Opera 9.5 has been released, beating Firefox 3.0 to the punch which is supposed to be released soon as well. The marketing speak: “Opera’s cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance culminate to create the most powerful Opera browser yet. Making its desktop debut in Opera 9.5, Opera Link blurs the boundaries between computers and mobile phones by enabling a seamless Web experience from device to device.” Get it from Opera.com.
That’s certainly the shortest RC I know of.
And I would say it was a mistake do have it that short.
Personally I find this “final” version to me quite unstable to the (rock solid) RC. I just installed the final… and within 30 seconds I had it crash on me.
Of course, it was a page with flash-content, but flash haven’t crashed Opera that easily on the RC.
I sincerely hope this is a mistake. Sureley they can’t release so unstable software? (Or I hope: I’m unluck, but from comments on other sites it doesen’t look that way.)
This is *not* the quality I’m used to see on a an actual final release from Opera software.
EDIT: Aside from that stability issue it’s excellent of course! Though the skin have some bugs(more precicely: kinda kills the flexibility I’m used with Opera regarding the GUI.)
But it’s faster than ever and having many tabs is no problem.
Dragonfly is not up to par with Firebug yet(the Opera-devs admit this) but it’s at least making progress, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it’s on Firebug’s level on day. What’s interesting is if it will ever surpass Firebug. Now that’s a challange!
Edited 2008-06-12 12:09 UTC
Yes, you are having soem problems (Software isn’t problem free) – but unless you disclose the website, the plugins, and more importantly, what operating system you are running it on – its all shouting into the wind.
Me? I’m running it on Opera; and had it hang once, but thats due to the hideous flash plugin; its a problem no matter what platform flash exists on. Apart from that, I love the new skin, love the new tabs, love the new buttons – love everything about it.
As mentioned on the blog, I’ll buy some stuff of them to show my appreciation for it
I find pissing into the wind more pointless. At least shouting doesn’t wet your pants.
OS: Windows XP SP3
The website the ‘o dread MySpace.
(Specificly a bandsite: http://www.myspace.com/kvelertak )
Anyway, I wasn’t doing a bugreport so I was simply assessing what my impression of it was. Obviously a bug like that didn’t higher my impression of Opera. Espescially since I never had problems with the RC.
Doesn’t crash here… it just loads s l o w l y.
I don’t really understand the objections some people have to Opera (the closed source, the skins?) but if you’ve been turned off by it in the past, I recommend trying it again. It “feels” much faster than 9.27, and most of the bugs in the beta have been handled. In my experience, sites that won’t display correctly are much rarer now.
I haven’t tried Firefox 3 yet, but I still think I’ll be hooked on Opera: it’s a beautiful browser!
I’ve been on Opera 9.2 for ages, it’s my browser of choice. Since Gmail 2 doesn’t work without a hack in Opera, I decided to switch to FF3 by using the RC literally on Monday. But with the release today, I switched back over. So far? I missed Opera! I really want “Stylish” and a few other extensions, but otherwise, I love Opera.
Beautiful!
This is the reason why I don’t like it.
http://img171.imageshack.us/my.php?image=operapi1.jpg
You’ve obviously done something MAJORLY wrong, because it looks nothing like that on my computer:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v420/kaiwai/opera-screenshot.png
Everything rendering as it should be.
No, Opera is wrong, I had to refres thge webpage two times to get the desired result. Obviusly it has bugs.
Excuse me, but how on earth can it be ‘wrong’ when I simply visited the website, and blam, it turned up perfectly first time. You’ve obviously been screwing around with your computer to get something that disasteriously wrong.
And how can bee good when in doesn’t work in my case?
Firstly, look at your screenshot; I only need to look at your bar the bottom of the screen to see that you tweak your operating system to buggery. The fact that youre the *ONLY PERSON* on this website who experiences this problem – one should look hard in the proverbial mirror and ask, “I have monumentally f*cked something in my computer to cause this problem”.
Again, worked perfectly on this computer, my laptop, my brothers laptop (MacBook w/ 10.5.3), heck, my reserve Windows Vista Home Premium computer; they all worked perfectly. If in all four instances it works perfectly then one can come to the conclusion is that in yout ‘fit of tweaking’ – you’ve buggered something up.
Edited 2008-06-12 13:49 UTC
The bar at the botton is the oficial MS Zune theme. I downloaded it too from MS is not a tweak.
Edited 2008-06-12 14:20 UTC
Different configurations, different computers, different OS, different architecture, osv…
Being the sophisticated crossplattfrom piece of software that Opera is… a lot of things can go wrong!
(That’s why one should do proper testing and not release a final *two* days after the final launch.)
My guess is that he was simply unluck.
A lot of people seem to hate Opera, but I don’t think anyone would go that far to spread bad reputation about it.
