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Linux Software

Opera Beta Released 253

Posted by Roblimo from the new-browsers-to-play-with dept.
Wil Mahan writes "According to the LWN daily updates page, a beta version of the Opera browser has been released for Linux, and is available at Metalab (1.9 MB). Looks like Opera fufilled its promise of a full public beta before Christmas."
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Opera Beta Released More

Opera Beta Released

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  • Will it be be open sourced ?
    mvg,
    Kris "dJOEK" Vandecruys
  • Will it be be open sourced ?
    Or will it follow the same model as the Windows version, a 30 day trial license that doesn't mean 30 consecutive days?
    I do use this on and off for testing/layout purposes, and it's refreshing to have a tool that doesn't expire just when it's needed.
    Kudos to the Opera team, my conscience dictates I really should buy it now.
  • Well ... downloaded it, started it, looked fine,
    couldn't log into slashdot (pressing the button didn't do anything), went searching for an option that could help me, which eventually crashed the
    browser :(

    Hmm, not quite stable yet.

  • I'm too chicken to run it... there's no mention of it being ready on the opera website.

    Hey, when did they become opera.com [opera.com]. They used to be "operasoftware" and "opera" really had something to do with singing.

  • I've been using opera for the BeOS on and off the last few months cause it's still buggy.
    But it's getting better with every new release and I sure am happy with the look and feel of it.

    Now for linux too yay!
    Together with the deal with Be for being it's browser on BeOS and Stinger (A lean version of BeOS for webpads) This should generate enough revenue and attract enough investors to allow them to seriously speed up development.
    On to a version that doesn't crash when you change too much preferences! :-)


    Happy holidays everyone!

  • A truly free browser for Linux (Score:4)

    by nocent ( 71113 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @03:01AM (#1447863)
    There's been a lot of talk recently about Mozilla reaching usable status and now Opera releasing a beta for Linux.

    However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya [w3.org] browser.

    Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
    1. Is a browser as well as editor
    2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
    3. Amaya is easily extended.
    Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
    4. Support of MathML protocol.

    But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright [w3.org] which is fully compatible with the GPL [w3.org]

    Why not give it a try?
    Binary Distribution [w3.org]
    Source Code [w3.org]
    RPM distribution [rpmfind.net]

  • I had a few rendering glitches, and post forms don't seem to work (voting, login, etc..). But overall, it's a fast browser and I'm sure it'll run well on older computers.

    As for quicker computers, Mozilla M12 is starting to be a pretty good candidate. (and it's Open Source)
  • I have been waiting so long because the Netscape 4x series sucked so bad. I dont care about paying for an application that will work well (I don't have the qt toolkit installed, either). Please please please let this thing work well. I know its just beta right now, but ... :)

  • Alpha release (Score:3)

    by Fats ( 14870 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @03:18AM (#1447866)
    Hmm, as far as I know, 'Opera 4.0a' indicates that it's an alpha release...

    It hung after I resized the window.
  • i got pretty excited, so i downloaded it run it and quickly became disspointed. it rendered the screens horribly. i tried www.cnn.com and it butchered it to pieces. i tried amaya, it was not all that great (almost same as above), but i have the source code, and i can try to fix it if i want to. but if i am going to pay for a browser, it better work better than stuff i can get for free (Mozilla, Netscape, Amaya). yeah, it loads quicker, and it has a much smaller footprint, but if Netscapes renders the screens properly, i'll stick with the bloat and lagginess until Opera looks better or Mozilla is complete

  • Opensource (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, it will NOT be opensource

    .. And I'm SO f***** tired of you linux dudes only using opensourced software.. You cry _all_ the time "oh, I can't use it, because it's not opensource".. Well, then don't use it, and don't complain.

    I'm going to buy this piece of software.. Yes, I think 35$ is CHEAP for a browser. I just bought Quake 3 too, and I'm happy I did. If you want more software on linux, start paying you too!


    Seriously.. Stop complaining about people wanting to make a little money. If you use a program all the time, 100$ is not a lot. Hey, you payed for the computer, right?

    --
    sick and tired.. and it's christmas

  • Wow ... it's small & fast! (Score:3)

    by RNG ( 35225 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @03:25AM (#1447869)
    Wow, this is pretty cool. I downloaded it, installed it and pointed it at slashdot. Yes, it's obviously beta with some things to fix (and a somewhat odd UI) but it's fast. Starts up within 1/2 second or so and seems to render pages fast ...

    I think we have another (serious) entry in the Linux browser market with Opera. I've obviously just played with it for a few minutes now, but for a 1.5M download, it's pretty cool. The important question now is: how come it's so small? What features doesn't it have that Mozilla does have? All in all, I welcome the Opera people/browser to the Linux world. The more the merrier. Competition is good and will force any other browser makers out there to keep on their toes.

    I still prefer Mozilla as it's open source, but this seems to be a nice addition to the Linux software world. What I'm wondering is: with Mozilla and (the rapidly aging) Netscape out there for free, what kind of market penetration do these guys hope for? This might be a good browser though for low end machines that don't have the RAM/CPU that mozilla seems to eat ... although Mozilla seems to have 'shrunk' (in terms of bloat) over the last few releases ... still, the Linux space should be large enough to allow them to continue development/support of Opera under Linux ... I wish them well even if they're not open sourcing Opera ...

  • try using open on a text file then type a url
    into the resultant window.
    however i had to post this in netscape as it wouldnt submit.
  • I hope they didnt bully anyone out of the domain name.
  • Hmm, if I were trying to release a browser for the Linux market, I'd be sure PNG was at least partially supported in the beta version.
  • When I saw that the beta was out I downlaoded it quickly beofre it was hit by the mass crowds who were bounds to slashdot the page. I untarred it and ran the script expecting it to goto the Opera webpage... but it didn't, just a grey background. After fidling around for awhile I figured out how to make it goto a web page. But unfortunatly every every web page I pointed it to either didn't render at all, or came up horibly mutilated. If anyone else had any beter luck with this, I would like to hear about it.
  • The important question now is: how come it's so small? What features doesn't it have that Mozilla does have?

