http://www.futurelooks.com/db_data/db_images/id80_images/opera6033.jpg

"Ever wondered what other Internet browsers are available outside of Internet Explorer?. Opera 6.03 from Opera Software boasts itself on being “the fastest browser on earth”. Does it really live up to its claim of being unique and being fast? Is it the wild child of the browser family and can it ever surpass Internet Explorer as the browser of choice? Let's find out."

Direct Link:
http://www.futurelooks.com/display.asp?i=80&p=1

i must disagree about them being hard to use. they're in fact the one feature i can no longer live without.

being able to quickly flick my wrist to go back or forward, or to open new windows, reload, duplicate windows, etc. are all very cool and handy features.

mouse jestures make surfing a breeze.

and as for compliance with sites, it's not that opera's not compliant with some sites but rather that those sites are not html standards compliant. they're usually custom-hacked to work only with internet explorer which breaks viewing the site in any other browser.

opera is hands down the best browser you can use for any platform.

Mouse gestures are by far the most usable thing I came across in Opera. I catch myself doing them outside Opera as well ;) Besides, if you don't like gestures you can always turn them off -like most of the features and possibilities found in Opera.

Regarding the discoloration, i found nothing of the sort in the mentioned sites (help me out here, where are those images?) But to tackle one of the possibile reasons for mismatched colors: .png support.

check http://ms.demo.org/2002/ for a good example of this issue. The images used have been modified to suit IE, despite the fact that IE's png support is crippled (for quite some time now, discoloration being just one of the problems). Opera and most other modern versions of the browser market support .png properly, so they supposedly 'misintepret' the modified picture. That is hardly Opera's fault.

Opera is generally considered to be the MOST W3C Standards COMPLIANT browser. Therefore, the "complaint" that Opera needs to get on the W3C bandwagon is unfounded. For more information, see Opera Compliance (http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/) for specific information about what parts of the HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, 2, and 3 specs that Opera meets. If you look at the similar documentation for IE, you will see that it has MANY more parts of the standards that are missing. (IE makes it hard to find - this is the closest I came IE Compliance (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/techinfo/overview/designers.asp) )

Please research your topics before writing about them - comments about the ads, the speed, etc., are valid topics. However, without first researching the topic, making (incorrect) comments simply shows your lack of professionalism.

Finally, to explain something you didn't seem to understand. The reason that things display differently in IE and in Opera is because M$FT makes their own HTML (and CSS) commands that are not recommended (at least not now) by the W3C. This includes things like colored scrollbars and INPUTs.

A little more than $0.02, but hey, ...

Edward

I've been using Opera alot since 6.0 was released on both Windows and Linux. One big thing you missed in your article is the shortcuts... When making a bookmark you have the option of putting a SHORTCUT name on it, so now if your friend Bob's webpage is hard to get to... www.gethere.com/personal/webpages/~bob/index.html for example(fake) you can put the shortcut bob on there, and now when you type bob in the url field it will take you directly to the webpage, sure you can click on bookmarks, but if you know how to type... this seems to be much easier to do then search for a bookmark.

Mouse gestures.... AWSOME... going forward or backward with just 2 mouse clicks... opening a new page off a hyperlink by click(holding) then pulling down makes opening other pages easy. Plus you can turn them off, and it also asks you the first time you do a mouse gesture weather or not you want them... so you don't even have to go into preferences to change that.

And the point of it not complient... it's the most complient browser that's actually good. IE has made their own HTML commands to make things "easier" and to keep their browser looking like it's working where the others aren't.

The thing that bothers people about new features(or anything else for that fact) is that you're having to change from the conventional methods you've grown up with and change always seems difficult to most. People fear change, just open up your mind and make your own decisions.

