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A comment on Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit.

Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by Osiris on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:46PM (#1807754)
I've been using Opera for many years. I'm so used to its features that I have a really hard time using any other browser.

Some people think it has site compatibility issues. That was certainly true back in versions 7, 8 and even 9, but with the latest 10.6 builds, I rarely, if ever, find a site that doesn't work. If it doesn't it's usually due to browser sniffing rather than actual functionality problems.

My favorite features are:

(screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/114028/OperaScreenshot.png )

1. Left-side tabs - I have a wide-screen monitor, why waste the vertical space on tabs?

2. Visual tabs - thumbnails of the pages on the tab. I can't get along without tab thumbnails!

3. Speed Dial - My top 20 sites sitting right on the new tab screen. If a site isn't on my speed dial, I probably don't visit it

4. Address bar - type in anything and it'll search bookmarks and previously visited sites, including the site's CONTENT, not just the URLs.

5. Custom searches - Just right-click in any search text box and create a new search. Assign the search a shortcut (g=google, i=google images, wi=wikipedia, tv=tv.com, etc)

6. Built-in IMAP/POP3 client - I use Opera's built-in email client exclusively for personal email. The email search engine is extremely fast. Type in any word and get a list of emails in less than a second, despite having 25,000 emails indexed. Also, whenever I get email I get a notification right in my browser window. The sidebas constantly shows me the number of unread emails, so no need to open Gmail in a tab to see if there's new mail. I can also click on mailto: links and they work =)

7. Mouse gestures - Although I only use one, I can browser with out it. I use right-click to left-click flip gesture to go back a page all the time. I find myself doing it in every other browser and it takes me time to figure out why it's not working

8. Opera Turbo - I travel a lot and use a lot of crappy hotel internet, so Turbo is great because it compresses all the pages before downloading them, making my browsing much faster on the slow connection

9. Built-in RSS reader - Any page that has an RSS feed shows an icon in the address bar. Click it to add the feed right into the Mail panel. I have a whole list of RSS feeds I read right in the browser every day

10. Built-in ad-blocker - Right-click on any site and choose "Block Content" then click on the content to block. Easy.

I think most of these features are unique to Opera, and if not, many were copied or implemented by as extensions to other browsers. Does anyone else do visual tabs on the left?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by runjake on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:32PM (#1807932)
Different strokes for different folks, but this is precisely what turns me off about Opera. I don't want a kitchen sink. I want an uncomplicated web browser.

That web browser used to be Firefox, but it got too heavyweight for me and Chrome's more minimalist approach became my preferred experience.

The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by pmjordan on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @03:26PM (#1808378)
In fairness, any stuff you don't wish to use doesn't get in the way. I'm a longtime Opera user (I bought a license back when it wasn't free yet!) and I don't use the built in Mail and RSS clients. They don't get in the way and it's still extremely fast. I did switch to Chrome for a while as the Mac and Linux versions were rather unstable in the early 10.x series, but 10.6 is solid again.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by katovatzschyn on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @03:17PM (#1808348) 

   The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)
I have thought this also.

  Opera - Vi

  Firefox - Emacs

  Chrome - Nano/Pico

  IE - Notepad/Wordpad
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by metamemetics on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @04:37PM (#1808642)
>Chrome's more minimalist approach

I find Opera to be far more minimalist than Chrome from a user interface perspective. Chrome doesn't even let you remove the tab bar.

[ Here is a screenshot of me switching "tabs" in Opera http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9053/operal.jpg ]

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by pornel on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @05:40PM (#1808902)
Opera is just flexible and customizable. Mine doesn't even have a toolbar, because I use gestures for everything (edit: I mean I don't see/feel any of the "kitchen sink" — I haven't enabled it, and I could even disable things that clutter other browsers)

Opera with the kitchen sink weighs less (14MB download Mac UB) than barebones Firefox (19MB) or Chrome (30MB).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by alnayyir on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @05:48PM (#1808938)
Kitchen sink is something you feel (UI clutter, features most users don't want), not something you measure (megabytes).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @05:19AM (#1810543)
Firefox used to have an actual kitchen sink as an easter egg:

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensin...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by SkyMarshal on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @02:06PM (#1808066)
I love Opera too, but mainly b/c it's always been fast, and I much prefer their infinitely more flexible Multiple Document Interface (MDI) to tabs. I actually hide everything - the sidebars, navbar, etc, and browse using shortcut keys (mainly Ctrl-Tab to switch through tabs and Alt-menushortcutkey) and mouse gestures. Here's an older image of Opera and FF side by side:

http://imgur.com/R2Wod.png

I'm using FireFox now primarily b/c of Vimperator, but still pop Opera up every now and then to give it some love.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by Nick_C on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @01:59AM (#1810201)
Just FYI, someone wrote the equivalent of Vimperator for Opera. I don't have it to hand here, so you will have to google for it. I use it all the time and it works great.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by SkyMarshal on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @04:25AM (#1810462)
Yeah, Vimperopera and Vopera, but both are abandoned. I have the source of the former and might one day get around to working on it, but that's pretty low priority as long as Vimperator and Firefox work so well.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by vladk on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @02:51PM (#1808262)
The only other browser to do visual tabs on the left that I know of is OmniWeb for Mac, which is/was an awesome browser that doesn't see much support.

I still use Opera on my PC laptop because like you, I'm used to the interface and the built in features. However, on Mac I've never felt like it was as stable/fast.

One feature that used to be in Opera that now isn't (but is in chrome) is switching between your first 10 tabs using Ctrl+# shortcut. I've grown very used to that and was sad to see that go.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by StavrosK on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:54PM (#1807787)
I agree with everything you say, except that Facebook, GMaps and a few other sites don't work very well for me. Hell, I just opened GMaps to see if they'd fixed it and the browser froze.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by chrislloyd on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @02:04PM (#1808051)
Hi! Full disclosure: I'm interning at Opera now. Site compatibility is a tricky issue, however it is one of our main goals. I'm personally working on OperaWatir, an Opera backend for Watir (duh). That means sites can take their existing Watir suite and run them in Opera. This should really help for sites like Facebook who have large Watir test suites and arn't currently targeting Opera compatibility. Official release date? When it's done :) However, you can read about it here: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/03/06/test-automation-wit...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by StavrosK on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @02:06PM (#1808067)
Ah, that's good news. I look forward to not having to launch other browsers!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by iron_ball on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:25PM (#1807906)
Ditto. I use Opera for almost everything, but I use Chrome for Facebook and Google Maps.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by Osiris on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:39PM (#1807957)
Weird, I use Google Maps all the time in Opera, probably almost daily, and never have problems. It used to be a bit slow, but that's changed with the new JIT engine in 10.6/10.7 alpha.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by StavrosK on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:43PM (#1807974)
Ah, I've had such problems before. I fixed them by deleting all my preferences files, which I shouldn't really have to do. I'll try a clean install and see if it fixes it, thanks.

Good thing we have sync, at least.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit by psadauskas on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:30PM (#1807922)
The JS on the Amazon AWS pages doesn't work very well, either. Can't open up the dialog that has my secret key, for example.
[ Parent | on HN ]