I was just over in the 73-79 Forum and Torque1st was raving about the superiority of the Opera browser over Explorer. I tried it a year or two ago and really liked its speed and simplicity, however, I recall lots of problems getting content from pages designed for Explorer and Netscape. Anyone using Opera now that would care to comment? Thanks.
jor

 

Back in the day, when we were just starting to transition from Gopher to the WWW, Opera was indeed the king of browsers. However, it failed to keep up. If you want to experiance the full capablities of the internet, you have to go with a mainstream browser, because that's what people develop technology for.

 

Well, Roger, I'm going to give it another try. I just d/l'd and am using it for this post. So far so good. I would be interested in hearing from anyone currently using Opera. At work, like everyone else, we use IE as our standard and do all of our developmental work with that in mind. I see Opera has a Java version now so I am hoping that they have overcome previous issues. Thanks.
jor

 

The transition from Gopher to the web was 1993-1994 with the Mosaic browser (1993) and Netscape (1994). Gopher disappeared almost overnight with the appearance of the web. The first public version of Opera was in 1996. I think you have your dates or your browsers mixed up.

Opera is still king of the hill in technology, and blows away IE. Opera has natively supported Java for several years and prior to that you just installed the Sun JM by-itself and then Opera would work fine with it.

Opera is faster, smaller and has more features than IE, plus it's quick option menu on the file menu lets you do things really quickly, like switch from Mozialla to IE to Opera identification quickly.

This web site is tested with Opera, and when it works with Opera, it'll work with IE 100% of the time and Netscape 95% of the time. When developing for IE, the same can't be said.

The issues with web pages are mostly the developers fault for targeting one browser over another. If you stick with tags common to all by following the open standards you won't have issues on pages you design.

 

Yup, had opera and Mosaic mixed Been awhile!

In any case, there are always going to be developers who want to take advantages of XML, DHTML, ActiveX, and the like. You gotta have a browser handy that can deal with it. I prefer IE myself, I have been using it since it was first introduced. To each his own!

 

I have used opera, and deleted it after a week. It did not suit my cranky nature, I think. I must be weird, I like IE, though I have many add on bits and pieces that make it custom to me.

Theo

 

I use Mozilla (open source version of Netscape) and it works 99.8% of the time. Freedom from pop-ups, viruses, and other infernal nuisance programs makes almost anything better than IE.

I have a couple of very very small problems with this site that is forcing me to go to Opera for compatability, the boss does not support Mozilla, otherwise I would stay with Mozilla because everything else I do with it works 110% My son has been using Opera for ~6 months and is happy with it. I have used Opera but was turned off by the thought of pop-ups being served to me from the company that makes it.

I am getting stuck in my ways like Theo and don't like to make changes either. I get "cranky" also...

 

Opera supports the XML and DHTML open standards.

 

Opera doesn't serve pop-ups. They do, however, have part of the upper-right reserves for ads if you don't pay it.

 

I like everything about Opera except for it's inability to render certian pages. For example:

http://www.jeep.com/wrangler/models/...ndex&type=left

If you open this page in both IE and Opera you'll notice that in IE the picture of the Yellow Jeep in the upper center of the page has a white transparent overlay at the bottom. In both Opera an Mozilla the overlay is solid, not transparent.

You might think, "well this really isn't a problem", and I'd agree. It's just cosmetic. But what if you would like to play a little online game of Wheel of Fortune. Lets see!

Go to http://www.sony.com/

Near the top of the page, going across horizontaly, is a menu list. The menu items read "My sony - Shop - Electronics.....". When you mouse over the menu items in IE a drop down menu appears. Mouse over Online Games and included in the drop down menu is a link to play Wheel of Fortune. Mouse over Online Games in Opera and no drop down menu appears. Click on the Online Games link and the following page is also absent the links contained in the drop down menu. Browse Sony's main page with Opera and you'll never know that they offer Wheel of Fortune online. The sad thing is, with the proper shockwave plugin, Opera is perfectly capable of rendering the Game.

There are features unique to each browser when comparing IE and Opera. I wont bother addressing them. Instead I'll argue that the deciding factor is one and the same as a browser's first and most important function: Displaying web content. And here, Opera clearly fails and always has. That Opera is still alive today is a big surprise to me considering that with every previous version, content display was even worse. With IE being free and fully capable, why would anyone pay $35 for a browser that is incapable of performing the function it sets out to do?

Just my $0.02. A $0.02 from the perspective of an end user.