Several years back when I was in college I encountered Opera (I think it was version 6 at the time) in a web design class. My typical browser then was Netscape 4, and it would crash on me all the time. This was particularly annoying because I would typically have 6-8 windows open simultaneously, and the crash would take them all down and I would lose track of what all I had open.
Opera, on the other hand, has a killer feature for me: you can have it start up with all the same pages open that you had open the last time you ran it. And it had this feature eight years ago.
Some other things it also has that I find useful are:
Mouse gestures
Completely customizable interface (and it’s dead simple to do so)
Ad blocking
Custom searches - I can search Google by typing “g thomas edison” in the address bar. I can look it up in Wikipedia with “w thomas edison”. (The wikipedia search I added, the Google one ships with the browser.
It’s not perfect - no browser is - but it was a huge improvement back in the day, and it’s still quite competitive. It has so many features built in that it is FireFox’s opposite: instead of finding plugins to do what I want, I generally find myself turning off the features I don’t need.
“IE still plays by its own rules, is still broken, and pilfered nearly all its new functionality from other browsers (and did so poorly IMO).”
Then I have to wonder… why on earth do I keep going back to IE?
I havent installed vista, but will consider it on service pack 2, just like I did with XP. I have tried to move to firefox. But I just slowly but surely transitioned back to IE.
One of the things I know about any product I dislike is the effort you have to go through to get things done. Specificly keyboard shortcuts. With IE shortcut key’s are in alt text everywhere. So I can just hold my mouse over something and possibly get a shortcut key. Same with the menu, most if not all shortcut key’s are listed.
But with firefox (Im probably geussing this) I have to find the shortcuts in the configuration among all the other shortcut keys.
If I’m wrong about that then oops But I have a tingle that I’m right.
Just like eclipse.
I’d take visual studio.net over eclipse any day, just because all the shortcut key’s are listed every where, in eclipse I have to navigate 1000’s of possible actions to find the one I want. That’s why I never learnt short cut keys unless a coworker mentions them.
I havent used visual studio in about 2 years though, and firefox was briefly every now and then, so my perception could be way off.
This is just my opinion on why I think I’m still using IE.
not a flame war or anything
I’ll add my quick two cents in on this topic. For me, a website that automatically obtains focus into form fields (such as mininova.org) actually makes it harder for me to navigate given my navigating style. Rather that surfing to a new page on my laptop, using the arrow keys to scroll down and backspace to go back (my fingers know where these keys are), I’m stuck in a search box that is attempting to help me. I’m then forced to de-select focus of that box, and resume my regular surfing habits.
Konquror has an interesting implementation of a similar feature. When you are viewing a page, you can tap the Ctrl key once, and all the links will be assigned some shortcuts - now all you have to do is press the key for a link and the browser will follow that link. For more info, http://lindesk.com/2007/05/konqueror-the-browser/
Based on one of your previous posts, I had installed Opera to try it out. I have a broadband connection (256kbps) but actually Opera was the slowest to work. Are there any specific settings that need to be tweaked or is it that opera works fast only on a Mac and not on PC?
I think Opera browser is so great. The market share is damn slow compared with another big two because Opera did sale them . But when Opera’s free, we should think difference
Back when I was working on the Foleo for Palm, I really loved using the spatial navigation in our Opera port; shift-arrow was easy to hit on the keyboard and less annoying in many cases that finding the trackstick in the middle and pointing to something new.
I added spatial support for the WinCE port of IE4 (back in 1999 or 2000). It’s the obvious navigation method for sub-PC devices since you’re highly likely to have a direction pad/keys of some sort instead of a TAB key.
IMO hit-a-hint isn’t as good as simple inline search or the “/” search in Opera; simply because the latter is more natural…
I got all the four browsers [IE, Opera, Firefox, Safari] on my PC for diff family members – it’s how I compensate for the lack of multi-users in my PC
I still use IE cuz it’s apparently the only browser to blend natively into the aero interface… Otherwise Opera would have been a no-brainer for me.
You’re making this harder than it is, what you should be doing is using the accesskey attribute on alements you want to have keyboard accessible. That’s been in the HTML spec as long as I can remember!
Access keys are conceptually broken: They have to be relearnt from site to site, and they presume that you actually have a regular keyboard. Having it as a quick-access feature should rather be done based on roles.
For what it’s worth: The accesskey attribute is gone from HTML5.
Hey Now Jeff,
I never new Opera supported spatial navigation. I learned hot clicks / mouse gestures form Opera now I’m learning spatial navigation. You also had some great analytics on the browser showdown @ http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html where Opera shows how fast it is. Someday spatial nav will be as mainstream as tabbed browsing where people can choose to use it or not.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
I remember using Lynx – a text only web browser that worked on the old CRT terminals – to browse the early CERN web space when most of the early web consisted of text. That was back before Lycos became one of the first web search sites.
You could easily and quickly go to the correct link or input box on any web page via a few key presses. Of course, as far as I was concerned, CERN’s HTTP protocol would never replace Gopher as a way of finding information on the Internet.
gattsuru: “there’s so much feature bloat that it drives me nuts. (…) That, and it’s closed source”
With bloat, I guess you meen ‘it coms with a mail- and torrent client’? The mail-client in opera is superb, and nobody complains about a browser able to use ftp, so way complain about torrents? Any way - last time I checkced, Operas download was way smaller than Firefox + Thunderbird…
I love the way many talks about open source projects though, as if they singlehanded would keep the project going if everybody else abandoned it…
gattsuru wrote "I can’t really get into Opera. It’s got a lot of great utility options, but there’s so much feature bloat that it drives me nuts. It’s not helped by Opera’s inability to see past the binary on/off featureset.
You either use no tables, or you must have the tab bar on. Where Firefox figured out that no one wants a blank bar sitting around uselessly, Opera’s (and IE) have stuck to the same paradigm: even if it’s not being used, it must stay around."
Right click the tab bar, click Customize…, look for the checkbox labeled “Show only when needed” and click it, then click OK.
Not only that, but this particular checkbox is available for all of the toolbars. I’m not sure how it would affect the others, though.
But I have a tingle that I’m right.