Apart from some small misunderstandings and mishaps, a good review! I've already e-mailed Stephen Fung about a small problem with the Futurelooks.com layout with CSS-compliant browsers (such as Opera) - a problem which wasn't there when I originally created the layout for Futurelooks. Those of you using Opera might have noticed that the grey gradient background in the center area of the Futurelooks layout "follows" your browser window as you scroll up and down. This is caused because of "background-attachment: fixed", which someone has added into the HTML code I originally submitted to Stephen, and is just one example of how wrong IE interprets CSS.

background-attachment: fixed, in its true W3C-intended way, causes the background image to stay fixed in regards to the browser's "frame" (so it seems it's floating up and down behind the layout as you scroll the page).

For some unknown reason, Microsoft in its great wisdom has decided to interpret that as "keeping the background fixed in regards to the layout", which is completely wrong. :)

I just wanted to point this out to make sure no one thought the creator of this site's layout didn't know how to write proper CSS / HTML.. ;)

AND as someone already pointed out, Kevin, your final notes have a slight mishap: you're saying Opera isn't compliant with some websites, while in fact that should read "Some sites are not compliant with the HTML and CSS standards, as set by W3C, and as such they might look weird on Opera, which parses and renders CSS and HTML the way it was ment to be, unlike certain OTHER browsers".

So as soon as you fix that small mistake, everything's hunky-dory :)

"Don’t get me wrong though, Internet Explorer 3 and 4 had to be the best versions of their browser to date!"

Is this a joke or what? How can the author even say that. Given, IE 4 was a HUGE improvement over 3, but to say that IE 3 was one of the best version to date? How much more of an idiot can you be? This guy really needed to do some serious research (as others have noted in this thread) before writing this article.

You missed my favorite feature: "Refuse pop-up windows"

Browsing the web without pop-up ads is definitely worth $39 to me!

The author has completely missed the subject of security. IE requires daily or weekly patching. I've only seen a security patch for Opera once. The ability to control pop-ups with out a third party program is also nice. After a browsing session with Opera a cleaning with Ad-Aware rarely finds unwanted registry entries as opposed to the many entries found after using IE.
Perhaps security is not important to the author, perhaps he is among the many that constantly send me virii with out knowing they're infected.

And fixing the W3C compliance reference before the Slashdot crowd arrives :)

Saying that Opera needs to be more W3C compliant, when it is in fact the web-developer's fault for not following the W3C, could lose you some credibility in the eyes of the /. viewers.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good article. But that little piece of [obvious] misinformation should be rectified, and quickly.

My $0.02

Hello McFly!!

Mouse Gestures: Simply AWESOME. Find that I use them so much, that I Mistakenly use them in explorer and iexplorer.

Hot List: The bookmarking system absolutely bakes iexplorer and netscape.

W3C Standards Compliance: They are THE MOST compliant. It is people that write sights with only IE in mind that are a problem.

Simply stated, Opera is the way stuff USED to be programmed, No body has pride any more.

as everyone has stated, mouse gestures are awesome. Don't try to learn all of them at once, just get the basic navigation, then as you get them down, go to the help and add more to the repitoire. (forward and back I use a billion times a day... and then I try to use them in windows explorer... doh!)

Other awesome features about opera:
keyboard navigation -- just about everything can be done via keyboard, too. And relatively easily.

f12 quickpreference menu, to quickly enable/disable those features for specific webpages, along with the icons right on each page for enabling images, formatting, etc, all of which can speed load times to get straight to the content inordinately.

Browser camaflauge -- you can make opera identify itself as various versions of netscape or IE, which allows you to browse through those pages whose webmasters are dumb enough to to make javascript that specifically disallows any other browsers. It also can fix quite a few of those pages that don't display properly, because of the different output those same webmasters create depending on version.

One of the best-- crash recovery. Even though it doesn't crash nearly as often, anymore, opera now has crash recovery options. When you restart the browser, you can jump to the web pages you were looking at *right* before it crashed. Or you can revert to blank or saved pages, if nescessary. Opera starts up so fast that sometimes a crash is just a momentary 'ugh', rather than a teeth-gnashing incident.

