Opera

In case you haven't heard of the Opera web browser, here is the URL

http://www.operasoftware.com/

The designers aim at actually adhering to html standards. This is in
rather stark contrast to the two leading web browsers which add
proprietary enhancements (to gain competitive advantages in the
marketplace,) which lead to incompatibilities which lead to flamewars in
the web design communities ...  ;-))

Opera has received rave reviews in the expert community, but it has not
captured significant marketshare (yet?) since it is _not_ free like the
two leading web browsers.

I have not used Opera yet, but it should serve well as a calibration
tool, better than the two leading web browsers, better than html editors
(most of which try to render well in the two leading web browsers rather
than adhering to the html standards.)

html checkers (such as the excellent and relatively bias free one in
BBEdit) are all text based, and Opera should serve well as the visual
complement to html checkers.

I don't work for Opera BTW, but I like very much what they are doing,
addressing root causes (rather than symptoms) of the problems that we
see on the web (and in aaa  ;-)) these days. I hope for the Opera
designers that they will succeed commercially as well.

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On Sun, 10 May 1998 05:07:26 GMT, Pete Casso
<pet...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

>I have not used Opera yet, but it should serve well as a calibration
>tool, better than the two leading web browsers, better than html editors
>(most of which try to render well in the two leading web browsers rather
>than adhering to the html standards.)

I've tried Opera (under Win3.1 on a 486 with 6MB RAM); here's what
I've found:

	- It doesn't render pages quickly.  It downloads them fast enough,
      and there isn't a lot of swapping to disk while it works, but
      the pages just don't get drawn with the same speed that they do
      under Netscape (Navigator 3.01).
    + The mouse isn't mandatory.  I love this part.
    + You can scale pages to various percentages of their normal size.
      I wouldn't use this, but somebody recently mentioned that MSIE
      had this feature.
    + Massively configurable.  I'd still like to see more, of course,
      but it's a step in the right direction.
    ? A severe deemphasis on mail/news integration.  I like to be able
      to use outside mail and news agents, but sometimes the one that
      comes with the browser is the best one available.  (This is
      particularly important when memory is low and opening up a huge
      mail or news app involves beating the hell out of the hard
      drive.)
    - Payware.

The fact that Opera renders slowly is the main reason I'm not using
it.  However, this may be the result of my own system's weirdness, or
16 bit Windows, or some combination.  I strongly encourage others to
take a look: http://www.operasoftware.com/.

Nathan