Opera 9 Beta
After reading an interesting review on IE7 that basically said "All these features are incredibly awesome, unless you've used something else, in which case they're anticlimatic and incomplete". The odd thing was that this was worded in a way that made it seem as though they were promoting IE. I've seen a lot of reviews like that of late, similar to the Liberal Party of Canada's ads wherein their pictures of their leader made you question just what party was being advertised. Needless to say, they lost that election, just as IE will lose this browser war. The point of this post is that this particular review casually mentioned that Opera 9 had a beta out. Now, I've always loved Opera, but Firefox was always so much easier to use. But the features mentioned were so seductive that I just had to try it. The first thing I noticed was the download site. Download Opera 9 . It correctly detects my OS as Linux, but just what distro seems unclear to it. I switched the box from 'Xandros' to 'Fedora', and found that they already supported Core 5! For the record, Firefox has been working almost perfectly from day 1, but most software doesn't support fc5 yet. However, Opera only supports i386 right now, so when I tried to install it on my 64-bit machine, I had problems with the qt libraries. Instead of fixing those problems, I switched over to my 32-bit Athlon, which has been working far, far better than the 64-bit machine for much longer. (Note to readers: Never purchase a HP media center, even if it has a Athlon 64 in it.) (Mainly because your son will put Fedora on it and brag about it on his blog). Installing Opera was incredibly easy. I downloaded and installed the RPM, ignoring the 'this software is not signed' warning, which you can safely ignore for a few more years, as there is no malware for Linux out yet, aside from the proof-of-concept codes. Once installed, I had a pretty Opera icon under Applications->Internet->Opera. I dragged this to my top panel, and immediately noticed how much prettier it looked than all of my other icons. I clicked on this icon to open the application.
WARNING: My actual review of Opera is about to begin!Upon opening Opera, I noticed that by default a lot of the Firefox keys had been set up. When I checked on this, I found that the default keyboard mapping was 'Opera Defaults (modified)'. Huh. That was, of course, not the first thing I noticed. Firstly, I had a lot more screen space, and pressing F11 gave me the whole screen, sans icons. I've never had a browser do that before. Also, the pages started loading pretty slowly, although it sped up after a few seconds of use. I disabled Javascript, Cookies, and Java, and attempted to browse the internet. I first went to a message board, where I wanted to keep myself signed in. I right-clicked on the page and clicked 'Edit site preferences' and re-enabled all the stuff I got rid of. I liked this, because a lot of the sites I go to leave cookies I don't want on my machine. Another great new feature is "Opera Widgets", which is a small white button (which you can drag around the top of the screen). When you click on it, it allows you to download widgets for your browser. This seemed a copy of OS X Tiger's dashboard, and it was. But surprisingly, it was just as clean, and a whole lot faster. I've never seen a Microsoft ripoff manage that before. I met some opposition from certain sites for my browser, specifically Blogger. This struck me as odd, considering Google's insistence on promoting alternate browsers. I got a 'Cookies not enabled' error page, even after enabling Cookies on that site. Not only that, but I can see their test cookie in my list, which the site has decided is non-existant. No cookies, my ass. I temporarily switched to Firefox to post this. Scarily enough, the Opera Widgets button is still there, on my Firefox toolbar. Other than that minor issue, which the other features more than made up for, I was really happy with Opera, and I'll keep using it. I had better end this post, though. I have a bash menuing system to finish debugging.
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