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Linux Software

Opera 4.0b1 For Linux 144

Posted by michael from the goods-things-come-to-those-who-wait dept.
Euro was the first to point out: "I happened to browse the Opera Web site and discovered this juicy nugget: Opera 4.0b1 for Linux is available for download. Seems like the Linux browser front is getting better all the time." Well, sure. But it's been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time.
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Opera 4.0b1 for Linux

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  • Really, who is going to buy this?
    If you give galeon a try, you won't
    see any need for this proprietary stuff....

    galeon.sourceforge.org

    and it integrates with gnome - it is
    quick and uncluttered too.
    Hopefully the mozilla component
    from nautilus will follow this philosophy too.

  • Hey man, have you tried Konqueror yet?

    I know it isn't 'official' yet, but I'm using the beta that comes with SuSE 7.0 and it is very impressive. It's fast, stable, and java actually seems to be working (at least in this version). It has awesome cookie management. You can set it to use any jdk you have loaded on your system. All in all, it's probably the best browser I've seen on Linux. Not to bad-mouth the others, but mozilla actually seems to have taken a couple of steps backwards lately (and that was what I was using for a time), and Netscape (oh boy, don't even get me started)....

    Of course, if you're not a fan of KDE you may not like it, but the KDE2 beta is pretty nice too.

  • Let the Mozilla bashing begin? (Score:5)

    by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:46AM (#727045)

    It's weird to see all this Mozilla bashing going on. Yes, it has taken a long time and yes, it's not read yet but how many of you Mozilla bashers have really given Mozilla a try? A good one instead of "it segfaulted at startup, so it sucks"?

    Netscape PR3 won't be installed on my computer. Nope, I really don't need all the AOL stuff. That's why I have been downloading Mozilla daily builds and actually use them more than the old Netscape. And let me tell you, the latest builds have been impressive in both speed and stability.

    So here's how you should do it. Go to Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] and check the build bar there. Go read the comments and choose a nice build. That way you can actually choose not to download a bad build. If one of those crashes too much, delete your .mozilla-directory. Chances are you have an old one which is not necessarily compatible.

    That's it. Oh, and don't only talk the talk. Walk the walk and submit bugs [mozilla.org] instead of just complaining about beta-versions.

    Even though I won't buy Opera, it's nice to see some competition. I strongly suspect they will have a hard time with Mozilla, though.

  • ...and now you've made it available for LinuxPPC! Wahoo. I downloaded it and ran it without problem. Looks like a very nice browser, too! Thanks for taking the time to support LinuxPPC.
  • We've had some network outage today, that might be why the DNS isn't responding correctly.

    Although I'm an Opera employee, the viewes expressed are my own.

  • It's weird to see all this Mozilla bashing going on. Yes, it has taken a long time and yes, it's not read yet but how many of you Mozilla bashers have really given Mozilla a try?...And let me tell you, the latest builds have been impressive in both speed and stability.

    As a recent Mozilla basher, I'd distinguish between criticism of what the project has available today and criticism of the project's performance over the last few years. I've used M17 on MacOS and Linux, and think there's definite potential there, although it's still far from replacing IE on my Mac or even Navigator on my Linux box.

    But what I think needs to be examined and hasn't been is how the open source process has worked out for Netscape. Yeah, Galeon is nice for us but I think it's clear to anyone remotely objective that the Mozilla project hasn't come close to living up to the expectations that Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, CmdrTaco and the rest of the Open Source mafia were encouraging a few years ago. It seems to me that it's much more valuable to look at the experience and see what open source development does and doesn't do than to keep insisting that everything is going according to plan because we have a rendering engine.

    Two asides:

    • Is anyone getting nightly builds to work on MacOS? I've been trying for a week and they keep freezing at the splash screen.
    • Check out CmdrTaco and Hemos' interview [slashnet.org] on Slashnet last night. The thing I thought was most interesting was how negative they are about the open source process for their own code. They seem to view it as a political obligation they need to comply with, but describe it as an unpleasant experience that contributed little to their software.

    ---------

  • Why not use them all? That's SO enlightening. I'll use Mozilla on some pages, and the pages it screws up on, I'll use Konqi on. The pages that Konqi uses 40M to load, I'll use Galeon on. The pages that Galeon crashes on, I'll use the GTK one on. Why pay for this? It's overpriced? I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm too busy browsing six different web pages, using about 3 megs of RAM, almost no processor time, and THIS under the static bin. This browser should be a call out to ALL THE OTHER browsers for linux. It's time to make it sleek, stable, and sound. I don't care if you people think it's over priced. THIS IS GOOD SOFTWARE, as opposed to the crap that other companies put out, and I will pay for good software. Magnwa
  • Goodbye Netscape. Finally a nice browser for Linux. This is a killer app. Dare I say I would even be willing to *cough* pay for it if it were polished enough???
  • ... Which is actually of some actual importance in light of the fact that one of its release criteria [gnu.org] is that of having a stable ABI.

    This is quite a significant issue, as libraries compiled with one release of G++ by one person may not work with another release of G++ by someone else.

    This appears to be the root of the problems I had running Opera; it would generally run OK until I actually tried to load in a web page, at which point it would discover it had just tried to violate a segment. That was with the statically-linked version; a dynamically-linked version will be at even greater risk of ABI violations...

  • I had to do this with netscape pr3, installed it last night. Installed M17 via an RPM I found on Nautilus site that went OK, permissions on /usr/lib/mozilla are 755.

