Comments on Yogarine: A look at Opera 9.6

Hi, I know this post is almost a year old, but wi...

2009-08-21T18:45:06.895+02:00

Hi,

I know this post is almost a year old, but with Opera 10 just around the corner I'd like to mention a couple of points to consider:

I have my browser running 24/7 and use it heavily for research (scientific and work), IRC, RSS, and mail.

Thus I need good session mangement. When I research a topic and have like 30 tabs open, I just save them as a session which I can open again later. Including the points to which I scrolled down on each individual tab AND the forward/backward history of each tab. Firefox can't do that, not even with session management extensions.

That leads me to another point: going backwards in history. Using Opera (and rocket gestures) I hold the right mouse-button and click the left as often as I want to go backwards. The pages display immediately (no loading time at all), again exactly at the point where I left them. Firefox is awfully slow there.

The synchronization works fine and DOES have dupe-checking now. It also synchronizes searches (the engines you have added to Opera), history and notes. Searches can be added by right-clicking in a searchbox which is very nifty.

The UI is 100% customizable. You can move everything around and easily add custom buttons:
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2892/operascreen.png

Qt4 and GCC4 build are in fact available but not offered by default. You can get them from ftp.opera.com. Using the Qt4 builds you can make Opera use your default GTK theme.

There are a lot of options for adblocking. I prefer using a custom user css which blocks 99% of the adds and rarely needs to be modified. This option is also a lot less resourcehungry than adblock plus.

Opera DOES support webservices like google reader or gmail. In the current version a bit of manual work is necessary, Opera 10 has GUI options to do it.

There is a short-key to show/hide widgets like the twitter widget. But I'd definately use a desktop app (like gwibber or Twhirl).

Another neat thing are site preferences allowing you to do special configurations for every single site (e.g. disabling certain plugins or javascript).

GPG: Unfortunately there is no GPG support, yet (although it has been promised for years now). You could use desktop tools (seahorse) or create an Opera button that encrypts the text in the textbox that currently has focus (see Opera Wiki).

To some it up: I have one low-resource app running for Web, IRC, RSS and mail. Usually once you really dove into Opera, Firefox seems like the medieval ages. ;-)

- Opera link doesn't even do proper duplicates che...

2008-10-09T20:31:00.000+02:00

- Opera link doesn't even do proper duplicates checking. And bookmarking should be just *one* click.
- Personally I prefer Gmail over any mail client, because no other mail client manages to handle threads the way Gmail does. The only thing that I want is to be able to sign e-mails in gmail with GPG sigs, and Opera doesn't offer me that feature, not even with Widgets.
- Opera locks you into using their integrated feed reader. I prefer freedom of choice. (And Google Reader over Opera's reader).
- Firefox *automatically* imports bookmarks from other browsers. (not sure if it imports from Opera though, never tried it)

Anyway, I didn't say that Opera is a bad browser. It's fast and it has nice little features like speed dial and mouse features. But nevertheless it doesn't make me more productive than Firefox does. Even if I depend on some add-ons... (Actually the power of Firefox comes from it's add-ons.)

What do we have with a brand new copy of Firefox, ...

2008-10-09T20:09:00.000+02:00

What do we have with a brand new copy of Firefox, just downloaded?

A lot of add-ons to make it run decently.

And what about Opera, in the same conditions?

Opera Link for all features, including web history, notes and bookmarks;
A mail client that does what it is supposed to do;
A feed reader with off-line reading enabled;
A note taking tool;
Import/export bookmarks feature compatible with many formats;
Speed dial;
Mouse gestures;
...

To walk around searching and installing millions of add-ons sucks too...