    My copy is still downloading, but I've been (very happily) running the Win32 version for some time. Opera's reduced size is partly because it comes with JavaScript but not Java (you need the Sun package), and *basic* mail and news clients.

    I wonder if it supports the button sets like the Win32 version...
    ==================================
    neophase

  • MathML (Score:1)

    by arielb ( 5604 )
    Mozilla will also have MathML Check this out for linux: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/reeases/m12/mozi lla-i386-pc-linux-M12-MathML.tar.gz

  • Screenshot (Score:3)

    by Staunch ( 28647 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @03:48AM (#1447877)
    Here's a screenshot for anyone who wants to see what it looks like, and can't download/run it for whatever reason. It Seemed to render /. fairly well, but most sites were a little funny looking to say the least.

    Screenshot [hubbb.com]

  • I was curious as to how it was coming, so I downloaded it and took it for a spin (this brings the total of different browsers currently executing on my system to three). Slashdot loaded ok, and so did a few other sites I checked on that I typically visit, so I'd say it's coming along.

    Here were my general impressions, based on an admittedly brief and superficial examination.

    Plusses:

    • Loading was very quick
    • The interface was clean. Good use of QT widgets.
    • Small download. No hassles.
    • The stylesheet examples I tried worked. Can't say so much for Netscape 4.X
    Negatives:
    • Several features were missing. When I tried to change the zoom, or tile windows, nothing happened.
    • No png support. :( I noticed this immediately, because my web page makes heavy use of them.
    • Closed source. Unfortunately, I don't expect this to be remedied anytime soon.

    Overall, it looks like Opera will become a viable option, and Mozilla is gonna have some competition, which is good.. The browser future on Linux looks bright. :)

    Posted with M12, cause Opera's CGI submit didn't seem to want to work.

    P.S. I doubt cnn.com is a pinnacle of standards compliant authoring. Most of these commercial news sites put out horribley bungled html. A pity.

  • I quickly downloaded Opera while it was still possible. (/. effect 80k..40k...12k/s!) Anyway my primary Linux box is an Alpha and this is a binary, so either open the source (preferred) or get an Alpha binary compiled. I did try it on an Intel, a plain old P133 from yesteryear and it kinda worked.

    It has allready been stated what most of the obvious bugs are, can't submit anything and it quickly hangs after trying a few things. Not mentioned yet as far as i can see is the fact that it has a rather outdated Windoze look to it. The BeOS version is sharp and it works quite well. Also, there was a small problem in rendering some types of images such as; "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It isn't ready for market yet, but i'm considering throwing some of my money their way in the belief that if several people do that it will provide the necessary motivation to finish the job! It is however rather fast and so far unbloated, and just maybe this can be the 'browser on the floppy'.
  • Actually the problem with the "News For Nerds" image might not be the fault of Opera - I'm browsing under NT using Netscape 4.7, and there are some funny horizontal lines running down the image....
  • It was quick as hell, but it really does not matter when it cannot load any pages huh??
  • This beta runs about as well under FreeBSD's emulation of Linux. Just as others have said, I can't use submit buttons, and occasionally it segfaults, but otherwise, it runs!
  • Ugh! This isn't beta software. Its barely alpha quality. Totally useless!

  • All of the above, and

    • I can't enter my proxy settings, because pressing the OK button has no effect.
    • There's no easy way to type a URL into the browser. Typing "http://www.yahoo.com/" into the File|Open dialog and clicking randomly eventually put the URL "file:/home/greg/opera-19991224/www.yahoo.com" into the browser panel, and after that I was able to highlight, delete and retype the URL into the now-present URL-entry textfield....
    • It crashed within 60 seconds.

    Keep trying, Opera developers. Once this actually works it will be ready for beta testing.

  • That would be a good newspaper headline:
    La Scala loses "opera.com" domain! U.S Judge rules its non-profit nature and freely available public domain sources confused the public and threatened the viability of a commercial browser product.

    The judge also went on to condemn the growing popularity of scripts displayed as subtitles, pointing out they "allow 'script-grown-ups' with no particular skills to sing along.

  • I have the same problem (I'm using SuSE 6.1) so i downloaded an upgrade from SuSE.com (gppshare.rpm)

    But now instead I get:

    martin@martin:~/opera > ./opera
    ./opera: error in loading shared libraries
    /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: undefined symbol: _IO_file_open

    D'oh... :-(
  • Learn the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, for one...

  • The whole thing has StarOffice-ish "look and feel" -- large window, MDI in it, widgets are exactly the same as in StarOffice.

    It has good chances to become usable, however MDI shouldn't be the only option for windows handling -- while it may be tolerable in Windows, in X it looks like an insult to the idea of window manager.

  • No doubt.
    This is my biggest complaint with the current browsers. PNG support is horribly lacking. How hard is it to get PNG transparency right? I try to use all PNG's on my site but I hate having to add backgrounds to the images just because browsers can't handle the transparency.

    How long have png's been around now? Why in HELL did we start using gifs when png's look so much better? My guess is people can't do without animated gifs. I'd at least like to think the one animated gif on my site is tasteful ;)
  • they got the domain sometime this fall. there used to a short snippet about it on their front page, but it's gone now, and there doesn't seem to be any mentioning of it anywhere on their site (nothing shows up through searching).
  • Nobody loses any money directly as if it was stealing, but undirectly losing money because of pirated software is as real as it can get. If you give out those 10000 copies you just made, someone who would have bought it otherwise doesn't do it now.. piratism isn't any worst possible crime, but you must be pretty damn stupid to claim it doesn't cost one penny to commercial software makers..

