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Opera 9.60 Released, With Upgraded Mail Client 128

Posted by timothy from the alternative-alternative- dept.
Kelson writes "Opera Software has released Opera 9.60, the latest version of their web browser & internet suite. It's an evolutionary release, focused on performance optimization, improving the email client and adding more items to the Opera Link synchronization service."
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Opera 9.60 Released, With Upgraded Mail Client More

Opera 9.60 Released, With Upgraded Mail Client

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  • QT4 vs QT3 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sahtor ( 750624 )

    The official download defaults to QT3 even though same build is offered as QT4 in beta.

    There might be graphical bugs but I couldnt find any.

  • It's the only non-free sofware I run. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by netux ( 806209 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @02:04PM (#25302787)
    It's a lot lighter weight than FF and has everything built in including IRC and BT, spell check uses gnu-aspell, and the email client rocks. Tabs and mouse getures came from it, so whats not to love. If you haven't used it check it out. If you have, but not for a while, do yourself a favor and see how it is now.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Threni ( 635302 )

      > whats not to love.

      Proprietary applications without full source code availability ("of course I trust some American companies browser with my bank's passwords...")

      • Re:It's the only non-free sofware I run. (Score:5, Informative)

        by bconway ( 63464 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @03:43PM (#25304533) Homepage

        > whats not to love.

        Proprietary applications without full source code availability ("of course I trust some American companies browser with my bank's passwords...")

        Opera is Norwegian. [opera.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sznupi ( 719324 )

          Which, for those who don't know, means: scandinavian mentality = at least as good as typical well know open source project.

          • scandinavian mentality = at least as good as typical well know open source project

            I don't know what this is supposed to mean :)

          • Sorry to break your perceptions, but Opera is actually a festering privacy nightmare.

            By default it sends each and every one of your URL requests to click-tracker site. If you don't believe me, check with a packet sniffer.

            If it had been open source, I dare say that wouldn't have been the default.

      • Who let Richard Stallman out of his cage?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ozphx ( 1061292 )

        When did you last personally audit your browser's source?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mdwh2 ( 535323 )

        So Open Source is great - but why is it only Opera that draws this criticism? By that reasoning, Apple should be disliked too, for example - but I don't see you posting this comment to every Apple story.

        Go on, try it - I bet you'd be modded down.

    • It's a lot lighter weight than FF and has everything built in including IRC and BT, spell check uses gnu-aspell, and the email client rocks.

      On OS X, it's never really been much of a contender. I checked out this release. It does better for standards compliance, but is still slower than Safari in general. For javascript it is still slower than the stable version of Safari and nowhere near the performance of the Safari betas with the javascript performance improvements. Using gnu-aspell is a minus in my book, at least on OS X, where there is a system-wide spell checking service. Training yet another spell checker for another application that has

      • It does better for standards compliance, but is still slower than Safari in general.

        You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be. I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera. Custom searching, mouse gestures and dynamic tabs are the first things that come to mind. Other obvious ones would be session management and being able to choose where to save a download instead of everything going to wherev

        • You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be.

          I can and do compare them when trying to pick a browser for everyday use.

          I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera.

          That's a fine opinion, but your supporting facts are a bit questionable.

          • Custom searching - you can do this with a plug-in, but it is a valid point.
          • mouse gestures - I prefer mouse gestures implemented at the OS level. I actually do use mouse gestures in Safari and in a lot of other programs. It would suck to have to configure them separately for every program using a different interface.
          • dynamic tabs - have been in OS X for quite a whil

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nareshov ( 1093611 )

      whats not to love.

      Lack of adblock plus. (the inbuilt isn't as good as AB+)

    • Does it have adblock plus? Cause if not, I won't use it. Adblock is the only reason I use FF, and not Konq. on KDE. And the same deal with Safari on OS X. Adblock Plus is, quite simply, the most 'killer' feature that I have ever seen in a piece of software. I wish I could get something similar for Safari on the iPhone, because the large flash ads are the only thing that ruin the net experience on the iPhone.