  • Opera is useless for me as both Windows and Linux versions can't display properly ISO-8859-2 encoded text on pages. It ignores appropriate METAs setting the encoding and there is no way for changing encoding manually. And it's a bit of a problem for me as I live in Poland and most local pages are - not surprisingly - in Polish, which I can easily read provided that those few special characters it requires are displayed properly.

    IE, Netscape and Mozilla (especially nightly build from 3rd of October which I use in preference of M17 as it is more stable and much faster) handle ISO-8859-2 pages very well. It puzzles me why folks at Operasoft can't implement something so simple as support for various encodings.

  • People will buy it (I will buy it when it releases) because it's small, it's fast, and it does it's job VERY well. In addition, Qt aside, Troll is still a Linux company, and I think if a product comes out that I can use and that isn't proced too high, I will buy it. I'm going to buy Neverwinter Nights (is that the right game?) when it comes out. I don't have much time for games, but I want the industry to know that people will buy the software if it's good (not Windows), it's reasonably priced (not Office), and serves a useful purpose (well, OK, but 2 out of 3 good...and stress relief is a purpose!).

    I played with the Windows version when Opera 3.x matured, and I had to drag my whole group over to watch things load. You'd be surprised how fast the net really is when the rendering doesn't have to go through 10 bazillion lines of code to get to the screen. Mozilla was 10 times better than NS on that account, but since Opera didn't do Java internally, didn't hook directly into your mail and new clients internally, didn't support 8000 directory search functions in the address book internally, and generally kept it's footprint down, I could have carried the install file around on a floppy disk, and installed it in something like 5M of disk space.

    Besides, what about in a ThinClient environment where the entire application resides on a server somewhere and all you see is a web frontend. Or Kiosks on small embedded systems? You'd rather install the Netscape beast than something as small as possible? There are many uses for a small fast browser that warrant paying for it.

  • In fact if I am not mistaken Trolltech is actually doing the port themselves. It makes sense that they would use their own toolkit, gives them the consulting revenue and some good advertising.
  • What choice? Mozilla, Konqi, Netscape, Galeon, and that Gtk one. Why not use all of them. It only costs a few megs of HD space. Opera? Overpriced. Choose the one you hate least.

    This is a total ice to eskimos situation. We have too many web browsers, so given the huge choice of potential markets, what do Opera decide to produce? Something that everyone else gives away with no indication that it sucks any less.

    And they're missing out the one thing they've got thats worth anything. Look at what this runs under. BeOS, Windows and Linux. If they can port it that easily then why don't they sell their compatibility wrapper library. THAT would be worth paying for.
  • I got bit by the preview box [slashdot.org] issue again. Well you would think I would learn to take this into account and preview my posts twice but I think my mother forgot to close the CRACKPIPE tag when conceiving me.

    Regards
  • i'm happy, i like opera, and i'm glad to see it in linux.

  • Huh? (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:54AM (#727060) Homepage Journal
    I can't disable JavaScript without going into such a paranoid mode that I can't even download anything...

    1. Go to Tools -> Internet Options
    2. Select the "Security" tab
    3. Select the "Internet" zone
    4. Click "Custom"
    5. Scroll down to "Active Scripting"
    6. Set it to disabled
    7. Close out of all dialogs, saving changes.

    Netscape crashes my machine sooo hard (in Windows and Linux) that only the power switch can bring the machine back to life...

    Dude, if a browser can lock up your Linux box that hard, you must have some serious system-level issues going on.
  • Nope... netscape crashes most of the time and has a huge memory leak
  • Indeed, I think I do have some problems. However, the system runs happily (at 100% CPU usage) for days on end, but has never stayed alive for more than about 4 hours with a Netscape running.

    Hmmmm.

    I'd make sure you were using the latest version of XFree considered most stable for your card. Right now, for some cards, 4.1 is more stable, for others, 3.3.6 is the one to go with. (Being in the middle of a major transition is making things a little confusing in the world of X11 on Linux right now.)

    You might want to try adjusting some settings in XF86Config for your video card, if it supports them. Some chipsets have advanced features which are not always 100% stable.

    And, are you sure it is really a total system lockup? I have seen Netscape get sufficiently hosed up that the X console becomes unresponsive. However, I was still able to SSH into the box, kill off a few programs, and get my X session back. In few cases, I've had to kill the X server itself, but I've never had a full system lock using a production release of XFree.

    (I have had lock-ups using beta, alpha, and development versions of certain drivers, but you kind of expect that.)
  • Why not? It's convenient to be able to type, say, "opera" and have the browser append the www and com for me. If you check both options, it should look for a local machine first before appending and prepending those bits. Name completion is turned off by default, incidently. I don't see what you are complaining about. You can make the browser do what you want. It's all about choice.
  • I've already (just) got/installed it and it rocks. Good to see REAL competition in the browser market... *nudge nudge* Mozilla.

    Regards
  • We have no idea when that release will see the light of day. Should all C++ development freeze until gcc 3 appears, months or years from now? It's a moot point anyway, since Red Hat 7 has shipped with the incompatible gcc-2.96. Stable C++ binary compatibility remains a dream.

    Besides, this is only a beta version of Opera.

  • Hopefully it's better than the joke of a browser I downloaded a few days ago. That PR3 release was crap. It segfaulted 3 times before I could even get it to run...

    Cheers to the folks at Opera.
  • It doesn't seem to crash, but it's fubared in the screen rendering
    department. It makes a right mess out of the screens here on /.,
    overlaying text on top of text, etc.

