing stuff like mad, and with three betas and countless previews in addition to that, Opera 8.0 is an extremely solid release.

        "Instead of fixing bugs, new features are being added, new features that themselves contain additional bugs."
        Instead of fixing bugs? What are you talking about? Loads of bugs have been fixed during the beta tests. It is nothing but a blatant lie to claim that Opera has been fixing bugs instead of adding new features.

        But so what if they add new features? It's a good thing! Opera is expanding. They can afford to hire more devs, both to add new features, and to fix bugs.

        "Why do I need yet another mail reader in my browser?"
        Opera has always had a built-in e-mail client, so the point is moot.
        "On the other hand, I can get FireFox to have similar functionality to Opera only by loading a bunch of plug-ins."
        Except Firefox has lots of bugs of its own. Just recently, 1.0.3 was released with critical security fixes, whereas Opera is the only browser of the "big three" with no unpatched vulnerabilities.
    • I know that Firefox is all the rage these days, but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....or did I miss a slash-think programming update, the one where we're supposed to badmouth and laugh at Opera?

      In the hospital that I work in, Opera users are 'faithful', they are 'fanatical'. I had to experience this first-hand when a request came in to set one of our in-house web forms up so that the user could add to a field, but not delete anything. Guess what, you cannot override the backspace functionality in

  • Great... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Masq666 ( 861213 )
    This is actually the first Opera version to work on my machine since i tried Opera 5 or something, and i'm all in love now... It's fast, safe and the rendering is nice... Great release..

  • But does it pass the ACID2 Test? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by haplo21112 ( 184264 ) <haplo AT epithna DOT com> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:39AM (#12280804) Homepage
    After all the bluster from the leader at Opera about making the next generation of IE do the last standards correctly. I would think that his next product would pass the test? Yes/NO...anyone who owns Opera 8 please report if ACID2 passes on Opera8.

    http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/ [webstandards.org]

  • How to (legally) get a free Opera license (Score:5, Informative)

    by zxSpectrum ( 129457 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:43AM (#12280844) Homepage Journal

    (This is a partial repost from my own blog entry on Opera 8 [virtuelvis.com]

    Opera is giving away free licenses to people who help spread Opera [opera.com]. That's right, you can get a free license for an ad-free Opera, provided you do the following:

    1. Register an account at the My Opera Community [opera.com]
    2. Create an affiliate link on your blog or web site. Your link should be to http://my.opera.com/username/affiliate/ (substitute username for your My Opera username, replacing any spaces in your username with +). You can use either a text link, or one of the supplied banners.
    3. Get fifty people to download Opera[1]

    [1] It's actually getting them to visit my.opera.com, but: People should really, really try Opera 8. It's quite brilliant, and in many ways sets the standard for what a web browser should and should not do.

  • I Loved Opera... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yakhan451 ( 841816 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:43AM (#12280848)
    ... in fact I was an Opera fanboy. There are still features i like in it that i'm not sure have been emulated using firefox extentions, such as the zoom, fastforward and changing styles on the fly. Even the mousegestures, to me, seem more polished. But... They've taken a pretty firm stance against including an adblock feature (nevermind that they were the first browser with popup blocking, i believe). There is filter.ini, but it's not the same. It's hidden, and you can't block an image with a simple rightclick. It accepts wildcards, but i don't think it accepts regular expressions. For me blocking ads is more important than the rest of those nice features. I don't care if that makes me a "thief" or whatever. I understand them taking the stance they do, afterall, they DO serve their own ads. But, as long as they don't have a good blocker, i won't be using their browser.

  • Does is have SVG support? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:43AM (#12280857) Homepage
    I can't get to the page, but I think this is the first browswer with a svg (Scalable vector graphics) renderer. If so, this could be quite the interesting release...

  • Mmmm... fresh Opera (Score:2, Informative)

    by tricops ( 635353 )
    Mmmm, that's a steaming pile of Opera...

    Seriously, I can't get anything more than a headline or two. What an excellent release, thanks /.! :-/
  • Opera is back again with a great browser. It's very fast. I've been developing a webpage that's very heavy on javascript and Opera 8 is very fast for that.

    Also the implemention of SVG is pretty cool. It's not very good. Rendering is sometimes a bit weird and SVG objects are not scriptable.

  • Opera is a great product. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:49AM (#12280932)
    Apparently being pro-Firefox involves being anti-everything else. There's no need for all the antagonism and martyrdom.

  • Good to have (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:51AM (#12280947) Journal
    I always test my sites with Opera, Firefox and IE.

  • Fast but buggy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The good thing about Opera is that it is fast. Its Javascript implementation, for example, is vastly faster than IE or FF.

    The bad thing about Opera is that it has bugs. It probably has less bugs than FF or IE, but it does have them, and they are different from the FF and IE ones. As a "real world" web developer you're going to put some effort into avoiding the IE bugs, and probably the FF bugs too, but are you really going to work around Opera bugs? The problem is that 20 lines of standards-compliant c

  • it's not just about the user experience (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mqx ( 792882 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:07AM (#12281082)
    I read a lot of comments here about comparisons between firefox and opera, and why one is better than the other and so on. Some of the comments then discuss the sizes of the businesses ,and how viable they are, and so on.