    And windows-version may lack some of the features compared to IE or Netscape, but it is *FAST*, *LIGHT*, and *STABLE*. That is why people think it is so good.
  • but they made it...
  • Please do not consider it a flamebait, but...

    Amaya is nice, but if it really is so standards-compliant, then it has a very tough time around: not a single site (except for the very plain ones) is rendered anywhere close to what any other browser would show. Not even lynx.

    On Opera: a nice README could help very much. Basic things, like this works, this does not, or here you can just edit opera.ini file.

    Otherwise, as pointed out in some other post, it was not even possible to go beyond a proxy.

    I'd say that Mozilla M12 is in a better shape feature and stability-wise than this Opera beta. Then again this MDI thing... Nice that they did not (could not?) use in under BeOS, though.
  • I was able to run it under Debian potato. I've had the same problems with logging in to /.

    What did work worked fast. I didn't check memory use. I almost forgot what browser I was using!

    I did think that I'd be willing to pay even $100 if the final version is as solid as I expect it will be. I'm glad to see someone mention that the expected (announced?) price is only $35. Geez, I haven't bought software since OS/2 in 1993! (Unless you count the MS tax *sigh*, I did reformat immediately ;)

    I haven't checked on where to submit bug reports yet. There is one 'bug' I haven't seen mentioned yet. I have no idea what files the binary installs on my system. I checked a few common places. It wrote directories ~/.opera and /tmp/opr. (That last may have been /var/tmp/opr, I've symlinked /tmp to /var/tmp). There was no man page or info page.

    Well, besides not knowing what a binary is doing, I have no other problem; it is a first release, after all!
  • First the bad news:

    There wasn't a single page I visited that didn't have rendering mistakes. The most annoying bug seems to be that if the page finishes loading before images are displayed, it just stops rendering the pages. Sometimes you don't even SEE some of the images on a page, just the holes where they're supposed to go.

    It's apparent that there's no support for the HEIGHT and WIDTH options to img src= tags; they're just rendered at the original size.

    Forms don't work. Submit buttons do not appear to do anything. Sometimes, input areas don't appear, so you can't even fill out the form before finding out that you can't submit it anyway.

    Paragraph spacing is "odd". Anyone who writes pages to fit just right is going to go insane trying to get pages to look identical on IE/NN and Opera!

    In all, I would say that this is not a beta. It's not even an alpha release.

    Now the good news: :-)

    What is encouraging is that pages do render VERY quickly compared to NN4. The status bar has a lot of geeky information (transfer speed that updates more quickly than NN's, and an elapsed time monitor), and it displays the full URL of each item that is being loaded. There were other widgets on the status bar that I didn't play with.

    When Opera does have a true beta out, I'm sure it will be fantastic. It didn't crash on me, so I suppose that puts it ahead of NN :-)/2. But if you're expecting to jump in and use this starting today, you will be VERY disappointed. Instead, look at it as a "coming attractions" demo.

    Bob Donahue

  • Dumb is making a statement like that when you know that this is an alpha version. Obviously no one would expect you to pay for this product. This is like saying that M1 of Mozilla was not worth paying for.

  • I just wish I could help out with coding because development seems to going slower than I would think.

    Yeah, which brings an obvious question to mind: why aren't more companies (or any, for that matter) taking advantage of libwine to port their products to Linux?

    While it's great that the Opera folks went through all that effort to do a "real" linux port, wouldn't it have made allot more sense to just get their Windows source to compile with wine? I've had the native Windows version almost running properly under recent versions of wine, so I'd imagine that it would have been trivial for them to find the bugs in wine's Win32 emulation that cause problems, and either work around them, or even better, send bugfixes to the wine team and fix the problems properly.

  • Mozilla M7 was farther along. (Score:5)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @05:51AM (#1447925)
    No frames support, poor "tactile" feel for when something is clickable, can't handle a simple redirect, often loads a page but won't display it, segfaults in a minute or so.

    This has miles to go. What's interesting to me is that this is supposedly part of a port series that uses a common codebase. Based on that statement, I expected it to be a buggy cousin of the BeOS version in terms of where it stood in feature support. From the looks of this, it certainly doesn't look like they're managing to write cross-platform code.

    Contrast this with everyone's favorite oft-delayed vaporware, Mozilla. A baseline Mozilla-based Communicator 5 now seems about 6 months away, and some 18 months past initial targets. But the codebase is by most measures 98% cross-platform, and it shows in the way the Win32, Unix and MacOS versions are progressing in lockstep.

    Indeed, at the moment, Konqueror is in much better shape. Heck, the GNOME and Tk HTML widgets are in better shape.

    I'm sure Opera will get something nice out the door. I'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computers generally don't buy software. Companies that want to use old computers would probably be better off from a manageability standpoint if they turned them into X or ICA terminals (running Linux, DOS, *BSD, or whatever), and made full-featured browsers available on centralized servers.

    As far as a lean, stripped-down browser goes for local execution, it looks like perfecty good Opera clones could be built out of Mozilla code. And since the MPL allows for BSD-like commercial extension, Mozilla's support for XML, DOM, plugins and so forth makes for a more realistic browser for the future. As DHTML continues to go mainstream and become a staple of web-based application development, Opera's austerity will come to look quaint.
  • Then maybe you aren't running the "right" version of RedHat.

    If the authors were sloppy about things, they'll have used the "latest" everything and it won't work right without the latest version of RH.
    (I'm running 6.1 right now and the thing seems ok.) It's got some of the problems that some of the other people have been claiming about it.