  • I haven't tried out the Linux version of Opera yet ... from what I have heard, the earlier "alpha" version was quite incomplete ... still I would rather use it than netscape as netscape is an unadulterated piece of shit - not only doesn't it do most CSS properly, it is inconsistent in its application, is not forgiving of "broken" HTML or even "correct" HTML - in developing web sites, I have noticed that syntatically pure HTML can cause netscrape to crash - then add a "stop all sort of tag" experimentally digging to find out the "critical point", it works albeit buggy ...

    Once the Linux version is "stable", there will one big reason less to use Windoughz ... haven't done any browsing on Linux (besides Lynx), as the preponderance of my XP with Linux has been CLI ...

    Opera is fantastic - it does take a little time to become familiar with the "dashboard", but I find it far superior to the other offerings because of (1) renders CSS more consistently, (2) lot more keyboard driver friendly, (3) zoom in/out of pics as well as text easily, (4) superior window management (don't have to open a new instance of the browser ...), (5) more customizable - at least the display fonts/settings/colors etc ...

    Again, I haven't tried the new Linux version - I hope that the Opera team commits to making a "production quality" Linux version ... realistically, with them charging and the others giving theirs away for free (Win versions), it makes it tough to sell the virtures but I think it is so good I will keep pimping it ...

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by pli ( 8167 )
    I tried the first alpha release of opera (released months ago) and was not very impressed. However, this release was really nice and fast. Of course it crashed a couple of times, and some thing still didn't work, but it looks very promesing. I'm really looking forward to the final 4.0.

  • Some known bugs: (Score:3)

    by edgrale ( 216858 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:15AM (#727070)

    It crashes now and then, and there is a memory leak problem

    Well it _does_ sound a lot like Netscape to me ;)
    I hope that it's better though.

  • Qt ? (Score:1)

    by xonix7 ( 227592 )

    Why not GTK+ or xwWindows?

    By the term "edition" I guess that they might port the browser to those toolkits in time. I sure hope so :=) Not that I don't like Qt, but I use an all GTK+ desktop at the moment.

  • The thing doesn't crash (so far...) but the screen rendering's toast.
    It's got text overlaid all over other text, etc. At least when Nutscrape
    renders the screen, it gets it right.
  • Hardly as long as Mozilla has been.
    --
  • [Insert rant about 'this is all well and good, but closed and commercial' here]

    There we go, just saved Slashdot from a few hundred Open Source/GLP nuts. ;)

    Seriously though, one thing I see though: Opera uses Qt-2.2 (the dual GPL/QPL licensed edition of Qt). Obviously Opera have paid TrollTech for the rights to use Qt in this closed app under the license of the QPL. Nice to see a great company supporting open source with a toolkit with the power of Qt being able to profit on it WHILE it is released under a 100% GPL compatible license - the GPL.

    Long live Opera. I love it in Windows, Linux, and eventually will in BeOS.
  • How can I really give Mozilla a try when it segfaults on startup?

    Dn't only talk the talk by submitting bugfixes! Walk the walk and fix them instead of just file bugs.

    Enough ranting.
    I'm sure I'll get moderated down for this as a troll... (read: obligatory note appended to make sure no on has the nerve to moderate me down anymore and everyone will bend over backwards to moderate me up!)

    Ivo

  • Try reading the (Score:4)

    by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:57AM (#727076) Journal
    FAQ [operasoft.com] as it list a rather extensive list of platforms they are "actively persuing". The list includes Alpha, Sparc and Power PC to name just a few.
  • You are exactly correct. Was gonna post the correction but you beat me to it. Thanks.
  • Actually I prefer this browser over Netscrape. It feels better, and I can't say for sure but it seems..surfing actually is fun again!! Not bad, I like it. Keep the good stuff going. Bunny
  • On the topic of netscape.... i think the reason netscape crashes so often is the memory factor.. i run n/s 4.73 on a linux box w/ 32mb and ns 4.51 on a solaris box with 1024MB. The linux one seems to crash a lot more often. Then again this could be due the unstable nature of the libs n/s uses under linux
  • can someone tell me what free(beer) means ? what does being free have to do with beer ?
  • Free (beer) as opposed to frre (speech)

    Free beer and Free speech. Naturally, when you open your mouth, you expect to pay. If someone gives you free speech, it doesn't mean that you can say what you like, just that there's no toll involved.

    Free beer on the other hand means that the ingredients and yeast of the beer are available, so not only could you use it in recipes, but you can make your own version and variants using the free beer.

  • Long long time, and attitudes (Score:4)

    by Xugumad ( 39311 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @03:07AM (#727082)

    I would like to point out that when Opera first looked into porting their browser to other OSes, the response from Linux users was hardly encouraging (actually, I beleive the Amiga users were the biggest fans of the idea).

    Perhaps if people sent encouraging e-mails to Opera, or any other company that is developing for Linux, rather than complaining that beta software *gasp* has bugs in it, we might get software a little quicker!

    Sorry, but Slashdotters, as a group, seem incredibly negative. On the one hand you complain that Microsoft restrict choice, and then someone asks why Opera bother porting their browser to Linux...

    And someone else said they would give Opera the same chance they gave all the other browsers; if it coredumps, they go back to Lynx. My apologies if that person did actually mean they'd do that test for the release version, but I suspect they intend to run the beta version, which undoubtably will coredump, and will go back to Lynx without giving Opera a reasonable chance.

    This isn't actually meant as a flame, this is meant to give people more of a perspective. In particular, if someone from Opera reads Slashdot (and is that all that unlikely), I wouldn't be exactly suprised if the Opera for Linux project gets pushed even lower down their priority list.

