July 18, 2004
opera set-ups
Opera's look and feel can be changed with one-click setups. These setup files bundle popular browser settings so you can select a style that suits you best.
I, having had a less than pleasant experience with Opera 7.5 when I last tried it, decided that these "one-click setups", which claim to make Opera look and feel like IE/Firefox, might improve the experience enough to try again.
To compare the initial user experience and see if this IE/Firefox Opera change made things better, I first removed all traces of Opera and Firefox from my system. I then downloaded and installed both the latest 0.9 branch Firefox build (20040717), and Opera 7.52 (Build 3834) and did fresh installs of both. I installed and launched both, adjusted the screen size to something not huge and restarted. I took screenshots of second launch on both, then updated Opera with the IE/Firefox one-click setup, restarted Opera and took another screenshot.
As you can see, the initial Opera experience is pretty painful. I'm not sure why they decided that the second launch needed to spam the hell out of the browser window with pop-ups, but I guess they've gotta make money and I suppose selling ads in the toolbar just wasn't enough.
The IE/Firefox (which neither looks nor feels anything like Firefox) setup is a fairly large improvement to the stock Opera setup. At least all the pop-ups seem to have disappeared, but it still suffers from toolbar overload, having very nearly twice the vertical space taken up by toolbars as Firefox (ignoring that vertical toolbar which is just an artifact of my arbitrary window sizing).
The IE look, even though it hides that strange side toolbar thing, actually seems to use up even more of the available screen space with toolbars than the stock Opera look (though a quick calculation shows that to not be the case). The menus aren't really much better with this setup and the IE-style buttons have a horrible mouse-over highlight that goes in exactly the wrong direction, getting brighter, lower contrast, and much lighter rather than slightly darker with more contrast. This makes them painfully difficult to recognize when you hover over them.
All is not lost, however, and if this IE Opera "set-up" was tweaked just a bit more, and was the "out of the box" experience for new users, then I might just find myself using it a bit more, and so might a lot of other Opera "watchers" out there. After about 30 minutes of playing around, I came up with this configuration which feels a lot closer to IE (and Firefox) than the official set-up. If anyone from Opera is listening, maybe you can update that setup to look more like this:
flame prophylactic: I use Opera semi-regularly to compare layout results with Gecko browsers and I appreciate the fast and standards-supporting layout engine as well as the multi-platform consideration. I'm not an "opera hater" but I do think that an overwhelming majority of people on the web would be totally overwhelmed by the heavy and chaotic application interface. This is meant as constructive criticism and not rival bashing. If you want to flame me for offering this criticism, don't expect a response.
Posted by asa at July 18, 2004 01:10 PMThe other day, I had a 'proper' go at trying out the latest version of Opera.
It did take me a while to configure UI how I like it, but it wasn't too painful. Confusing, yes - but I figured it out in a few minutes.
After playing with Opera for a while, the one thing that impressed me was the rendering speed - switching tabs and back/forward is almost instantaneous. For me, this was the only thing that Opera does which Firefox can't provide.
On the other hand, I was suprised that Opera doesn't seem to have any extension mechanism. Themes yes, but no extensions (please correct me if I'm wrong, Panels aren't the same). Also Opera isn't so good at rendering in Quirks mode as FF is.
So yeah, they're both very good browsers, but I can't live without Adblock, Googlebar et al.
in my firefox i have the menu, some personal links,nav buttons,address bar, search bar and throbber all on one row. then I have the tab bar for all the tabs. I don't know if you can drag items to Opera's menu bar but it's already way too big. My next challenge is to nuke the red close button on FF's tab bar and rename Bookmarks on the menu to something shorter
Posted by: arielb on July 18, 2004 05:41 PMI had tried all those 3 themes when they were out.
The best one I found it the "Safari" one, which gives you a dark metallic theme.
Arielb:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#app_tabclose
And then check out the one below it.
Posted by: Mike Goodspeed on July 18, 2004 06:13 PMYour "FF" setup of Opera is indeed cleaner than Opera's own.
Next, the popup ads on Lycos are a killjoy. The default installation does not block popups (who knows why), and 2 popups on first install is the worst thing an alternative browser could present to a new user. It didn't used to be that way. I don't know what has changed, but something has changed for the worse. I sincerely wish that Opera drop the partnership with Lycos. Theirs is the bottom-dwelling site in all respects. They used to have crashware JS on their sites, millions of popups, and flashing ads (and I mean flashing!!!). Lycos does more harm than good to Opera. There isn;t any good that i can detect.
I'd be interested in your opinion on the third setup offered (beyond IE/FF and Safari). I have updated it a couple of days ago.
regards,
M.
Posted by: Moose on July 18, 2004 06:21 PMA screenshot of the theme that I mentioned.
Posted by: minghong on July 18, 2004 07:29 PM
Anyway to tweak FF to do the instantaneous forward/back like Opera? Seems like FF checks the website rather than using cache??
