[Tfug] Opera Web Browser.

[Charles R. Kiss]

James I haven't yet figured out how to "paste as a quotation" using Opera  
Mail; but I copy your comment below.

Using Opera, I now enjoy a email/internet situation where my POP email  
client is one tab away from another tab containing web page.

All through a "64 chroot 32" on AMD64 Debian kernel. I click my Opera icon  
on the panel. It sends me to a small schroot script (/usr/local/bin/web)  
that opens Opera. I set Opera's display default to open the email client  
window, with my mail and contacts lists on the left hand column -like  
Thunderbird, and others.  If I get an email in the form of a newsletter,  
say, from washingtonpost.com, and it displays headlines as hyperlinks,  
like "US Debt: Trillions is the New Billions", and I click on it, it opens  
an adjacent tab with the web page of the story.  It's really, really  
cool.  So it's one window with two tabs: one containing the email client,  
with Inbox, Contacts etc., and one containing a web page with an address  
bar, etc.

Also, on the "tab bar", I can click on a small icon, and a page will open  
with nine pages in a 3x3 matrix; this page is the "speed dial" page it  
contains my 9 favorite pages. Like bookmarks, but different.

As far as the speed goes; I have 2GB of RAM, I think. So, I haven't  
noticed anything significantly negative happening on the speed side.

Finally, the lines, the design, the fonts, etc are super clean.

I can't remember how I installed it.  I think I unpacked the Browser in a  
chroot directory, it installed itself fine (after some trivial amount of  
typing)... and it even knows that it's running in a 64bit architecture,  
even though it's in the chroot!  Flash works, Java works.  I used it for a  
couple weeks, and was so impressed I installed Opera Mail the same way, I  
believe; not using apt.  It unpacked and was installing fine, if I can  
remember correctly; but forced me to put in my POP username and password  
before completely installing... I remember that because I was a little  
nervous about losing all my Thunderbird stuff.  But I did it anyway.

Opera Mail did a great job of importing all Thunderbird mail, some 2000  
messages, all my contacts, including the prefs.js file... which is why I  
installed Opera Mail to begin with because the Thunderbird prefs.js file  
edit I made =user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http",  
"/usr/local/bin/web"); to open email hyperlinks, wasn't navigating to the  
hyperlinks, but instead opening Opera the Opera "Home" page.

Well, I'm not blaming Iceweasel or Icedove for any particular behavior,  
but consistently on washingtonpost.com, "ad space" which I assume is  
written in Java, would interfere with "text space", which at times would  
interfere with "graphic space".  And it also happened on other pages,  
consistently, including some dcra.dc.gov pages. Margins would be off. It  
would display a row of words as two rows no matter how small I set the  
font, and overlap the surrounding graphics, etc.  Not everywhere all the  
time, but in some places all the time.

Regarding Add-Ons. Opera has what are called widgets. I haven't looked  
into that yet, I think it does have a working VideoDownloader, and Pandora  
radio, though.

I just assumed a lot of the Opera and Firefox code were the same.  So, I  
switched over, including shutting down the Thunderbird Mail client, though  
I haven't deleted the account, yet.

I sure would like others to give it a try and inform me of their knowledge  
and experiences. I'm particularly concerned about security holes, but  
since it was developed by the OpenSSL people, who've recently suffered an  
embarrassment, I intuit that it's pretty safe.



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Just curious...could you elaborate on your complaints about
Firefox/Iceweasel? Firefox definitely isn't perfect, but I was wondering
what it was doing to make you want to switch. I think the biggest reason to
stay with Firefox are the add-ons. For example, I can't live without  
Firebug
for web development.

I've personally been a little disappointed with some of the design  
decisions
that have been made with Firefox over the years. Particularly how bloated
Firefox 3 feels. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.2 and what always
made it so great was that the base browser was light and had an emphasis on
speed. The add-ons were there so you could customize the browser with
whatever features you need. They seem to have gone away from this original
design point since the base browser has a ton of features now.

James
-- 
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/