  • I love Opera (Score:5, Funny)

    by BlowHole666 ( 1152399 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @02:04PM (#25302799)
    Opera and myself have been browsing the web for porn since 2000 :) I never leave my pants on the floor without it :)
  • Someone needs to engineer an app that would let me have a tab for each, we could call it Firefopera Internet Chromesplorer!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

      You forgot one.

      Internet Explorer + Firefox + Opera + Safari + Chrome = Internet Firopesafrome.

      • Well Chrome and Safari both use webkit for a renderer so only counted one.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

          AFAIK WebKit is an Apple fork of KHTML, so you should list the original instead.

          In that mindset you should say "Netscape" instead of "Firefox" too. ;)

  • Opera has a mail client? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @02:08PM (#25302879) Homepage Journal

    Opera has a mail client? Who knew?

    Seriously - until a few weeks ago I never noticed it had a mail client. I just use Opera to verify sites. I never checked to see what other features the browser had. I'd run it long enough to see that menus, etc. rendered correctly and then shut it down and go right back to Firefox.

    I mean, really. With all the great open source mail clients out there, why would I need a mail client from Opera?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You have a good slashdot approved post.You praise open source, You praise Firefox, and you tell us that you are standards compliant or you at least try to make your web applications cross browser compliant. You get an sticker.

    • You are a brainwashed idiot.

    • It was added in the heyday of Netscape as an all in one, at one time Opera had an email client, Irc client, and an Aim/Icq client

  • I've been using opera since v2. And yes that makes me one of those people who actually paid for a browser. Over the years it's grown in size and complexity but still manages a great and fast browser.

    But I have to admit I'm finding Chrome very alluring.

  • If I had to choose between Firefox 3, Chrome and Opera, currently I'd rather use Opera. It's the only one of the three that does not blur images that have been resized in the html source. FF3 and Chrome use scaling interpolation (or antialising?) so heavily on the images it makes you feel as if you had some kind of selective myopia. That unwanted effect breaks the design of a lot of pixelart/retrogaming websites, including mine, and I really don't see in which circumtances it may actually be useful.

  • I like Opera (Score:5, Informative)

    by BaileDelPepino ( 1040548 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @02:37PM (#25303457)
    If you haven't tried Opera, I highly recommend you give it a spin. It's a great browser and it's worth using for regular browsing; even better than Firefox, in my opinion. Firefox's extensions still give it the edge for web development, but Opera is quite close. Here are my favorite features Opera has over Firefox:
    A sexy default look. I think Opera generally looks much sleeker, and the smooth-scrolling is worlds better (parabolic instead of linear, I think). It's a tiny aesthetic change that makes a big difference in ease of use (I don't lose my place) and feel of the app.
    Speed dial. You've got your top nine right there in front of you.
    The Wand. It's a huge time-saver if you have multiple logins for a site. Just click the username you need to use, and Opera submits the form with the creds you picked. It's faster and less clunky than the dropdown that Firefox uses.
    The Trash bin. It lets you pick any recently closed page; you don't have to Ctrl-Shift-T through all the tabs you just closed to find the right one.
    Quick search. Firefox has inline search too, but Opera simultaneously highlights *all* occurrences of the search text as you type.
    And finally...
    Dragonfly, the Opera javascript debugger. This baby is impressive. It's much easier to use than Venkman and rivals Firebug. The script window lets you pick any loaded script (inline scripts have their own entry!). The DOM tab (which is less spastic than Firebug's) lets you inspect all of your elements in folding-tree style. The Styles pane with then show you the explicit and computed styles on the element. Fantastic.
    So give Opera a try. You might find a thing or three that you like.

    • A sexy default look. I think Opera generally looks much sleeker, and the smooth-scrolling is worlds better (parabolic instead of linear, I think). It's a tiny aesthetic change that makes a big difference in ease of use (I don't lose my place) and feel of the app.