  • ... Maximum number of users connected, please try again later ...

  • Heh. Have you ever looked at the HTML source for Slashdot? Dog's breakfast, it is. Miracle that *any* browser can display it!

    :)

    --
  • >Indeed, I think I do have some problems. However, the system runs happily (at 100% CPU usage) for days on end, but has never
    >stayed alive for more than about 4 hours with a Netscape running.

    I've seen this on my own system, & I think it's due to a funky memory chip.

    Hint: for torture-testing a system, can't due worse than running the Mersenne Prime program on it from http://www.mersenne.org. (The download page is at http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm.) Download, untar, run it as mprime -m, & select the torture test option. Oh yeah, & be sure to read the reeadme.txt file.

    Geoff

  • $35? Many people spend more money than that on games. $35 isn't a high price for software. But I guess it depends on what you use your computer for, and how important a web browser is to you. If you use it 10 minutes a day to check the Slashdot headlines, then yeah, maybe $35 is too much (although I guess that also depends on you're a starving student vs. a worker who gets paychecks). If you do a lot of browsing, though, then even a small disparity in quality can end up making a $35 look like an insignificant detail. (This is based on the assumption that the quality disparity happens to be in favor of Opera; I haven't used Opera or Mozilla enough to judge that for myself, one way or the other).

    The real advantage of free browsers like Mozilla isn't that they're $0, it's that they also happen to be Open Source. Users can influence their future more directly and they're safe from getting abandoned.


    ---
  • Firstly, you're quite right. It is a karma whore (Well spotted that man).

    Actually I was wondering what would happen after the flamewar yesterday [slashdot.org] where somebody suggested that if Trolls were really popular then perhaps they should be labelled as such.

    Maybe I should have actually trolled.

  • The online.no download area is not down, but may be a bit bogged or just far away... If you'd like to contribute by hosting the product we'd be happy to add you to our download area! ;-)

    There are two versions: Statically linked with QT and Dynamically linked to Qt.

    Statically linked with Qt
    File size: tar.gz: 2.5MB, Debian: 2.5MB, RPM: 2.5MB
    tar.gz:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/opera-4.0-b1-stat ic.tar.gz Debian:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/DEB/opera-static_4.0- 0beta1_i386.deb RPM:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/RPM/opera-static-4.0b 1-1.i386.rpm

    Dynamically linked to Qt
    File size: tar.gz: 1.1MB, Debian: 1.1MB, RPM: 1.1MB
    tar.gz:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/opera-4.0-b1-dyna mic.tar.gz Debian:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/DEB/opera_4.0-0beta1_ i386.deb RPM:
    http://opera.online.no/linux/RPM/opera-dynamic-4.0 b1-1.i386.rpm

  • I've been waiting this for buddhaknowshowlong. The alphas were the only browsers I found that rendered css properly. But the d/l site seems to be down, /.ed or something. Mirror, anyone?

    --
  • Yes! Exactly what I was thinking. They shouldn't have let the tard out early.

    I would like a browser to disallow OnLoad though.

  • yeah, and you know why that post got modded down? It was Funny, and someone, afraid the next version of Slashcode will be delayed more, modded it to oblivion to make sure we wouldn't find it and respond to it... aw shit!
  • ...for segfaulting, bloated software.

    Especially when I can get it for free from corezilla and netscrape.
  • Dude, if a browser can lock up your Linux box that hard, you must have some serious system-level issues going on.

    I have to agree with this. Netscape had this effect on me. It went away when I changed video cards. Netscape still kinda blows, but it no longer locks the machine. I went from rebooting several times per week to 32 and 62 days without a reboot. (Still don't know whetehr the problem was the ATI Xpert98 or the Mach64 Xserver, as both were changed out at the same time.)
  • Come on. It's is a beta. Those people have to eat, too.

    --
  • Trolltech certainly did an early mockup to show Opera what could be done but I don't know if they are still doing the work. I'd imagine that using the gui toolkit is probably ridiculously easy compared to the browser code itself. At least one of the people working on Opera (and working on the gui bits too), Espen Sand [online.no] has an Opera email address.
  • I just tried it. Why is it that I always have a feeling that Linux is treated like a poor cousin? I felt exactly the same way in the days of OS/2 when it was still alive and kicking.

    Netscape still appears to be a browser of choice by default (for Linux, anyways. It's nicer and at least they pay attention to a detail.). Opera has still a LONG WAY to go. As it is now, I wouldn't use it. A thing as simple as a SUBMIT button does not work! I go to a page which uses regular forms (no Java), and I can click on SUBMIT until I'm blue but nothing comes out.

    Oh well, until next time... :-)

  • Oh my. This crashes now and then, but oh my oh my. It's so fast. It's so pretty. It's so configurable.

    The Multiple Document Interface isn't my bag, and the bookmark UI was a bit furry at start.

    But I'm buying this senorita. This is IMHO the best graphical web browser on Linux, although IE 5(.5) still has the overall lead.

    Some of the more frequent crashes occur when I try to choose a certain option in preferences. Annoying, but I can live without it. Some pages are lethal to the beta, but I'm hoping all the crashes are ironed out in the final version.
  • I'm thinking the ATI....here's why. I had a similar problem w/ an ATI Rage. Gifs would not always get rendered correctly (sometimes I would see a black outline of the image only) and the machine would BSOD in NT daily. When running Linux it would just wedge solid for no apparent reason. I mean it was just completely hung - couldn't telnet into it or anything. Maybe it was the driver, but if so, it was the Windows driver and the Linux driver. I replaced the card w/ a G400 and haven't had a problem in two weeks. Anybody want a Rage II cheap?