    It's fast and relatively small, yes.
    This version of the software is clumsier to use than Opera for Windows (There's a clunkiness somewhere within their UI design that I can't quite describe with words- suffice it to say it's "not quite right".).
    It's got rendering problems and it doesn't support as many image formats as the big boys.

    Beta software? Nope.
    Alpha software? Yep.

    Welcome? That remains to be seen...
  • MDI (Multiple Document Interface? or something) is what you see commonly in the Windows world and _never_ in the Unix world. MDI is when you have a main window and every document/image/file/whatever you open is in a new window that is contain entirely within the main window. Examples of this - MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, mIRC (as default), Jasc Paint Shot Pro, Opera.

    Compare this to the unix world, where, for example, you run gimp and have the tool dialog and the image you're working on free floating anywhere on your desktop.
  • Gosh, I just love browsers that make me type "http://" on the front of everthing. Boy, it burns me when I type "slashdot.com" in Netscape and it takes me to the slashdot website when I so clearly want it to do nothing! And, overall, I think there is just not enough "http://" in my life, so I appreciate having the to opportunity, and silent reminder, type it.

    Thank you, http://www.W3C.org (location: http://www.w3c.org/), for standing athwart the tide of them who would take shortcuts and shouting "enoughttp://"!

  • why do I feel like this is the quake opensourcing argument all over again? First off, of COURSE it's going to have bugs. it's their FIRST LINUX RELEASE. Yes, some of them seem obvious enough that they should have been fixed. But instead of bitching about how a program that you haven't had to pay for (and won't until it's out of beta) has bugs, submit bug reports. sure, you can't debug or get the code, but pop off an e-mail mentioning a particular problem.
    it's small, blazing fast, and isn't a system hog. I'ts missing e-mail? GOOD. I wanted to separate those two programs out anyway. at $35 and free minor release upgrades, I'm going to be proud to support them. I've talked to some of their sales people over the past few days while I tested out their windows client to see what we were looking at as far as a linux client. they were extremely helpful and patient with even my most obnoxious questions. This is ONE case where a commercial product is smaller, faster, and better than an open sourced "free" one. point me at a browser that DOESN'T have the same sort of problems that opera does FIVE RELEASES OR MORE IN, and I'll be amazed. Netscape is the closest, and for pete's sake, it's HUGE. You think once Opera is done, Mozilla will be able to compete? only on the free side, man. We can't directly affect the way Mozilla is going any more than we can Opera. Oh sure "but I can go in and change it myself". But how many of us have the time and knowledge to look through a code base that HUGE??? Not me, that's for sure. So don't look YET ANOTHER gift horse in the mouth. Please. If you can't be happy about it, keep your mouth SHUT and go sulk in the corner.
  • Two corrections: Word 2K is SDI. All other Office 2K programs are actually MDI but default to behaving as if they are SDI. Photoshop allows you to pull all of your working palettes out of the main window and place them wherever you want. This makes it easy to put all of your tool palettes out on your second monitor and devote your main, large, hi-res monitor to just image display.
  • I don't understand why so many people get excited about Opera. I can't believe there is a company that actually expects to make money by selling a web browser. Specially a web browser that has _less_ features than IE or Netscape or Mozilla. This is rediculous. Yes, it is somewhat faster, but this speed comes at a cost. Last time I have checked it did not have java support. Many sites just don't render correctly with it. I certainly wouldn't pay a dime for something like this. I am using Netscape 4.7 glibc2.0 version, Thank you very much.
  • Amaya package is now configured
    Amaya configured with libWWW
    Amaya configured with Math support
    Amaya configured with Graph support
    Motif seems not installed on this machine
    Thot and Amaya need Motif 1.2 or 2.0
    Thot and Amaya probably won't compile

    Motif isn't free (Yes, I know about Lesstif, doesn't work here)
  • my take on piratism is this:
    take photoshop. I would not use it enough to warrant paying $600, nor do I have enough money to throw out that much on a program I would rarely use. therefore, I would never have bought photoshop in the first place. if I downloaded it, and used it for personal (ie, noncommercial) tasks, and since I would not have bought it in the first place, adobe is losing absolutely nothing.

    I am gaining something I otherwise would not have had, sure; but they lose nothing. it is simply greed and anti-altruism of software companies to claim they lose $40 billion (I made that up I don't know the real amount) per year to "software piracy."

    sure, that is the theoretical loss, had every one who obtained it illegally instead purchased it. but I wager that that is a very small fraction indeed.

    on a related note, if I had need of photoshop for commercial use and profited (directly or indirectly) from its usage, I would definitely pay for it.
  • Humor value. Opera wasn't news for slashdot when the new Windows [opera.com] (Dec 20) or BeOS [opera.com] (Dec 15) versions came out. (I know, I submitted the article.) Also we have icons for Netscape and Microsoft but not for an alternative to the big two... Hmmm... 6 kids in MTV bunker is news but not an alternative browser for BeOS. (is this "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."?)

    All that aside: If you go to Opera and you happen to run Windows or BeOS you'll find new versions there as well.
    Bugs, tech discussions, etc. can be found on theirdiscussions page [opera.com] (most of the links there are newsgroups, which works rather well).

  • not to be picky, but word 2k actually opens separate windows for each document. very nice! now I can alt-tab between docs. (why they didn't also do this for excel 2k, I will never know.)

    you know, one thing I never figured out, why didn't they make it so you could type alt-# to switch between docs in the old versions? alt-w # is very awkward. (perhaps you can configure keys to do this, I never checked.)
  • There are more advantages to opensource software than just the low price (free) :

    1. With opensource you get better security. Anybody with some time on their hands can look at the source, find security holes, fix 'em and ship patches. And for a web browser, security is a big issue.