      So, Opera went back to the pre-9.5 look? I switched from Opera as my main browser to Firefox shortly after Firefox 3 came out. I was NOT happy after upgrading to Opera 9.5 and finding out that it went from OK looking defaults (I had it set to the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ozphx ( 1061292 )

      I use Opera.

      The only problem that I have with it, is that the goddamn space-bar scroll is 100% of a window height. Not something sane like 95% so you can see the last line of text you were reading.

  • Mail client kicks rear (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @02:52PM (#25303725)

    Seriously, Opera's mail client is amazing (No, I don't work for them). I've tried the other biggies (MS and TBird) and I really like the way Opera manages the content. It's almost like they took a step back and examined all the things that email should do as a properly databased system and made it do those things. Finding an email that's a few years old is extremely fast and easy, the filter system/contacts is amazing, it really understands the concept of an instance of the email -- the same email can appear in multiple places but doesn't have to be copied. It's just smooth. Only two minor gripes: 1-it's quite technical and I've had a bit of a hard time showing non-techs how to get the most of it, and 2-no HTML composition, but who cares? I'm in the design business and I rarely need it -- it's one of those features desired by people who really think that putting their content in bright green will make it more interesting/important (sorry, got off on a rant there)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kiarn ( 1192357 )
      I've been using the mail client for a good 2+ years now for work...I can't live without it now.

  • Acid3 compliant? Nope. (Score:3, Informative)

    by sarabob ( 544622 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @03:31PM (#25304385)

    Long-time opera user here, and I feel it's falling behind rapidly. No ACID3, relatively slow javascript, other browsers catching up.

    When chrome gets fixed, safari gets inline search off the / key, FF stops being slow and/or any of them get the nifty right/left click gesture to go back I'll be switching.

    Although just typing /. in the address bar to go to slashdot may be the opera clincher :-)

    • [quote]Long-time opera user here, and I feel it's falling behind rapidly. No ACID3, relatively slow javascript, other browsers catching up.[/quote]

      You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit [slashdot.org], and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).

      And what sense does it make to say that it's "falling behind" while

      • You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit [slashdot.org]...

        Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly (it is still choppy in the latest dev versions of Opera).

        ...and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).

        When the new version of Opera shipped (9.6) I ran it through the Sunspider javascript speed test. It scored about 6900 versus 6100 for the production version of Safari (3.1.2), so at least on OS X, Opera is significantly behind and that's even without the fancy new javascript engine in the dev

        • Why pick one of the smallest platforms? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Rui del-Negro ( 531098 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @08:41PM (#25307765) Homepage

          Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly

          Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.

          Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.

          And while both layout engines got the perfect score months ago, the current release version of Safari scores only 75/100, and Opera 9.60 scores only 85/100 (highest of any current non-beta browser, but still not 100).

          BTW, the Acid3 test has changed several times after bugs in the test itself were discovered, the latest one on September 29th, so maybe no engine will actually get 100/100 when it's fixed.

          it used to be that Opera had pretty much cloned all the neato features of other browsers

          In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed). :-)

          Personally, I like Opera on Windows quite a bit and it may be my favorite browser on that platform... but I don't browse in Windows [...] you realize they coded it for Windows

          If you're going to pick one platform to optimise (or if you're going to pick one platform to benchmark), it makes sense to pick the platform with 90% market share (Windows) over one that barely reaches 5% (OS X), no? Or test all platforms and then weigh the final scores based on each platform's share.

          • Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.

            True, but that wasn't the original requirement, even if it is the most we home users can conveniently test.

            Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.

            They supplied specified reference hardware and rates, so there is no ambiguity. You can define the test as it is acceptable to you, or course, I'm just pointing out why some people can reasonably disagree. Both engines are pretty good for compliance in any case.

            In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed). :-)

            You misunderstand. Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to c

            • Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to clone any useful features from other browsers.

              Such as...? The only major feature that I remember Opera introducing after other browsers was automated password management, and they took ages to add that.