  • Re:Opera for Intel Linux... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...but not for Alpha, Sparc, or (in my case) PowerPC. I guess they don't have any alternative-platform test boxes, or they don't want to deal with the (probably minimal) cross-platform issues right now, which I can understand. Too bad the source isn't available so we could help them out with that. :-)

    We've got two PowerPC's (an iMac and a G4) running Linux, a couple of Sparc's (including a Ultra 250) and an Alpha.

    Be patient.. We can't do everything at once ;-)
  • The one thing that keeps me from wanting to use Opera on any platform for more than a few minutes is the non-standard toolbar layout. There is too much collective muscle memory in the world for them to be screwing with the placement of the back button.

    How many average users regularly (if ever) 'save' web pages or 'open' them on their local drive? And what is 'new' supposed to mean when there isn't an HTML editor and there is already a 'URL' button (the opening of a new MDI window could be a option in that URL dialog)?

    I say put the back button where $DEITY intended it to be; the far left side of the toolbar. Even better would be the ability to re-order and add/subtract buttons on the toolbar.

    PS: The toolbar in full mode with text labels on does not fit within an 800x600 screen on my machine :(

  • Opera and Konqueror (Score:3)

    by benmhall ( 9092 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @03:16AM (#727101) Homepage Journal
    A lot of people here are saying that Mozilla is competition for Opera - I guess it is. Personally, I think Konqueror is closer to home. It's VERY fast, uses QT2.2 etc.

    For anyone who hasn't tried Konqueror (part of kde2base) in a while, you really ought to. I've been playing with the daily builds for Mandrake 7.2 and it has gotten a LOT better at renedering pages over the last month or so.

    Personally, a year from now I can see two main browsers in the Unix world:

    Mozilla (ns6, galeon, nautilus etc.) and Konqueror. Really, Konqueror is THAT good. It's amazing to me that the KDE guys have put together such a great product suite in a few years. It's true that they don;t have to worry about non-unix ports, but they really desrve some recognition.

    Anyway, one nice thing to see about Opera was that it was 2MB for the static version and only 1.1MB for the dynamically linked version. When was the last time we saw a 1MB browser that had that many features? (Galeon doesn't count - you still need mozilla.)

  • The default font looked like crap, but I was able to change it to a nice one without a hitch. /. renders okay and the response is snappy. It takes about half the memory of Netscape and I haven't hit any show-stopping bugs yet. If the finished product is just a bit more polished, I'd consider making a purchase.
  • Mozilla is still not ready. I download a nightly build at least once a week. My advice: Don't download mozilla unless you are willing to find bugs and report them.

    The biggest bug in mozilla for linux right now is its inability to start unless it has write access to the directory that it is installed in. ( Bug 41057 [mozilla.org]) This kept me from actually using the nightly builds for the past several weeks because I couldn't get them to start.

    If anybody else is using mozilla, can you go and confirm this security bug [mozilla.org] for me? I hate being the only one who has looked at it.

  • Seriously, use Solaris for what it was designe for: serving. That is, unless it's an UltraSPARC workstation which you're talking about; however, I've seen those things utilized as servers (it ain't pretty on the tracert log!).

    Why don't you just assign a Win2k box with IE 5.0 as a web browser? Aside from not crashing, you can also debug javascript to make sure it is seen the same way in all platforms. Personally, my Win2K machine has never crashed due to IE5 (though I have seen cursor freezes due to Javascript programmers making stupid mistakes with their syntax). I use IE 5.0, because I'm refusing to upgrade to a newer version until I find a real reason (like IE6 being developed with even more speed optimizations while maintaining the same [or better] level of stability and HTML/JSP/PHP/perl/ASP compliance).

  • Is it stable on Linux? I have been playing with the Windows version, and there were some really annoying times when it would just crash on me. I mean I loved its speed, and the little internal taskbar let you avoid the crowding on the system taskbar, but I just wish it wouldn't crash intermittently.

    How's the linux version measure up when it comes to stability?

  • Thanks.

    IE:
    "Active Scripting" eh?
    And I was looking for "JavaScript".
    Silly me.

    Thanks for that pointer, I think I disabled that option by default anyway.
    (Oh - I saw some interesting behaviour in Netscape 4.5? recently where it would run Javascript even though it was disabled!)

    Crash:
    Indeed, I think I do have some problems. However, the system runs happily (at 100% CPU usage) for days on end, but has never stayed alive for more than about 4 hours with a Netscape running.
    I'm going to give the mobo away quite soon anyway, so I'm not too worried, I simply ensure that I close down Netscape when I leave the machine, and that appears to work.

    Phil
  • Opera was certainly not written with portability in mind... It was just created to use as little resources (in Windows) as possible, in contrast to the apparent IE / NS bloatware.

    And of course some extra features the other browsers didn't have; such as several pages in one window and, of course, keyboard shortcuts for everything.
  • Well, that don't work now, either... Errors out while trying to retrieve the URL:

    http://www.opera.com/stylesheets/default.css

    Even starting from Opera's homepage and using the Linux download link has the same problem. Guess dey gettin' slashdotted ;)
  • Sorry. Left my brain in reverse. I clearly labelled the thread as a troll and then forgot to say anything trollish. Then I got speech and beer mixed up. (Although that one was deliberate)

    Anyway, you have been charged $1.10 + tax for saying that.
  • Just a word for Moz: you can't really complain about it's look since that is TOTALLY customizable.