And finally, perhaps one of the best things about opera that you just don't see in IE or Netscape, the Opera guys are really good about bug reports, fixes, and suggestions. I've made several suggestions, one of the above, in fact, and they have all eventually been included in Opera. If the ideas are good, they take the time to listen to the community that sticks with them.


Opera is awesome. It still has a few minor things to deal with, but nearly everyone that I have gotten to try it since 6.0 has loved it, and switched to it when possible. It's funny watching the slow creep through my office of the little red O.


Other than that, good article. Always good to see GOOD programs get GOOD press.
keep it up.

Check out the Opera newsgroups (news.opera.no, opera.* -- may be echoed on your Usenet news provider). There are regular postings about how to customize search options. On my system, I've got an allmusic search, a biography.com search, and I use onelook for the dictionary search. What's cool is that all of these searches use POST parameters, which Opera supports just as well as GET parameters.

And our reviewer evidently didn't catch on to the hotkeys: "z" for the Back button, "x" for the Forward button are the ones I use all the time.

The only annoyance with Opera (which I use 99% of the time) is from websites that have gate scripts that only look for MSIE and Netscape. Most of those sites can be spoofed (and render just fine) if you pick "Identify as Netscape 4.7" from the quick preferences menu. You can change back to identifying as Opera when you leave those brain-impaired sites.

Wonder how somebody can call himself news editor and utter things like "Opera needs to be more W3C compliant".

It's too much effort remebering ten mouse gestures or so?
But it's not too much effort to remember 500 keyboard shortcuts in your 10 favorite games?
The Linux version of Opera still has it's issues, but F12 and mouse gestures alone make me stick to it. I am blazing fast handling 10 or more sites and combined with keyboard shortcuts I've been roaming all of my fav sites while IE folks are still searching for the option to turn java script and cookies.

I am coming through /. to read the article of the only browser that people can use (because IE, Netscape and Mozilla are so crippling compared to Opera).

Thank you all for posting points that I was about to make about shortcuts, mouse gestures and w3c compliancy.

I cannot say this enough, if you site looks jacked up in Opera than it is the script and not the browser. IE will do it best to make it look right whereas Opera will let you know what is wrong.

Now, I script my pages to look right in Opera because if it passes mustard there, than I am fine. On top of that, I run my script through HTML Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) and CSS Validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) just to make sure everything is kosher.

If you have never ran your site through their before, you may be a little discourage in all the errors that will come up. Trust me, your site will load cleaner and faster once you get the kinks out.

... but when you use Opera, you will never have to see another pop-up window... ever.

There are third-party programs that do this for you but no thanks, I rather not have another program that bogs down my system.

It looks as though there has been an update on the article as I had an opportunity to go through the article twice as I emailed the writer.

I am trying to get use to the mouse gestures.

REVISED

In the end I believe that if Opera is to grow in size at least within the Windows market, they will need to continue to conform to any and all standards passed down from the WC3 committeee. Most sites currently don't conform to those very same standards and hence there is rendering issues. Once this is resolved, Opera should truly shine over top of Microsoft.

Everyone thanks for your comments. I found the mouse gestures to be annoying as I am more of a key-combination person and ended up turning it off. One thing that I do quite alot when browsing is when you start to type the name of site you've browsed before, you cannot click tab in order to select the site from the history list as in IE. I wish this was available in Opera 6.03 :)

Another fun part of running Opera is when the local MS Internet Explouder developers call ya up and ask you to check out their site for problems.

Out of all browsers it seems as though IE crashes on me more often.

Originally posted by Splitfyre
REVISED
One thing that I do quite alot when browsing is when you start to type the name of site you've browsed before, you cannot click tab in order to select the site from the history list as in IE. I wish this was available in Opera 6.03 :) Of course you can. Maybe you haven't enabled the address bar? Its at View | Address Bar.