True, but at the same time, as I mentioned in a follow up post – I tested Opera on 3 different operatng systems on 4 different machines – and couldn’t reproduce what he experienced. All my stuff is as vanilla as it gets, heck, I don’t even change the colour scheme or background – and everything works smoothly.
Having worked at an ISP (and thank god I don’t work there any more), I’ve come accross all manner of butchered and bastardised machines by owners who tweaker, twirl and manipulate their machines – then wonder why all hell breaks loose.
I’ve see people install rubbish of all manner of backgrounds, from ’email enhancers’ to ‘speed boosts’ – and I can tell you that when they came in, I did a clean install of Windows (or what ever the OS is) – the go, “wow! its so reliable”. Yeap, its reliable because it doesn’t have all that crap installed on it!
Edited 2008-06-12 15:43 UTC
Get over it would you? Just because it works on yours but not on his doesn’t mean that there isn’t a bug. Acting like a “know-it-all” troll on here isn’t doing you any favors.
By the way, did you ever buy that guy the brand new Mac you were running your mouth about a couple months ago able the money being a drop in the bucket, or were you just running away at your mouth then like you usually do?
Atleast I’m not a coward who deducts points off peoples posts.
Edited 2008-06-12 17:50 UTC
AFAIK, every user free to deduct points as they see fit, specially when someone starts behaving like an ass, like you’re doing right now.
Atleast I’m not a coward who deducts points off peoples posts.
..but you are a guy who likes to brag about himself and his money yet doesn’t stay true to his word. I wonder which one is worse….
Want me to find a pocket for you to cry in?
Seriously, did you buy that guy the brand new Mac or not? I want to know if you’re just some twerp on here that backs up what he says, or you just have a case of diarrhea of the mouth.
Quality software should work on tweaked systems. Sadly though.. this is not always the case.
However, I think *especially* Opera should handle this. Why? Because Opera have an impressive ability to be tweaked like hell!
Did he even tweak it? I didn’t see anything about tweaking in that post.
I’m a huge Opera fan and I love their work, but being a fanboy to the point of being blind and defending it no matter what doesn’t help anyone. Especially not Opera.
Most likely your Zone Alarm is having brain farts and screwing with your connectivity.
Why would anybody use that piece of shit (ZA not Opera) software is beyond me.
JDS, huh? Interesting!
Yeah, I spotted that too, however, I think he is running it atop some form of Solaris.
As I’ve said in other comments: this “final” was released to early.
IMO Opera is a great browser. Sad to see them making the mistake of releasing to early as it gives the wrong impression. =/
Well, that seems to be the Spanish version of Osnews – looks fine to me
And I think this is a superb release.
The skin is a welcome change; but of course as a change it will not be welcomed by all and being largely an exercise in aesthetics its never going to command a 100% (or close to it) popularity. That is of course what user configurable/downloadable skins are for.
It’s certainly faster and more functional than 9.2x and having discovered the resizing Speeddial tweak a while back I’m even happier with it.
Nice to see it finally out.
I like it, I even like the new skin. And of course, if someone doesn’t like the skin, they can easily change it. There are a lot of good skins (and also some crappy ones) available.
Can anyone verify whether they have updated the certificate confirmation process, or added settings for it. The primary reason I don’t use Opera, is that it will not prompt you to accept or deny certificates that are not signed with the address it expects. I use alot of SSH tunneling, and Opera fails miserably because of the addressing used across ssh tunnels. All other browsers will prompt you to accept the certificate, Opera just flat out denies you access the sites.
I would have to try a specific example, but Opera does ask for certificate verification from time to time (which is to say: I don’t run into it every day, but sometimes a website will trigger it).
I don’t know if that answers your question, but I’d like to think it works. Do you have a website that is a specific example?
I really love the updates this time around. I know I’ll use the Quick Find feature and I’m already used to the new skin. It seems faster to me too!
Who else hates the new skin?
I recommend D.T.A (I prefer slim, but there’s a regular-sized version as well): http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/?search=d_t_a&x=0&y=0
I just upgraded, and it kept Dimple as my default skin when the browser reloaded. So far, this is feeling a bit faster than before. The only problems I had were that the placement of the New Tab button changed, and the search engine for the Speed Dial page changed from Google to Ask.com. Easy fixes. I’m liking the new drop-down list in the URL bar.
Not a fan of the new skin. The icons with it are horribly unprofessional.
I don’t know if it was my old install or the fact I had to use the 32bit version with 9.2x but with the native 64bit version on Kubuntu it sees the Gnash plugin now!
It seems to work for most of the stuff I want it too, and hopefully it wont hose up my computer like when I tried to use the ‘official’ plugin before.
