Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/11/17/new-and-improved

by yread • 16 years ago

56 63 16 years ago

my.opera.com

xytop3• 16 years ago

Still waiting for news: Opera xx - now we support google services!

I dont know who downvoted you, but as an Opera user that uses Firefox to check Gmail, I'm waiting for the same thing myself!

Tomek_3• 16 years ago

Huh? I don't have any problems with Gmail under Opera. As for the "who downvoted" I guess it was someone who thinks that it's Google that should be blamed for most of "the problems" with Google's services under Opera. It's a browser that's very standard compliant and yet they don't even let you do such silly thing as changing background image on Google's front page (and of course it works fine if only you mask Opera as Firefox).

famrey9• 16 years ago

Google can't even get Chrome to work on all their own services. How can you expect them to support Opera?

kooshball• 16 years ago

title should be clear this build is a nightly build, not retail

Tomek_3• 16 years ago

That address field feature is a cool idea. I'd expect other browsers "copying" it soon, which would make it another item on a list entitled "Invented by Opera, popularized by others".

pornel4• 16 years ago

The way Opera hides http:// is a nice touch (edit: because they avoided copy&paste problem that Chrome has), but such addressbar style has been pioneered by Firefox (extensions) and Chrome.

nodata2• 16 years ago

It's not. It breaks copy and paste.

irahul• 16 years ago

Dunno about Chrome but I don't have the copy and paste problem in Chromium 9.0.584.0 (66224) Ubuntu 10.10. Since Chrome is released from the same base, either it should already be there or would be there in the future releases.

bambax2• 16 years ago

I don't understand what you find "cool": not showing protocol, not showing query parameters, or both?

> Parameters at the end of web addresses are visually hidden when the address field is not focused

I think those are terrible, terrible ideas; to the best of my knowledge this behavior was pioneered by Chrome and is now growing like a cancer, under the false premise that "non-technical users don't understand urls".

How are they going to ever understand them if browsers don't show it to them??!? Hiding query parameters breaks the relation between a url and its content; now all of Google is under the same "www.google.com" url: how is that "better"?

By the same principle that "young people don't understand words" let's remove all printed words and simply print books with the same cover and the same title -- they're all "books" anyway.

sgift2• 16 years ago

This feature evokes unpleasant memories of Microsofts decision to hide file extensions and all the pain which came because of this. The only good news is that you can deactivate the feature in your preferences.

pornel4• 16 years ago

I don't like that they hide query string, but they've implemented hiding of protocol well (doesn't interfere with copy&paste).

I've realized that hiding of https:// actually makes sense. You could mistakenly believe that page delivered over https:// is secure, but there are several cases, when it's not true (e.g. page embedding JavaScript over plain HTTP).

A true security indicator replacing https:// in the addressbar makes more sense, and it shows secure only when connection is really secure (as far as SSL is concerned of course).

Tomek_3• 16 years ago

Actually I wasn't referring to the fact that they hide protocol, that is indeed questionable move. What it's cool it's how they present you an information about security level of the site - check it.

Edit: plus if this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1921100 is true (don't have Opera 11 here to check it) then hiding protocol it's hardly a problem.

Lagged2Death3• 16 years ago

I'm sympathetic to the argument that hiding information is counter-educational. But nothing exists in a vacuum. There are serious problems to deal with, too. I suspect the concern is phishing. Consider:

  hxxp://mc564.mail.yahooo.cz/mc/welcome?.gx=1&.tm=1290173262&.rand=8a8hcjme2nb60#_pg=showMessage& sMid=13&&filterBy=&.rand=1020435964&midIndex=13&mid=1_41637_AFNv%2FNgAARb0TMWfVwycxVDDYoo&fromId=sendreceive@iso50.com&m=1_45237_AFRv%2FNgAALZZTMxQEQbt1QDuB60,1_44482_AFRv%2FNgAAX6dTMscRg7DzmBp0%2BM,1_43847_AFRv%2FNgAAWU6TMoFPgz8kG1tlus,1_43135_AFVv%2FNgAAPHWTMixWAJSDRUfECQ,1_42368_AFNv%2FNgAAEUnTMcCHAZk2EsgYvc,1_41637_AFNv%2FNgAARb0TMWfVwycxVDDYoo,1_40918_AFdv%2FNgAAOo%2FTMMVTQtEN0nYhxw,1_40277_AFdv%2FNgAAK2ETMGqmwMZ%2Fm865vA,1_39560_AFdv%2FNgAAJLQTMBzaQzIs28a2Uc,1_38916_AFJv%2FNgAAGfRTL97CgGm0yp6dBs,1_38170_AFZv%2FNgAAAK%2BTL4DxwdptRQfn90,&sort=date&order=down&startMid=0&hash=30c49f5b9f61273beed1953ae7674c2f&.jsrand=5917415

How likely are you to notice the problems with this URL? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that non-technical users consider the address field a sort of write-only space; they type something comprehensible in there, and the browser destroys it. The simplified address field with the bold domain name is a lot easier to read, and that probably increases the chances that it will be read, rather than ignored. The full URL is just one click away.

famrey9• 16 years ago

Why should people have to understand URLs? Do most people understand how the engine of a car works? No. They just want to get from A to B. Most people don't care.