    2. Stability and more features. Again, anybody with time on their hands can fix bugs or add new features and have these incorporated into later releases.

    Myself, I paid for Opera on Windoze even though I had a fully-functional pirated copy of it. And if the Linux-version is just as good, I'll pay for it too, opensource or not.
  • Although it's great to see Opera coming, i think that KFM would be an adequate browser for 90% of my needs if they'd just fix the stupid cookie bug. (KFM never saves cookies, even when you tell it to.) Is it too much to ask KDE developers to step back from Krash long enough to fix this stupid bug, which would render stand-alone browsers largely superfluous? Why should we have to wait until KDE 2.0?

  • My first opera session:


    one% cd opera-19991224/ ~
    one% ls ~/opera-19991224
    gif opera runnow
    one% ./runnow ~/opera-19991224
    one% ./runnow ~/opera-19991224
    Sorry, not implemented: ProxyServerConfigurationDialogx::slotHelp()
    UNDEFINED STRING -- SEE PrefsManager::GetLanguageString()UNDEFINED STRING -- SEEone% ./opera ~/opera-19991224
    one% cd ../ ~/opera-19991224
    one% rm -rf opera-19991224 ~
    opera-19991224 opera-19991224.tar.gz
    one% rm -rf opera-19991224* ~
    one%


    Yes, it is beta. I think I'll wait another 2 or 3 months. :)

    --
    blue
  • I'm using suse 6.2 and Opera runs fine (well... except that it segfaults all the time).
    I'm grateful that opera took the time to port the software but ( always a but ;-) I'm going to wait for konqueror 2.0. I really think it's something to watch.
  • Amaya is a cool browser. It doesn't support Frames (they aren't standard, yeah!) and it doesn't read past the closing HTML on a page (cuts off my school's lousy disclaimer, yay!) and it allows me to laugh at people who write bad HTML (ha ha ha ha ha!).

    ...and if it doesn't do something that you want... why, change the source! Work on Lesstif, port the widgets to GTK, hack in graphics support or something. Or at least don't sit here and whine.

    But Amaya has some cool features I'd still like to see in some browsers. Their layout view for webpages when you view source is downright nifty. I never tried compiling it, but did check out the binaries on Solaris. (Lesstif doesn't work?)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • until they fix those nasty bugs and release a version for us Alpha Linux users! Then I'll buy as many copies as I can afford/have machines for..

    LONG LIVE ALPHA [alphalinux.org]!!!
  • Hey all,

    Quite a few comments seem to be slagging off this release with views such as 'segfaults after a mintue' and the like.

    Well, what do you expect ? Tell me how many distributions of *nix's are there out there... and now how many libraries... and now how many versions of those libraries ... and then which kernel versions ?

    I think most of those who post these types of comments have never even attempted to get substantial program working accross many platforms. I certainly havn't, I'm a PHP programmer, so that isn't going to happen... but I can appreciate how difficult the task is.

    So, chill out a little... This release of Opera just about works for me and it is very quick... it's not like Netscape which is so *slow* and crashes 90% of the time if a lookup on an URL fails... and that's happened on *every* platform I have tested it on...

    As for the comparasins to Mozilla... I'm running on a 400 Mhz 128mb system... and yet it still crawls along... fair enough, it's not even officially alpha status yet.

    So, finally, sod off to all you so ready to slag of an attempt to produce a half-decent browser.

    P.S. Don't forget that Opera 3.62 works perfectly under WINE... well, for me that is ;)
  • It's very very unstable. I was able to bring up slashdot 50X faster than with any other browser, but it's got a lot of work to do. Mozilla is a lot farther along and doesn't use Qt. Also, Opera costs money, and Mozilla is free, not to mention way farther along in development.
  • Simple... SuSE 6.1 had serious problems with the Glibc2 (or something like that) libraries... I used to run 6.1 and couldn't run any program that required it, such as Mozilla...

    However, I'm now running Sexy SuSE 6.3 which has them sorted and I'm flying with Opera at last ;)
  • Same here. I closed it and ran it again, and then it was fine. Before I closed it, I turned on a full button bar and a status bar, neither of which appeared until I restarted it. Perhaps that's a relevant factor.

    It renders things a bit differently from what I'm used to, but I gotta say, it's FAST (or shall I say, the stuff I've been using is SLOW).

    Gives the Mozialla crew something to shoot for, I imagine :-)
    --

  • Yeah, which brings an obvious question to mind: why aren't more companies (or any, for that matter) taking advantage of libwine to port their products to Linux?

    If all you are using is Windows programs, then why not jsut use Windows. It is a catch-22. You can make Windows programs to run under Linux, but then why use Linux? That's where OS/2 lost. OS/2 could run Windows programs, but why use OS/2 to run Windows programs if you can jsut use Windows.

    We need Native ports that take advantage of the OS. Wine is Fine. And it'd even be nice if Opera would be wine compatible. But certainly not what we want to see for a browser on Linux.

    -Brent
  • I welcome any new piece of software; expecially when there is only a few others that do the same thing. It keeps everyone else on their toes and encourages competition.

    Opera loads and displays nicely; but it hurt my feelings when it wouldn't load my site: http://www.jackchaos.com

    It sites there doing nothing, and eventually begins to take X with it until I kill.

  • Why do people buy Porsches when your average Honda Accord seats more people, gets better mileage and has more trunk space?

    One word: Speed.

    I use Opera under Windows for that one simple reason. Unfortunately, I am forced sit and twiddle my thumbs while navigator loads the damn page. feh!

    I'll be installing Opera as soon as it is stable. I don't need a lot of useless features. What I need is something that works well and fast.