    But does it have an option to turn this off (either globally or for specific users/groups)?
    My main moan about most browers is that they are simply not designed for workstations or multi user machines. Typically expecting the end user to do all sorts of configuration (sometimes as daft as TCP to 127.0.0.1:110 when a simple open() would do, "Holy Grail" would be a GUI email program, integrated with a browser, which like elm, pine, mailx "just works" without expecting the end user to mess around with feeding it user details.) as well as being inflexable about what is global (e.g. local cache) and what should be per user (e.g. history bookmarks.) As well as data structures being written to break with more than one copy of the program is running.
  • Try pinging opera.com

    From here, the hostname doesn't even resolve.

    bobv@server:~$ whois opera.com
    (excess verbage omitted...)
    Domain servers in listed order:

    LUPINELLA.TROLL.NO 213.203.59.59
    MOTORKATT.TROLL.NO 213.203.58.58
    bobv@server:~$ nslookup opera.com 213.203.59.59
    *** Can't find server name for address 213.203.59.59: No response from server
    *** Default servers are not available
    bobv@server:~$ nslookup opera.com 213.203.58.58
    *** Can't find server name for address 213.203.58.58: No response from server
    *** Default servers are not available
    DUDE! Their nameservers are slashdotted!
  • Try http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/libstdc%2B%2B-libc6.1 -2.so.3.html - I just did a search through metacrawler for the lib, and it came up with a bunch of results.
  • It appears you can turn individual buttons on and off in your ~/.opera/opera.ini file. You can also make your own button graphics (I did see this option in the preferences dialog before). I don't know if you can change the order of the buttons you do want to display though (like changing back-reload-forward to back-forward-reload).

    Opera User Definable Buttons [opera.com]

  • Ugh, beta software. I think I'll just shut up now and go back to netscape. Blergh.
  • Thanks for the tip-off. I downloaded, installed and tried Konqueror after seeing your post. And I agree with your assessment: it's fast, it's stable and it renders most pages just fine. And it supports SSL and plug-in-able Java. All this from a beta. There are still a few minor rendering bugs sometimes, but hopefully they'll be sorted out. I'm giving it a try as my standard browser.

    But what I really like about Konqueror is being able to set your cookie acceptance/rejection policy differently for each site, and on the fly. No more giving information about my browsing habits to doubleclick.
  • You're talking to the 4th largest finder of titanic primes :-)
    When I said my CPU was at 100%, that's why.

    www.utm.edu/research/primes/bios/TopProvers.html

    Third place will be mine soon...

    FatPhil
  • I was the one who said I'd give it a chance. I will, and if it spontanoiusly
    coredumps I will drop it like a hot potato. However, when the next version
    comes out (a release version), I will give that a chance too. I've let
    Netscape have about 8 chances now, and Mozilla 4. I will keep giving
    Netscape a chance, as the problems are small compared to Mozilla's 5 minute
    coredump. I'll really need my arm twisting to try another Mozilla.

    Oh - I'm now using w3m as my browser at the recommendation of a Slashdot
    reader who mailed me personally. Thanks go to him again. w3m is excellent,
    the default keybindings take some getting used to, but I think I'll
    customise them instead.

    FatPhil

  • Both the Mac and Linux ports with v4.x are using the same core browser as the Windows version, so it's only minor details that should separate them. It's one of the design choices they made with 4.0, that they'd have a common core and then create port-specific code for the rest.
  • 1.1 megs for the dynamically linked version isn't exactly what I'd call bloated......these days that almost looks absurdly efficient!
  • I for one am extremely happy there's another stable browser out there on the market. I'm getting tired of Netscape. Every time I find a good porno sight, Netscape crashes on me. Right when that huge freaky video gets done downloading, BAM!!! There goes netscape and my hopes of good porn.
  • All in Wonder Pro

    So it could be an X problem.
    However it stays up (in X) for weeks as long as I don't run Netscape.

    I don't care about the reason if I can do sometihng simple (not run netscape) to avoid it.

    Thanks for the confirmation that you'd seen the same.

    FatPhil
  • How can I really give Mozilla a try when it segfaults on startup?

    Try to figure out what is wrong/different on your system because apparently it works for a lot of other people. You're running linux (I assume): Don't expect everybody to hold your hand when trying out beta software! After all if it would work for everybody they might as well release it as final.

    A good start might be to read the faqs and readme's.

    I tried netscape pr3 on windows today here's my impression:
    - loads fast, (appr. 5 seconds)
    - install seems slow, probably because of the AOL bloat. The nightly builds install much faster.
    - seems stable
    - it did freeze on one occasion, I could not reproduce it.
    - Java works
    - Sites load & render fast (i normally run ie 5.5 so I know what fast is)
    - a lot of AOL links and clutter
    - starts to look and act like a finished product
    - there are some known UI issues that still are not fixed (e.g. IE favourites importing is not fixed in this version, bug 47961, reported it myself :)
    - it seems feature complete (mostly)

    Not bad for a beta/pre release! I expect that there will be a release candidate out for testing in one or two months. Plenty of time to fix bugs.
  • As I stated in my other post, the segfault at startup is due to bug 41057 - Mozilla should not need write access to the binary directory [mozilla.org]. The current work around is to run mozilla once as root before running it as a user. That way it will at least create the files it needs to start up.
  • I like the newest version of galeon a lot. It does still crash, but it has this sweet feature that allows you to resume your browsing session after a crash. It beats the hell out of mozilla and netscape.
  • This argument is valid for the Windows port of Opera. You have a number of people (I have talked to a few) who don't want to touch any product without a company behind it to offer support. But thos people usually run windows.