Hiding query parameters hides yet another thing that's mostly unreadable anyway.

Comparing this to "young people don't understand words" is quite silly. Printed words are important. The message is important. And in fact, language is constantly being simplified, and has been simplified throughout history. Just like the address bar in Opera is now simplified.

yread• 16 years ago

I really like the way mouse gestures are shown and "taught" - feels almost like a teaching game. But I had to disable the URL parameter hiding..

rimantas5• 16 years ago

I am a Mac user and I have a new wish: browser vendors releasing alpha and beta versions named as such: so instead of Opera I would have Opera11a in .dmg. Then I would simply drag it into my Application. Now I drag it on desktop, rename, and drag into Applications…

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

They've previously done that with Opera alphas and betas. I don't know if they're doing it consistently, though.

rimantas5• 16 years ago

Scores only 179 on html5test.com. Chrome dev: 241, Webkit nightly: 243, Firefox 4 beta: 217

Indyan• 16 years ago

HTML5Test doesn't pay too much attention to stuff like SVG, which is Opera's strong point. One area where opera is lagging behind is webGL support and that reflects on the tests.

rimantas5• 16 years ago

SVG is not HTML5…

famrey9• 16 years ago

That site isn't very useful since it only reflects what the author thinks is important. It doesn't show actual standards compliance. He chooses tests and assigns scores according to his own priorities. So it's misleading to call it "html5test."

rimantas5• 16 years ago

Scores are based on the number of features supported. What's wrong about it?

jasonkester• 16 years ago

I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody. I just checked for a few of my sites, and I'm seeing about 1.3% of my visitors using Opera. I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it.

The one thing I always liked about Opera as a developer is that they used IE as their spec. That is, if a site rendered correctly in IE, chances are it would do the same in Opera. The upside is that you'd only ever need cross-check for Opera compatibility a couple times a month (versus several times per day for IE/FF/Chrome), and it would generally still be working.

The downside of course, since they have such a small installed base, is that if ever your thing stopped working on Opera, you didn't have much incentive to spend the time and effort do do anything about it.

pornel4• 16 years ago

Opera has decent market share in central and eastern Europe.

In Ukraine and Russia it's huge:

http://clear.com.ua/projects/ee_browsers/?ukraine

27182818284• 16 years ago

Wow! Thanks for that. I really need to break the habit of assuming the world follows US patterns because Google, Silicon Valley, etc are in the US.

famrey9• 16 years ago

> I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody.

I don't get it. They were never on the radar. They are now. They've got more than 140 million users.

> I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it.

It has 1/4 of the mobile browser market, and mobile browsing is expected to be bigger than PCs in a couple of years (it's actually growing that fast).

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

Opera exists on the basis of the superb mobile browsers - Opera Mobile and _especially_ Opera Mini. (there was a previous post about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882753)

In India, where smartphone penetration has just started, pretty much Opera Mini is defacto here. Especially with the cheap, underpowered Chinese smartphones which come pre-installed with Opera Mini.

In fact, a significant percentage of Nokia phones out here are preinstalled with Opera Mini (or Opera Mobile). I'm pretty sure there is a per-device licensing that is making money for them.

famrey9• 16 years ago

More than 1/3 of Opera's revenue is from the desktop browser. It's simply false to claim that it exists on the basis of mobile browsers (superb or not).

Monkeyget• 16 years ago

I was excited to see they decided to add extension support. Unfortunately it seems quite limited for now. Essentially you have greasemonkey scripts plus a button on the toolbar. Also the extension API is extremely buggy at the moment, which makes it painful to write extension but its still a development build so it's ok.

Looking at the changelogs I'm surprised to see regressions in basic features of the browsers. I wonder if the firefox and chrome trunks have the same kinds of bugs.

lhnn2• 16 years ago

Immediately used 160MB upon starting the program. Firefox is lean compared to that.

famrey9• 16 years ago

A random number like that is pretty useless. Opera has dynamic handling of RAM, so if you have a lot of it, it will use more. If you have less, it will use less.

I'm guessing you have at least 1-2 GB RAM.

famrey9• 16 years ago

By the way, claiming that Firefox is lean because it sets hard limits instead of adapting the memory usage dynamically is pretty silly...

Osiris• 16 years ago

You can manually set the memory cache in Preferences.

I figure that unused RAM is wasted RAM. If I've got 4GB of RAM and all that caching allows to browse faster (going back a page in Opera is lightening fast), then I applaud it.

lhnn2• 16 years ago

I like getting downvoted for not knowing the minutia of a program's memory handling. Thanks, people.

To Osiris: Given I'm not aware of that 150+ MB being dynamic, I assume that's 150MB I'm not getting back if and when I need it. I play memory-eating video games and use VMs; 150MB for a web browser looks like a lot when you've got to trim the fat off your running processes.

Does Opera reduce its memory footprint when you are low on RAM?

Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

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