    I really wish there were an open-source browser that was as quick.
  • I agree that its not Mozilla, but theres another down fall. The original idea was to make a web browser that could fit on a floppy to stop all the 75 MB (FULL IE5 install) downloads. But now its 1.9 MB (which isnt bad at all on 56k, about 6 min) therefore it dosent fit on a floppy. So i think the entire browser is pointless and im going back to IE5 cause it comes on these free CD's.
  • I'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computersgenerally don't buy software.

    I'm not a consumer. I'm running a 300 MHz, and typical browsers whether by Microsoft, Netscape, the KDE team, or whoever, take a ridiculous time to launch, let alone what they do to my machine performance by hogging all the memory. In my book, no program you run should take more than a second to load. Personally, I prefer load times less than .1 second. (no, really) From my experience with Opera on Windows I'd say that opera is the only browser that comes close to being able to meet my criterion. The Windows version is also about the most stable browser I ever used. I really think the Linux version will be even better, once it's done. I'm not going to dump on them for releasing a little early just so they could get it out before Santa comes.

    I guess Opera's best strategy would be to open-source their code the rest of the way, let us geeks fix the code some more, proclaim themselves a linux company, and cash in with an IPO.
  • I think I'll not *waste* time reporting bugs on this one.

    I looked on the site and didn't even *see* a place to report bugs. I would be surprised if it was even possible to report bugs.

    Even if Opera wants to make money, (nothing wrong with that, of course), they could still be more open. How about using a SCSL which is not free, but certainly allows more flexibility.

    -Brent
  • I crashed it a few times doing regular surfing, but opera does have potential for small machines running just monitoring software. One grip is no navigation buttons and no right click. When I refreshed /. I got a core dump.

    Segmentation fault (core dumped)

    -Kris

  • First of all mozilla is further along. I'm using a nightly build to post this. It works great and getting better daily. For the longest time I couldn't figure out how to get a browser window opened I just kept on hitting file->new. It crashed before I saw a web page. I eventually got to see a web page taking a tip from a previous poster by trying to open a file and then typing in the url in the window that opens. It rendered yahoo horibly. It made yahoo look uglier than it really is. I am totally unimpressed. Then I noticed a whole bunch if GIFS! in the directory where I extracted opera. You would think they had some more tact and used pngs or xpms. It also used an interface similar to many windows programs and star office. I don't like star office just for that reason. I don't like to see windows in windows there is no reason for it. I just don't see myself paying $100 dollars for software thats gonna suck this bad. I don't think that they will make user interface changes when they go to beta or release. I'm happy with mozilla.
  • Well the program itself seems to run fairly well. It didnt crash on me but it would not let me log into slashdot. Some .jpg images came up looking wierd also. It is gunctional right now though. Goot work Opera, hope the actual release comes soon. It loads much faster than Netscape and of course looks better than lynx. It could be my happy medium.
    PS- One more thing, could installation be any easier? Just tar -xvzf (filename) and then click on the shell script and it works! I wish Quake installed that easily!
  • Opera isn't faster than IE in page rendering, sorry. Especially IE 5.0..Opera is significantly slower. And even if it were faster in special situations, it's CERTAINLY not fast enough to make the Honda/Porsche analogy.

  • Re:second first post today :) (Score:3)

    by elflord ( 9269 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @08:45AM (#1447969) Homepage
    Yeah, which brings an obvious question to mind: why aren't more companies (or any, for that matter) taking advantage of libwine to port their products to Linux? While it's great that the Opera folks went through all that effort to do a "real" linux port, wouldn't it have made allot more sense to just get their Windows source to compile with wine?

    Because this is a kludge. Instead of using a native API, they are using one API pretending to be another API. The end result would inevitably be something that didn't work quite right, and would never work quite right. Not to mention the fact that it would "feel" like a "piece of windows" running under linux, rather than a real linux app. If you're willing to stoop to this, why not just run the native windows version on native windows under vmware ?

    I've had the native Windows version almost running properly under recent versions of wine, so I'd imagine that it would have been trivial for them

    No, it wouldn't. Part of the problem with WINE is that they need to emulate the bugs in win32. It's not just a matter of debugging wine, it's making a perfect clone of win32, that does exactly what win32 does. When you are running through an emulation layer, you are tying yourself to an API that is unreliable. Using a bad API puts you in a very bad position, because your chance of ever getting something that works properly is very slim ( unless you fix the API, which in the case of WINE is not easy ).

    On the other hand, by using QT, which is a very nice API btw, they have managed to port most of the code in a very short timeframe, and now they only need to worry about their own bugs, as QT is pretty solid.

  • Re:Computer=hardware (Score:3)

    by elflord ( 9269 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @08:51AM (#1447974) Homepage
    Computers are hardware. Until we get replicator technology I won't be able to copy a computer for zero cost.

    And how do you propose to "replicate" the creative efforts of the software author ? Are you attempting to argue that the software author is not worthy of compensation for his/her efforts ?

    Nobody loses any money because of piracy

    This statement is extremely dumb. If the author puts in time and effort into a piece of software and isn't properly compensated because a bunch of leeches don't pay their dues, they have lost money.

    I certainly will NOT give them one penny for Opera but I may use it if someone comes out with a crack or a key generator for it

    If you are not prepared to give money for it, you have no right to use it. BTW, if you think it "sucks", don't use it. Myself, and a lot of people disagree with you though.

  • At around $39, Opera was much cheaper to buy than a hardware upgrade for my mother's 486SX with 8 MB RAM, which she used until early this year. Without Opera, the web was effectively unusable on this hardware.

    Mozilla may well win in the longer term, but my experience with Opera on Windows has been very good.

    Haven't yet tried the Linux version but the Windows version does have frames, redirects, etc - I'm surprised they've released such an incomplete version since it sounds more like an alpha than a beta.