I don't agree with others that Opera is the most standard compliant browser though. I think that would be Moz followed by Opera with IE Win far behind. The biggest con with Opera as I see it is that it's DOM is still rudimentary.

Originally posted by metoo
Of course you can. Maybe you haven't enabled the address bar? Its at View | Address Bar.

I don't agree with others that Opera is the most standard compliant browser though. I think that would be Moz followed by Opera with IE Win far behind. The biggest con with Opera as I see it is that it's DOM is still rudimentary.

No. What I meant was that if you have a site that you know you've visited and you re-type it in the addressbar, what will happen is it will show you the drop down, however you can not tab to the full address. This is a small little thing that I do alot in IE when browsing to multiple sites.

However when it comes to multiple websites, Opera does kick some serious ass as the speeds are amazing in comparison to Netscape Navigator or IE.

I think we talk about the same thing. Try Down Arrow and see if that's what you want.

Originally posted by metoo
I think we talk about the same thing. Try Down Arrow and see if that's what you want.

That does the trick however I've been tabbing in IE with this function since IE 4.0. Going to using the down arrow might take some time :p :lol:

Couldn't agree more. I use a bunch of browsers. Mostly I do things the slow way because my brain can't separate all different shortcuts and trick. Oh well, for once something that isn't the browsers' fault. :D

Thanks for the heads up Janne!

I've made the changes you've pointed out.

Originally posted by Janne Puonti
Apart from some small misunderstandings and mishaps, a good review! I've already e-mailed Stephen Fung about a small problem with the Futurelooks.com layout with CSS-compliant browsers (such as Opera) - a problem which wasn't there when I originally created the layout for Futurelooks. Those of you using Opera might have noticed that the grey gradient background in the center area of the Futurelooks layout "follows" your browser window as you scroll up and down. This is caused because of "background-attachment: fixed", which someone has added into the HTML code I originally submitted to Stephen, and is just one example of how wrong IE interprets CSS.

background-attachment: fixed, in its true W3C-intended way, causes the background image to stay fixed in regards to the browser's "frame" (so it seems it's floating up and down behind the layout as you scroll the page).

For some unknown reason, Microsoft in its great wisdom has decided to interpret that as "keeping the background fixed in regards to the layout", which is completely wrong. :)

I just wanted to point this out to make sure no one thought the creator of this site's layout didn't know how to write proper CSS / HTML.. ;)

AND as someone already pointed out, Kevin, your final notes have a slight mishap: you're saying Opera isn't compliant with some websites, while in fact that should read "Some sites are not compliant with the HTML and CSS standards, as set by W3C, and as such they might look weird on Opera, which parses and renders CSS and HTML the way it was ment to be, unlike certain OTHER browsers".

So as soon as you fix that small mistake, everything's hunky-dory :)

So we are now fully compliant? I've made the appropriate changes.

Looks like it. Check it out in Opera :D

Weeeell... Not quite :D The site does look fine in (my) Opera - which is great - but as far as being completely standards-compliant it's still ways off ;)

The first problem with the site is that it doesn't have a DOCTYPE statement anywhere (or atleast not at the beginning of the document, where it should be). It also does not have a character encoding statement. If we assume that the doctype is HTML 4.01 Transitional and the character encoding is iso-8859-1 (Western Europe), you can check this page for what problems W3C's HTML Validator service finds from the front page alone (=plenty):

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futurelooks.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional

I use 4.01 Transitional (and iso-8859-1) these days, because 4.01 Strict is a little bit too strict (untill I learn to write CSS 1 and 2 in my sleep, that is ;) ).

PS.

I guess it's worth mentioning that being completely standards-compliant might not be the sole reason for Futurelooks' existance ;) As such, it's hardly a requirement for the site to be made out of 100% compliant code.

Here's our Slashdot immortalized in our humble forum :D

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/03/1217222&mode=thread&tid=95