This is a very quick post, I have been out of the country for most of last week. (Cyberterrorist on the loose! :P)
Anyway, with Opera’s new debut in the 100% freeware market, no ads, no catches, its on everyone’s minds. I have said it time and time again, that no matter how good of a browser Opera is, so long as it packages with ads, or sells at a fee, it will never be number one.
1) Their motto: “The Fastest Browser on Earth”
I have to ask: is the browser fast, or does it load pages fast? Either way, they need to recheck their game plan.
a) Most competent browsers are now equally fast (AOL and MSN Explorer not included obviously), since they load pages almost as fast as your PC can receive. Also, with 60+% of America on broadband, a nano-second load-time is as negligible as the weight of an electron in chemistry :).
b) The browser (as a program) is fast, but certain parts of it are murder. I’m talking about the message boxes. Do you want to save this password? or Would you like to subscribe to this web feed? They load fast enough, that’s not the problem. The problem is that it takes 3+ seconds for the box to unfreeze. Whilst its frozen, its useless. Obviously.
2) Its very pretty. Believe it or not, this is the slickest-looking browser on the web. Firefox with themes does not count, I mean, what kind of company cannot make a decent theme for its browser to ship with??? But Opera? Its beautiful. I enjoy looking at it.
3) Very incompatible. Of the three leading browsers (no need to list them, esp. since this bulletin includes Opera as one of the three), Opera fails the Acid test the worst. But forget Acid, no crazy webmaster writes pages like that. If they do, they should be banned from writing pages. Hell, ban them from using a PC! But, Opera is not compatible with any BB-code shortcuts, AT ALL. I’m typing this from Opera 8.5, just to be fair, and I have to manually hit the B button for bold and the i button for italics. No ctrl+b and ctrl+i for me…. Also it has issues displaying many CSS-Positioned tables.
This may not have been as brief as I intended it to be, but it’ll do ;) I hope this clears up what Opera needs to do to get some more ground. Its a nice browser, but not yet ready for the masses I’m afraid.