    Opera was, perhaps unfortunately, never designed to be cross-platform as far as I can tell (which is one reason it has a small memory+disk footprint).

    For someone running Linux on a low memory 486 or Pentium, Opera may still be the better choice. Since a lot of Linux boxes appear to be 'recycled', there may actually be a good market for Opera here.
  • mathml is incomprehensible gibberish. I bet the people who designed it have never written any math. What would be nice is a tag that lets you use ( the much more elegant ) TeX syntax. Hopefully, someone will write a latex2mathml parser ( if it's not been done already )
  • Elflord wrote:
    And how do you propose to "replicate" the creative efforts of the software author ? Are you attempting to argue that the software author is not worthy of compensation for his/her efforts ?
    ``Get thee behind me, foul dweomerlayk!'', cried the elflord, Glorfindel. ``The Servants of Stallman hold no power here!''

  • Re: At least you can tell what you need (Score:4)

    by elflord ( 9269 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @09:04AM (#1447978) Homepage
    Your problems are

    (a) You lack write permission to system directories. This has NOTHING to do with linux.
    (b) You appear unwilling to learn how you can install libraries in your home directory and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to make the app search your home directory for shared files.

    It's hardly linux's fault that you lack sysadmin priveliges and that you are lazy.

  • Opera has several features that IE and Netscape users can only dream about. Namely, it puts presentation control in the users hands. Have fun with your Netscape browser. Netscape is the only app that's caused me to reboot any UNIX machine.

  • here's no easy way to type a URL into the browser. Typing "http://www.yahoo.com/" into the File|Open dialog

    There is a button on the toolbar ("Open remote URL") to enter a URL, or you can just type it into the URL bar at bottom if you already have a page showing...

  • $ ./opera

    You should run the runnow script, it preloads a couple things.

  • The important question now is: how come it's so small?

    Because it's written from scratch, and does not have any library routines that it doesn't need...

    I *do* like the fact that they bothered to write their browser from scratch, and in the Windoze version, it works very very well.

    I have an OLD 486 laptop with 8mb RAM, running Win95a, and there is no IE or NS on it. Opera is the only browser on it, and quite probably the only one that WOULD run...

  • Have you you no understandng of the creation of user interfaces? The input from the user should be accepted as often as possible. The assumption that text typed into the URL window, without http:// in front, is a valid one.

    For example, where I go to school, everyone on campus has the same area code and same prefix. When you ask someone for their number you either get 1) 2 digits if you're in the same dorm or 2) 4 digits if they're in a different one.

    Find something worth while to bitch about.
  • "There's a clunkiness somewhere within their UI design that I can't quite describe with words- suffice it to say it's 'not quite right'."


    I've run Opera on win32 and I must agree with your observation...but I would chalk this "clunkiness" up to the fact that the designers are Norwegian... It's a style issue!

    Living in Europe for as long as I did has shown me that not everyone on the planet does things like the Americans...
  • What do you mean remote URL?

    That's what it says; it's their wording, not mine.

  • You are correct; it is all of those things.

    But...some non-features:

    • Table rendering blows. Load Slashdot [slashdot.org] or AltaVista [altavista.com] to see this.
    • It doesn't support GIF transparency. And I whine that Netscape doesn't have a full alpha channel in PNG images. This is much worse.
    • It looks like crap. It uses the Athena widgetset!

    If you want a browser, I suggest:

    • Netscape 4.7. Bloatware.
    • Mozilla M12. Watch it crash. Bloatware.
    • Konqueror. Smaller and faster but alpha.
    • Opera. Smaller and faster but alpha and non-open-source.
    • StarOffice. And you thought Netscape was bloated...
    • Any of the other options. They suck.

    So...those are your choices. Rejoice.

  • Are you just trolling, or are you that dumb? Read the original poster's problem. It's a library version issue.
  • I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm trying to replace all of the non-free software on my system. I use Debian GNU/Linux, which makes this very easy (apt-get install vrms). Netscape Communicator is one of the only non-free applications I still use, and last time I checked, I was only a few mozilla milestones away from replacing it. Netscape is pretty darn buggy itself, and I haven't the slightest idea why I would want to use a new web browser that has lame HTML support and doesn't even have the source available when:
    • Netscape communicator does pretty much everything, and is reasonably stable. And guess what, it's FREE BEER! (unlike Opera, which doesn't aproach it in capabilities).
    • Soon I will use Mozilla and show my support for a company that made their product truly free software. Mozilla supports even more stuff than Communicator, and I hope they will be able to make it faster and more stable. The source is available under a free license.
    • To top it off, I use lynx a lot. For those of you that don't use lynx, well, you're missing out. Lynx is WAY faster than any graphical web browser, and it doesn't show ads or annoying graphics. When you visit /., how many of you REALLY want to see the Slashdot logo and all the topic graphics? Lynx gives you a simple view of a web page. And it takes less than half a second to start up (on my computer).
  • Well, I downloaded Opera and played for a while.
    My impressions:

    1. It is FAST. It beats the crap out of Netscape4 I use now in Linux.

    2. My current version of Netscape is almost as unstable as this early beta version of Opera.

    3. It is amazing Opera is only ~5Mb.

    4. I has (or will have) everything I need from a web browser.


    I really wish Mozilla development team concentrated on a simple web browser and left alone all bells and whistles. Really, how many of us use Netscape mail? Pine is much better for me.


    Whatever happened to the initial goal of Mozilla team to make a browser that fits on a floppy? Sorry to say, but Opera beat them in here. (OK, Gekko fits on a floppy, but the ENTIRE Opera fits on a floppy - or almost fits).


    Mozilla becoming a ~20Mb source code monstrosity.
    Can anybody tell me what is it about a web browser (plus all imaginable bells and whistles) that makes its source code bigger that the source code for the entire Linux Kernel? Should any application be more complex than a full featured operating system?