    Please, don't forget that the desktop user experience is only _one_ dimension to the problem - remember that Opera aims its business at the embedded/mobile market by producing a light and fast browser. Don't forget that supporting embedded and mobile devices is more than just "porting to a new platform", so if Opera is well engineered from the bottom up to support this area, then it's leagues ahead of Firefox in that game.

    There are many, many, many other markets for webbrowsers other than your desktop - phones, kiosks, consumer products, set top boxes, etc, etc, etc. This is a pretty big market, and probably has a greater revenue stream. Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business? In addition, remember that someone like Opera may not be able to quote (or even know) its total user base because of commercial confidentiality issues.

    If you're a business looking to integrate web browser, I think the nit-picky user issues may be traded off against cost and technical issues, and that's where Opera may have an advantage over Firefox (and over IE/CE).

  • A case study of why software patents are needed. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Knights who say 'INT ( 708612 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:25AM (#12281291) Journal
    I usually bring up the case of Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc -- a harrowing story of the man who single-handedly invented business computing as we know it -- but Opera is a good, closer case study.

    It's so simple. Opera comes up with the conceptual innovations (say, mouse gestures or tabbed browsing), and then someone can hack up an extension in XUL to duplicate the functionality. Why would someone cough up the bucks to support Opera's R&D? I know I don't.

    Granted, futile software patents are granted everyday, sp. when there is significant prior art already, but incentives are really being distorted here. Why would a company even invest in R&D? They can always just begin a company [slashdot.org] with no significant investment.

    This is a schumpeterian collapse [newschool.edu] scenario, and it's dangerous for the future of technology as a whole.

    It's pretty scary. Tell me, what open-source app has come up with a really new concept, if as minor as mouse gestures?
    • Neither mouse gestures nor tabbed interface to multiple documents were invented by Opera. They "only" brought it to the browser world in a good way. Software patents would have prohibited that and maybe would have lead to several applications, each with one killer feature, but none with all of them.

  • I might switch back (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grungebox ( 578982 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:41AM (#12281499) Homepage
    I used Opera for four years, from 2000-2004, then switched to Firefox for 2 main reasons:
    1) Smaller menu bar at the top
    2) I felt like a change

    To be honest, though, Firefox was a bitch to set up with my three favorite features from Opera:
    1)Mouse gestures - the Firefox extension's all-in-one gestures default to different gestures than the opera ones, which was annoying to fix, but not a big deal. Opera's defaults are more intuitive, too.
    2) Save session. It took me awhile to find a good working version of this for Firefox, but I loved resuming my session when I closed Opera.
    3) Quickly turn on and off pop-ups with F12. Still no good solution in Firefox, as far as I've found.

    The fact that Firefox needs an extension for single-window mode is also kind of stupid and annoying. Other people have said this above, but good grief, people, Firefox owes a LOT to Opera. In fact, in a comparison I like Opera more. It's not IE. Firefox is NOT the end all of browsers; it's on par with Opera. Once I get bored with Firefox, I'll probably switch back. And the ad is a small price to pay for promoting a good product. It's a small bar, and if you hate it that much the inevitable crack takes maybe 1 minute of Googling to find.

  • A very polished product (Score:3, Interesting)

    by __aahrlq8808 ( 804799 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @10:51AM (#12282307)
    I decided to try Opera out and I'm quite impressed with the care put into it. In addition to rendering blazingly fast on my old PII-266, the pages scale easily to my 800x600 monitor.

    Other smaller things I also liked, like how link addresses pop up in a tooltip on mouseover. This allowed me to cut out the statusbar without travelling blind. It can still show during page loads, but doesn't take up space during viewing. A nice touch too was the way tab favicons shrink as more tabs open up, allowing more room on the row.

    I've been a diehard Firefox fanboy because of the customizability (and full Gmail support), but I'd like to see some of these features in upcoming releases.

  • www.opera.com down.. ?Download if from a mirror.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by edwardtls ( 877284 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @10:59AM (#12282393)
    http://ftp.tiscali.nl/opera/ [tiscali.nl] -- if you can't download it from www.opera.com... I can't... Only I do know we have a mirror.. ;) [] Edward TLS

  • Ad Block (Score:3, Informative)

    by yoshi_mon ( 172895 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @11:29AM (#12282733)
    While I tend to install Firefox on end users computers because it's free I myself use Opera.

    As has been noted by others in this thread once you have Opera installed your pretty much done save for configuring it the way you like it. With Firefox you have to install a number of plugins to get that same level of functionality and hope that they will run with the current version of Firefox.

    But the real point I want to make here is that while Opera does not have a native ad blocker in place I have always simply used my hosts file as a universal ad blocking mechanism. Dan Pollock maintains a great one [someonewhocares.org] on his site and I've yet to find a false positive in it.

    The best part about going this route is that all programs on your machine get the benefit of blocking these ad servers or whatever else you care to put in the file. So if you ever have to, , use IE on a website that refuses to work with anything else you are still protected.

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