    I would assume that most of the people who installed linux would not want to buy software for it that is closed source. I wouldn't. I run a dual boot system, and while I have no problem with buying windows apps and games that I find useful or entertaining, I would not buy anything for linux, simply because it seem's "wrong" to me. I know it's not much of a reason, but I guess I got some of that purist spirit :)

    I believe that there is a large amount of people that think as I do, and that draw a distinction between buying software for window and buying it for linux. If that is the case, Opera may just be wasting development time on a port of its browser it may never sell enough copies of to make it worthwhile. Channeling those resources into windows development, may at least have worked to break IE monopoly on that platform.

  • Opera Nice addition (Score:5)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @03:27AM (#727126) Homepage
    I've been using Opera for years, although I wish it was open source, I didn't mind paying. Opera allows people that would otherwise NOT use their computer (because it is so slow) a web browser that is functional and useable.

    Many of us are lucky, we are running on systems that are less then 3 years old. Others aren't as lucky, and there are a great many people that can't afford even the most basic new computers. In rural areas where I live people spend 350 bucks for an old P100 monitor speaker and modem and they have to make payments on that! Opera at least gives them a Browser they can use. Even see people use it on a 386, that's impessive.

    It's a welcome addition to the Linux community. It gives some other browsers competition If Opera is like it's windoze cousin, it's very lite and fast. I'll have to fire it up an old 486 and see how it runs in Linux. It seems Opera is extending the life of some of my hardware ;)

  • People use these phrases when making the distinction between software that is open source, and software which is merely without monetary cost. It became something of an issue because of Stallman et. al's use of the term "free software" (as in, the Free Software Foundation [fsf.org])to describe software which is not merely free of charge, but is also liberated in terms of source code.

    That didn't come out very well. Check out their explanation [fsf.org] and see if that makes more sense.

  • The biggest bug in mozilla for linux right now is its inability to start unless it has write access to the directory that it is installed in.

    This is a major bug in any application. It's hard to see how it could happen except as a result of very sloppy coding and coders who have no clue.
    Are you sure that this is actually a Linux specific bug? This kind of thing more commonly originates in Windows, sometimes working fine for years on a local HDD under Windows 9X then going bang the moment someone tries to put the program on a network drive or run it under Windows NT.
    It's more a matter of fundermentals, write an application for a multi user system with file protection and you can always get it to work on a single user system with no file protection. The otherway arround tends not to work.

  • Re:Long, long, long... (Score:3)

    by AussiePenguin ( 83326 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:22AM (#727134) Homepage
    There is a slight difference... Opera is porting a pre-written browser to Linux... Mozilla is practically rewritting a browser from scratch!!

    AussiePenguin
    Melbourne, Australia
    ICQ 19255837

  • Re:Qt ? (Score:4)

    by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:23AM (#727135) Journal
    Why not GTK+ or xwWindows?
    The fact that not only are both Trolltech and Opera from Norway, but they also have offices in the same building may have something to do with it :)
    I'd like to see a GTK version too.
    Roll on the final release (and version 4.1)... Paul
  • I'd just like to point out that it's not far behind from the windows version if you can trust the version numbering.

    The windows version is 4.02, while this is 4.0b1 for Linux. The stable Windows version was 3.x when they started porting Opera to Linux.

    AussiePenguin
    Melbourne, Australia
    ICQ 19255837

  • Hmm. Next release of slashcode prolly just got longer when you posted that.

    And this.

    D'oh!

    ...j
  • Considering the choice of free (beer) web browsers, why do these guys think its worth developing this? Are people really willing to spend money on it? Is it that much better? Considering it wouldn't be an essential part of my internet using experience, and it costs as much as a couple of months net access, I'm not going to buy it.

    Most other web browser companies have a product to market (MS have Windows and IIS, Netscape have servers and an ISP etc. Even the GPL'ed ones can get costs from RedHat and SuSE) and so can use a browser as marketing. Opera needs to give their browser away or at least find a way to sell it for a lot less for it to be succesful. So far they're relying on charity.

  • Quick impressions from Opera 4.0Beta Dynamic (Score:3)

    by Rendus ( 2430 ) <rendus&gmail,com> on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:27AM (#727141)
    bash-2.04$ time opera
    Segmentation fault

    real 0m21.607s
    user 0m11.890s
    sys 0m1.060s

    This happened several times, taking anywhere from 0.01 seconds to about 30 seconds, but then it works great for awhile, even when going to the same websites (slashdot, etc). Dunno.
  • Did this press release ever make Slashdot?

    Opera Software, PalmPalm and Trolltech form Strategic Alliance for Asian Embedded Linux Market [operasoft.com].

    The press release is about a week old.

  • Re:Opera and Konqueror (Score:3)

    by ichimunki ( 194887 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @04:58AM (#727157)
    I compile and run KDE2 and Konqueror on a P/133 with a mere 32 megs of RAM, so I find it hard to think of it as bloated. Yeah, it's a little slow, especially when I try to run Apache and an emacs session so I can edit, serve, and view webpages all on my laptop (web development is more fun at the park than in the computer room), but it runs and is amazingly stable-- especially given the beta status of all the object code for the entire K environment.