And I think I like the new skin, although I still wish Google would make gmail work 100% with opera like other browsers (still no colored labels for example)
Very nice indeed this new version but extensions hold me back in firefox…
With Adblock+Google Notebook+Customize Google I became so dependent that irritates me browsing without…
You have Adblock although it’s not as automatic as the Firefox one.
You have something called “notes” where you can do inline search and it’s (realtime) synced with Opera Link.
Don’t know what customize google is.
Also: alot of greasemonkey script works with Opera UserJS and there are also some OperaJS-only stuff that does various things people miss in Firefox.
That being said: Firefox 3 is very impressive and although it is much slower. (Chaing tabs, loading pages… browser performance is much more than javascript-speed.) And FF3 is of course very customizable once you get it with a lot of plugins.
Opera on RHEL works bad. Really bad. I’ve download it and took around 1 minute to start the Mail Yahoo, Google Mail always crash Opera.
Works sluggish on this environment. Probably is cause of my runtime, my environment, but excluding the mouse gestures and stuff, which are nice, but can be added by extensions in Fx, compared with Fx 3.0 seems a far away scream that tries to do so much with so less.
Only a new theme and a crappy browser will not make me switch.
I posted this on the opera news server, but I’ll post it here too:
After having used Opera since 1998 it’s been with some sorrow and hesitation that I’ve finally swiched over to use Firefox 3.
Opera has always been the innovative client, and has brought tons of awesome features to the browsing world. Mouse gestured, and tabbed browsing (opera was waaaay ahead with tabbed browsing) was just a few great features I enjoyed.
However, now with the release of Opera 9.50, high-traffic sites such as http://maps.yahoo.com and http://www.hotmail.com and http://reader.google.com still have problems with Opera.
In the past, it’s also been Opera’s extreme performance advantage over other browsers that’s had me coming back as well. With Firefox 3 the speed-gap has finally been closed, and extensions have made it possible to emulate many of Opera’s great features. Not as well, and there’s still a lot missing. One example is even though there’s a plugin for gestures, it doesn’t pick up on links that go to the ‘next page’ that haven’t been browsed yet that Opera picks up so nicely on. Small, but built on the continous innovations which again, and again has made opera so great.
Firebug has also been a major reason I’ve been using Firefox more and more. Opera’s Dragonfly looks like a spectacular improvement over the previous developer tools, but I miss things link easily being able to inspect elements on a first glance. Also, the first website I went to play around with it, the right-click context-menu didn’t open and work like on all other browsers.
Opera Links is a long welcomed feature. Foxmarks was my first reason to start using FF3 more and more. I’m keep privacy in mind, and had it not let me use my own WebDAV server to store my information, I probably would not have started using it to begin with. That feature is lacking in Opera Links, and i’m forced to store my information on Opera’s servers.
This isn’t meant to be a negative email saying that I’m leaving Opera forever, because that’s not the truth. I will check back with interest with every release hoping the problems I’ve encountered will have been solved.
-d
… moments later …
Embarassingly enough, I forgot one more item. I’m not able to close the Panel by clicking the X in the upper right corner making the Panel seem rather permanent on my display. Bug.
-d
I, too, was really impressed with the improvements to FF. I started using FF3 (beta 5) when I installed Kubuntu 8.04 on my MacBook Pro. I was sufficiently impressed with how far it had come since FF2 that I eventually switched my Windows desktop over as well. But today, I find that Opera 9.5 is out, and now I’m completely torn.
To address your concerns, I have seen no problems with the websites you have mentioned (aside from Yahoo maps being a low-quality knock-off of Google maps). In fact, it was Opera <9.5’s handling of Google’s apps that drove me to FF3 in the first place – it seems that a great deal of bugs have been worked out.
Feature-wise, I find the browsers to have about parity. FF has better adblock, but Opera has better tabs. Opera has one of the best IRC clients I’ve ever used, -built in-. FF has, Opera has, etc etc.
Performance wise, the two seem to handle pages with roughly the same speed. Flash is an issue for both browsers, as I’m on a 64bit linux machine. Their respective viewers both chew up unholy amounts of CPU, sometimes even when ‘idle’.
This may have been improved since beta 5, but so far I’ve found (with my less-than-scientific methodology) that Opera uses almost half as much memory as FF3. That’s saying something.
As this matters to some people, I will point out that Opera has made standards compliance a top priority, while the FF devs have shown a great of deal of antipathy towards such tests as Acid. That being said, my current builds of Opera and FF come close on the Acid 3 test, 83 and 71 percent, respectively.
To me it seems that the browsers are really comparable, and it comes down to preferences. What is more important, a quality Adblock (which is apparently ruining the internet anyway) or a smaller memory footprint (which matters little when machines have excess of 4GB these days)?
As for myself, I am completely stumped. I have no idea which browser I am going to be using from here on. They’re both so great!