              I'm going to pick the most featureful and preferred platform for my own use. [...] a quick test on the platform I prefer shows that Opera is not particularly fast

              When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people (in the US - probably more like 3% worldwide), I really don't think your results can be taken to represent browser performance in general (as experienced by the majority of people).

              And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based b

              • Such as...?

                Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters.

                When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people...

                That's not really pertinent since it is also slower on Linux and Windows, or was last time I tested it. The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.

                And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based browsers...?

                Gecko based browsers still run it twice as fast as Opera. Are they just biased against Opera in some unspeci

                • Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters. [...] The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.

                  Opera doesn't have any built-in spelling or grammar checking, so that hardly counts as a "feature copied from other browsers" (unless you mean they copied the absence of a built-in checker?). Under Windows / Linux, Opera uses GNU Aspell and, under OS X, it will use the operating system's checker. I guess that contradicts your theory that "Opera is not coded to take advantage of the features offered by OS X".

                  Resizable text boxes are not defined by the current HTML / CSS standards. If and when resizability be

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sarabob ( 544622 )

        I have tried opera 9.6 on windows and osx. Both get 85/100 on acid3. They got 100/100 when there was a bug in the acid3 test which the webkit guys found, and only in an internal version, None of the released betas have ever got 100/100 AFAIK.

        It falls behind on svg performance (I like to make big auto-generated sequece diagrams etc), javascript performance, rendering speed, debugging tools (network graphs showing page load times, for example) and features (auto-completing google search)

        I have no idea how you

        • Opera might not have compiled JavaScript, but I doubt that it falls behind the other browsers when it comes to SVG performance and rendering speed. If I am not mistaken, Opera currently has the most complete SVG implementation of any browser, and the performance has been shown to be excellent. Maybe there is a performance bug or two somewhere, but overall, it is definitely not slower at SVG and rendering.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) *

      Long-time opera user here, and I feel it's falling behind rapidly. No ACID3, relatively slow javascript, other browsers catching up.

      It's an incremental release over 9.5. All the ACID3 stuff went on in the internal development builds (though you can download that one with the first ACID3 100/100 pass), which will most likely be Opera 10 -- and that's what should be compared to still-in-the-future releases like Firefox 3.1, Chrome 1.0, etc.

    • On Acid3, Opera is ahead of everyone except Safari nightlies (an experimental Opera build reaches 100/100). JavaScript isn't slow (look at these speed gains [nontroppo.org] in 9.5 compared to older versions and other browsers), it just hasn't applied all the things to the JS engine that other browsers have (experimentally). So how you can conclude that Opera is falling behind is slightly strange.

  • Why I use Opera: (Score:5, Informative)

    by __aailob1448 ( 541069 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @05:29PM (#25305823) Journal

    Blazing-fast fullpage zoom: using the + and - keys makes Opera a delight to use for those of us browsing at high resolutions with websites designed for low resolutions. With 30" monitors like mine, it's an absolute must.

    note:Firefox 3.1 has a horribly slow full page zoom on my dual core 2.2 Ghz AMD.

    Instant page backtracking:. No re-rendering delay. (oh how I wish I could use Opera on my iPhone just because of that). The bonus is that any text typed by the user is also saved. A lifesaver for those of us who post on forums and hate to see their comments "eaten" by server and network errors.

    Snappiest interface of the bunch: It shows quickdial tabs faster than the firefox plugin. Closing tabs and opening new ones is faster. Scrolling is faster. The reduced input latency makes interacting with the browser more enjoyable. Chrome is second best in this regard.

    All of this makes up for the slightly higher incompatibility issues Opera deals with and the lack of addons (segmented downloading? Adblock? etc.). I can always fire up Chrome or Firefox if I need to.

    • I don't think incompatability is really an issue anymore for basic webbrowsing. My personal experience is that 99% of the webpages that I regularly visit render perfectly in Opera. I love this browser.

  • So I tried Opera a while back and the pages were noticeably slower to load then in Firefox. Having just tried it now, I can safely say that its finally a bit faster. I'll be happily switching and taking advantage of all of Opera's features that Firefox has yet to implement.

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