Posted by: Tracy on July 19, 2004 04:26 AMTracy, there is a fast forward/backward extension.
Posted by: minghong on July 19, 2004 06:14 AMOh, in my comment I forgot to mention that in addition to the fast rendering speed, I also appreciate Opera's very good cache. I've heard that Opera not only caches the HTML of the page but also the DOM so it doesn't have to rebuild that when you reload a cached page. Whatever it is, it works quite well.
--Asa
Posted by: asa on July 19, 2004 06:45 AMminghong, the extension you linked to implements the useful rewind/fastfoward feature from Opera, but its not what I was talking about. I was describing the speed of normal back/forward in Opera, which apparently uses the DOM caching like asa described.
Posted by: Paul Stone on July 19, 2004 07:23 AMI would love to use Opera, but they insist on putting that huge ad banner on by default. DO their advertistors think that huge honking banners actually generate revenue? Have they learned anything in the last 5 years?
It has the "damn that's fast" speed, but Firefox has the interface.. :(
Posted by: gman on July 19, 2004 07:05 PMOpera is awesome! I love it! The best out there and the Suite of features is awesome! (If you don't like the banner ads, use the relevant Google based ad bar --- it's not annoying at all--->certainly no more annoying than the ads in Google searches or GMail.)
I can even use Opera IRC to chat with other IM protocols by using public servers of BitlBee.
The keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, etc….. wow!
39 minutes into the show … interview with Opera CEO: http://www.webtalkguys.com/mp3/webtalk-7-3-2004.mp3
Also,
http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/7/
http://www.opera.com/features/
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WhyOpera
This is just holerious.
Posted by: vr on July 19, 2004 11:25 PM
I suspect Opera's portal is based on your IP address, or something, because I get http://eu.opera.yahoo.com/ instead of Lycos. No popup ads either (yes, I turned off the blocker).
Posted by: Andrew Gregory on July 20, 2004 05:33 AM"It has the "damn that's fast" speed, but Firefox has the interface."
FireFox has the speed too. You just have to know how to get it.
"FireFox has the speed too. You just have to know how to get it."
I disagree, I find it freezes up whenever I'm loading pages with lots of tables. Vbulletin forums is one. Opera on the other hand doesn't freeze up the interface at all with multiple vb pages. I have to believe it's a prob with Gecko because it happens when Kmeleon also, though not as bad as FF.
Oh well, don't worry, I'm not going over to Opera anytime soon ;) I just want more speed!
Posted by: gman on July 20, 2004 05:16 PMI changed from Opera (3 years) to Firefox (about 6 months so far), and I do miss many things from Opera. The default setup is horrible (it took me 25 minutes to figure out how to get the status bar visible), but as you have shown, tweaking makes it a lot nicer.
Not having extensions is not always a disadvantage, as it means your app has everything out of the box. I can go a friends machine, and if I'm using it for an hour, throw Opera on and get all these cool features. With Firefox teh setup time is so high that IE would be better. Also the features are more integrated, you don't have to search for them, and they are very logical.
The main complaint I have with Firefox is speed and the download manager (which sucks in FF compared to Opera, even if the Opera downloading mechanism is unreliable).
Posted by: Neil Mitchell on July 20, 2004 07:04 PMIf you think that it's slow on Windows, try using an optimized build. Many of
them have hand-coded assembler to improve performance.
I have script that automatically loads my Etrade and Fidelity portfolios into a
Streamer (displays stock quotes, gains, losses and charts in realtime) in FireFox.
I haven't seen that function in any other browser, Opera included. I asked around
in the Opera forums as to how you can do this but no answers.
I have a lot of other custom scripts that do things that save me a lot of
key and mouse clicks. I did a fair amount of programming on IE to customize
functions but it's a lot easier with FireFox. The real pain on IE was that I
had to add entries to the registry to add functions to the context menu.
> With Firefox teh setup time is so high that IE > would be better.
Neil, tell me one feature that IE has, which is only available as an extension for Firefox.
--Thomas
Posted by: Thomas on July 22, 2004 02:52 AMThe two main problems with getting Opera's UI smaller are:
- Tendency to show off all features.
Greatly reduced in 7.5 compared to 7.2, the IE-like setup goes even further and hides the panel selector bar by default. I note that Asa hides the 'personal bar' (with selected bookmarks and search fields) in his prefered Opera setup, even though Firefox comes with a 'Bookmarks toolbar' by default.
- The ad. Especially at smaller window sizes...
It helps if you choose the thinner Google adwords strip, but in that case you'll have to hide the main toolbar. Not a real problem for me, but some people like the single main toolbar instead of the address bar in each separate page ('tab'). If you register, these worries are gone :)
Thomas, "tell me one feature that IE has, which is only available as an extension for Firefox."
One-click CDF integration.
The Import/Export Wizard doesn't seem to have an equivalent in FF. It has an Import option, but no export?
Posted by: Phil Wilson on August 4, 2004 06:19 AM