I saw some screenshots of the UI on Windows. Even if subjective at the end of the day, IMHO it has a polished and uncluttered nice UI.
Now, what’s wrong with Opera’s Mac OS UI designers? Firefox’s 2 UI is acceptable, Safari 3’s and FF 3’s are neat^aEUR| Opera’s is utterly hideous and amateurish, the control widgets and buttons are just thrown in there, with no consistency on margins, styles or anything.
With other two rather nice contestants on the Mac, Opera’s position is rather difficult there. Still, no matter how impressive the engine might be, how fancy its features are, or how hard the competition pushes the envelope, it is the incredibly unprofessional UI that irremediably condemns Opera to oblivion on this platform (now, one might argue that the Mac is not relevant either, but that’s another issue).
Edited 2008-06-12 16:00 UTC
Oblivion? I know a few Opera users on Mac.. it looks fine too.
I have all the buttons removed on mine.
I’ve used Opera on and off over the years and must say it’s a pretty good product. I’m using Firefox(3) mostly nowadays, though.
Opera (not this latest version) runs well on my mom’s 6 year old PC and I have a version of it for my Nintendo wii as well. No problems, although I don’t use it as heavily as Firefox.
It also seems really good for non tech-savvy kids (rare these days, I know) who download lots of stuff because of it’s built-in BitTorrent.
Will try this new version when I have the time.
I’ve been using the beta’s and RC’s on windows and linux and the only thing that made me like opera over firefox is gone…
firefox isn’t slow anymore! that’s the only reason i stuck with opera through 8&9. it was quick easy to change visually and worked well.
opera is hands down my favourite browser and it gets installed on every computer i touch.
i’ve been waiting for the 9.5 release to migrate all my mail and setting from a windows install and go back to opera full time. It has everything i’ll ever use on the web all integrated into the one window.
Firefox is now a very good browser and i think both are infinitely better than IE on windows. But now it’s out i’ll stick to opera with epiphany on the side.
when trying to download opera for windows and debian using FF3. i managed to get memory usage to over 600mb with just gmail and opera.com open. it stuck at 50% cpu the whole time through.
let that sit for 10 mins just to see what happened (not much) restarted FF and everything worked fine. The ONLY problem i’ve had with 3. Mozilla mustn’t want anyone to get their hands on opera.
I love Opera, it’s simply the best and has so many features that Firefox copied or have to be downloaded as an extension.
But I hate the new skin. I also hated the old skin, so I switched it to “Windows native”.
Recently, I have put the tab-bar to the right side. That’s cool, so you have lots of space for tabs and you can always read what’s written on them. Every Opera user should at least give that a try. After 2 days you’re completely used to it and it’s way better.
You might also try, while in Opera, to hold right mouse button and move scrollwheel.
This Vista-baby looks awful on WinXP to my liking. Why not stick to native UI presentation (like Firefox does)?! Is it an artist contest or smth?!
You can just select “Windows Native” and everything will be fine
What a brillient release.
Still needs a bit of polish, but definately faster than the already speedy Opera 9.2x release.
It’ll be replacing FF on my PC, although FF still has the best web development addons I’ll need to use now and again.
I really liked Opera more when it had less features and was faster.
1. Few of the old features came disabled – why ? I need them, why I have to go back and turn them on ? Not a big pain though, I can live with that.
2. Weak support for Linux / Unix – compared to FF3 RC2, opera is very slow in :
start up time, rendering time, java script overall performance. It wasn’t like that in 9.27 though, I have to spend time downgrading.
3. Previous RC / Beta versions almost crash my entire OS, including other browser settings and plugins. I did report that.
4. Slow overall performance when using various skins (I don’t like the default one), no change in performance when putting the default skin. Clicking OK takes forever to accept since 9.50. No visible improvements, at least for me – OS : Fedora 8, KDE. My machine is powerful enough to handle every desktop application, but opera seems to freeze every 3-5 seconds when browsing.
5. Lack of addons – I’m not aware of anything that can beat FF addons, opera’s widgets are miserable and useless.
6. Lack of flash player plugin – you have to source the path from mozilla’s path – certainly, it works OK for FF, but not for opera. Downgrading the .so file gave me vision, but not sound for flash content. It’s not my fault also that opera can’t handle the flash, FF can.
7. Better support for Windows ( of course ), worse for Linux. I’m not aware of any other person that would prefer Opera 9.50 against FF3, despite it’s still RC – it’s much more stable.
8. Lack of “check-spell-as-you-type” feature – there are workarounds, I know, but not as good as FF one.
“7. Better support for Windows ( of course ), worse for Linux. I’m not aware of any other person that would prefer Opera 9.50 against FF3, despite it’s still RC – it’s much more stable.”
I prefer 9.50 to ff3 so that’s one person…