  • If you just look at the browser, all Opera is missing (in the Windows version, which is stable, small, and damn fast) is DHTML, Java, and a few small things like images as table backgrounds. In fact, the only sites I've seen that don't render correctly have either been badly written (depending on bugs in the way Netscape and IE display pages) or use DHTML (which I suspect will be supported in Opera 4.0, since the Linux version is willing to at least hide divisions through stylesheets). Sites with correct HTML display fine. As for Java, all you have to do is download Sun's Java Plug-in. If you do Java programming anyway, you'll want the latest JDK, which already includes the plugin. Otherwise, the JRE's an extra 6 or so megs. THIS is the major reason Opera is small: simply because Java takes up huge honkin' amounts of space.
  • Especially IE 5.0..Opera is significantly slower.

    That is because IE 5 caches EVERYTHING. It's a bug, not a feature.
  • Open Source is about more than license fees. It's about the licenses, too. That's why license issues are argued as frequently as anything else in this community.

    MJP
  • For example, where I go to school, everyone on campus has the same area code and same prefix. When you ask someone for their number you either get 1) 2 digits if you're in the same dorm or 2) 4 digits if they're in a different one.

    Y2K redux. No, there is no axiom that says user interfaces should accept invalid or badly-formed user input if possible. You have to train the user, too, y'know.

    MJP
  • It's a 'technical preview', which seems more or less equivalent to a daily build from the looks of things.
  • I am really, really tired of waiting forever for a browser that works without problems on Linux. What the hell? This beta is a rush job that doesn't half work. Why bother? Where the hell is Netscape 5 or a version of Mozilla that doesn't crash even more often than Netscape 4? Where is the much vaunted advantage of Open Source when it comes to producing a simple browser? This is really beginning to burn me. Do I have to drop my own work and projects and go write my own? Why is Konqueror all bundled up with the rest of KDE? Why not break some of these things loose on their own to fill such pressing needs? Or did the code end up so tightly coupled and entangled that this isn't possible? If so, what does this say about the way we are designing and implementing these tools?

    I don't mean to be a grinch but it sure looks like I won't be getting one thing I very much wanted for Christmas.
  • Not if X completely locks up ( since X takes control of the keyboard )
  • No, no, no. Empty cache, try to render a page in both browsers. IE renders faster. Period.
  • Well, considering how ludicrously easy the PNG team has made adding PNG support, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Have you ever written a PNG-reader/displayer? Trust me, it's about 100 lines of well-spaced, well-commented code. LibPNG is the bomb.

    MJP
  • The problem in this instance is not the system's "complexity". The problems are (a) you don't have root priveliges on the system, and (b) the browser requires a newer version of the distribution in question.

    However, if you would take the other guys advice, and fix the problem instead of whining, you'd have it working by now.

  • i hate netscape (opera isn't looking too good either with it's windows-inside-a-window design). i truly do. in linux/freebsd, not only is it slow and bloated, but it likes to crash when there's a hint of java or when you get it confused by trying to close windows. some people will most likely say i'm lame because i want the EVIL EMPIRE(tm) to release a version of IE for linux/freebsd, but that's okay. if it works, i don't care who makes it. i know many people who would also like to see IE for linux/freebsd, and i hope it's released someday.

  • Geez people! (Score:4)

    by twdorris ( 29395 ) on Friday December 24, 1999 @11:12AM (#1448032)
    Come on! Lighten up! Is this how the Linux community is going to react every time some piece of commercial software is ported to our fine OS? Cut these guys some slack! Have you ever tried to write an application as complicated as a browser? Even targetting ONE platform is immensely complex.

    Yes, the rendering quarks and their time to port might suggest some slight problems in their cross-platform architecture, but geez! Software just isn't that easy, folks! Personally, I'm amazed they have it working at all...

    If someone were to ask me to port some huge piece of graphic code to X-windows, I'd estimate about a year for a completion time. X ain't easy, HTML rendering ain't easy, cross platform threading ain't easy, making money off software ain't easy...and these guys are trying to do it all. So the version they're throwing out before Christmas is a little buggy. Big freaking deal. They're a small company supporting several different platforms! X and UNIX are not the most natural environments to step into.

    Cut them some slack and offer some words of encouragement when a company is willing to port their software over to Linux. That's what most people want, right? Application support under Linux? Even if it's not an application you're gonna use, it's still a step in the right direction. The more companies that support Linux, the more well known and accepted out platform becomes. Before long, you have companies *assuming* they'll have to support Linux rather than asking if they should bother or not...

  • It's great to get Opera for Linux too. As we so often want to point out: the freedom to choose is important. Also Opera and Mozilla will definitely battle each other and result in better products.

    I downloaded both. Opera starts up fast. I pressed enter and there was the window. Then I visited slashdot with it. The front page loaded fast and it also showed this topic nicely. The feeling I got is that Opera loads slashdot pages faster than Mozilla but Mozilla renders the page faster. Just resize the window to see the difference. However, Mozilla's slowness with big Slashdot pages come from early incremental reflow code and still unoptimized table code. However, some new code has gone in lately to make Mozilla faster.

    Opera also lacked features. If you click on submit buttons, nothing happens. Also it has big problems with some web pages. But as programmers know, this is very normal at this stage.

    Check out the latest Mozilla. The Linux version has become a lot faster lately. It also crashes a lot more seldom and renders pages better than ever. There's still a lot of bugs left but this one is almost good enough for daily browsing. And as Mozilla could use some good testers, report the bugs you find at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org [mozilla.org]

    In a nutshell: Opera is still far behind Mozilla. It's not possible to use it for daily browsing. Mozilla is almost there.

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