    [Warning: Zealous rant ahead] I have no interest in paying for proprietary software when I could give that same money to the developers of Free software, so how much is the Opera registration price? In fact, I find confounding the constant expectation of Linux users that anything with a GPL-type license should be gotten for $0, while it's perfectly fine to shell out $$ for software that limits freedom just because they are supporting Linux. It's this exact attitude that helps starve people writing Free software, while enriching those who have made it clear that they don't care about your freedom. For instance, I'd love to test Opera on one of my faster Linux machines at home, but it's a PPC-based system, so no luck. If the software were Free, I'd at least be able to try to compile it on that machine. So instead of praising the Opera team, I guess I'll ignore them and get back to figuring out which Free software projects I use the most and making sure I'm assisting them financially.

  • A maze of futility! (Score:4)

    by fatphil ( 181876 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:30AM (#727160) Homepage
    Sorry, this will come over as flamebait, and yet it's a rant. Mod me down now, and don't bother reading any further.

    I have real problems with _all_ the current browsers, and always try new ones on the hope that they are better than the ones I've tried before.

    all of these include using the latest 'stable' version. And I only mention my most recent annoyance, often there are many...

    IE - I can't disable JavaScript without going into such a paranoid mode that I can't even download anything, even .tex and .tiff files! I also find it unwieldy to use.

    Netscape - crashes my machine sooo hard (in Windows and Linux) that only the power switch can bring the machine back to life.

    Amaya - dropped core within 5 minutes of running it. lather rinse repeat... Also has a slightly wierd feel to the UI.

    Mozilla - dropped core within 10 minutes of using. lather rinse repeat... Also suffers from too much clutter which removes vital inches from my desktop (hey, my girlfriend's blind and likes 640*480 on my 21" monitor) OK I can turn it off, but that means having to navigate arounf another maze of configuration options, I've only just become comfortable finding options in Nutscrape.

    So, I'm giving Opera the same chance that I gave the others. As soon as I start seeing core files, I'll go straight back to Lynx, which for most of the kinds of sites I visit (boring technical ones).

    Do I have anything good to say about any browsers?
    Yes -

    Netscape - Great Newsreader, my favourite ever.
    Mozilla - Great cookie/image management, really
    handy.
    Lynx - Never had a problem with it at all.
    Shame about the web-pages though...

    Rant, rant, rant, rant, rant...

    FatPhil
  • I'm under the impression that they more or less started from scratch with the Opera 4 series and that the Windows and Linux versions of 4 have been developed at the same time, based on the same cross platform core.

  • Opera for Intel Linux... (Score:4)

    by Brighten ( 93641 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:33AM (#727165)
    ...but not for Alpha, Sparc, or (in my case) PowerPC. I guess they don't have any alternative-platform test boxes, or they don't want to deal with the (probably minimal) cross-platform issues right now, which I can understand. Too bad the source isn't available so we could help them out with that. :-)

    On the other hand, even though it's of no use to me, I have to give them points for including a statically linked binary -- no need to install Qt only to try out their browser for an hour or so.

  • Of course, Google [google.com] had it right as usual.

    The real download link is at http://www.operasoft.com/download/linux / [operasoft.com] .

    Installing the Debian package now...

  • ...if it doesn't render pages right, it's of no use whatsoever. It doesn't seem to do anything right on any of the popular sites, overlapping text renderings all over the place.

    If it doesn't do what it's supposed to, it doesn't matter how small/fast it is. Mozilla's only slightly better in this context as the binaries can run for minutes or hours without a hitch rendering the pages. It only goes poof every so often.

  • Actual numbers here (Score:3)

    by ChrisWong ( 17493 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @05:45AM (#727183) Homepage
    I get annoyed when I see people talk about how large/small a program is without actually quantifying it. Here, I will do my part. I loaded Netscape 4.75 and Opera 4.0b1 and went to Slashdot (this very article). Their memory footprint can be seen below.

    11:32am up 4 days, 59 min, 4 users, load average: 0.65, 0.52, 0.33
    67 processes: 66 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
    CPU states: 3.3% user, 1.3% system, 0.0% nice, 95.3% idle
    Mem: 63032K av, 60300K used, 2732K free, 29840K shrd, 1308K buff
    Swap: 64476K av, 15704K used, 48772K free 21484K cached

    PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
    731 root 15 0 14392 13M 1044 S 0 0.9 21.8 31:48 X
    14806 chris 7 0 13164 12M 8088 S 0 0.0 20.8 0:07 netscape-com
    883 chris 0 0 12172 11M 2232 S 0 0.0 18.0 22:05 xemacs-X11
    14785 chris 0 0 7172 7172 4392 S 0 0.0 11.3 0:09 opera
    14786 chris 0 0 7172 7172 4392 S 0 0.0 11.3 0:00 opera
    14530 chris 0 0 4424 3740 2608 S 0 0.0 5.9 0:05 kfm
    14822 chris 0 0 3724 3724 3148 S 0 0.0 5.9 0:00 netscape-com
    654 xfs 0 0 3472 3052 988 S 0 0.0 4.8 1:01 xfs
    735 chris 2 0 3252 2276 1708 S 0 0.0 3.6 0:43 kwm
    771 chris 0 0 2848 1844 1260 S 0 0.0 2.9 0:43 kpanel
    14782 chris 17 0 868 868 664 R 0 2.3 1.3 0:05 top

    In short, Opera looks a lot smaller than Netscape, even when statically linked to Qt 2.2. Mozilla usually needs 30MB or so. Anyone care to post numbers for Galeon and Konqueror?

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