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Why you should care about Opera: 1. More minimal interface than Chrome. New-tab Speed-dial can be a solid background [or image] with no extra cruft. Unlike Chr

Why you should care about Opera: 1. More minimal interface than Chrome. New-tab Speed-dial can be a solid background [or image] with no extra cruft. Unlike Chrome which adds bookmarks, recently closed, help links etc. 2. Equivalent performance to Chrome including JavaScript. 3. Firefox-isms while offering chrome performance. Aka Pop-in sidebars for downloads and history rather than new tabs. 5. CTRL-Tabbing is similar to operating system alt-tabbing. You don't even need a tab bar occupying screen real estate. 6. Password manager light-up button is a superior user experience to saved password autocomplete in Chrome and Firefox. 7. Right click mouse gestures. [and fully navigable keyboard only]

samstokes 16y ago
Does Opera have an Awesome Bar (i.e. find-as-you-type in the address bar autocompleting from browser history and bookmarks)? Does that integrate with Delicious? That's probably the biggest reason I stick with Firefox. Chrome's autocompletion doesn't compare (it only does prefix search on the URLs or entire page titles, whereas Firefox does infix search on URLs and words in titles, which makes it much easier to recall a given page).
- metamemetics 16y ago
  Yes! [to first question. can't comment on 2nd because I don't have a delicious account and am not sure how well pre-existing widgets work for it] [ http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=del.icio.us http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=del.icio.u... http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=delicious http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=delicious] [Opera's Awesome Bar is so Awesome it does intext searching too. Ex. If I have an HN page in my history containing a link called "blah ... analytics ... blah" that I never clicked on, I can still find the HN page containing that link by simply typing "analytics"]
- endtime 16y ago
  Well..."Opera 11 will have extensions" so probably.
  - samstokes 16y ago
    "Yes because you can write your own" wasn't quite what I meant :P
    - endtime 16y ago
      Well, it kind of does have that bar already. The delicious integration would probably be an addon, though.
- ramchip 16y ago
  Yes, and it's better than what you describe. For example, I only typed "delic" and it found your post instantly, since it actually does a search on the full text of pages in the history.
ramchip 16y ago
Oh my God. I've been using Opera for close to 10 years and had no idea that I could ctrl-tab windows. Opera has a lot of features, even weird stuff like a BitTorrent client, text-to-speech reading of documents, custom search engines (eg. I can type "h [a] -> [a]" to look for Haskell functions of type [a]->[a] on Hoogle), yet it has excellent performance, even though I almost always have 20+ tabs open. Edit: I knew about the mouse wheel, though. If you hold the right mouse button and turn the wheel you can do the same thing as ctrl+tab.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  Assuming you decided to ditch the tabbar as well, I like to mentally model it like this: CTRL-N: new globally scoped window. Cycle with ALT-TAB. CTRL-T: new locally scoped window. Cycle with CTRL-TAB.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Here is a fun one. If you have multiple tabs, pinch any tab by its base and drag it down. Ooooooooh :-) icon previews of the sites :-)
pasbesoin 16y ago
Lack of MRU tab order for Control Tab behavior is just one way in which I've been becoming increasingly unhappy with UI developments in Chrome. In looking into it, I found a developer's blog entry explaining that it is a design decision; they don't see how MRU fits into their conception of work flow or how to achieve a "perfect" implementation (sorry, I don't have the URL for that entry at hand). With... v6, I think, of Chrome, they changed the padlock / SSL-TLS designation appearance, to my eye making it less clear when a site is secure. Such UI paradigms take a long time to establish themselves in (non-technical) users' minds, so particularly for security-focused ones, you shouldn't go changing them willy-nilly -- it defeats their primary purpose. (Separately, their own properties break their secure channel at times by including non-secured resources.) Rightly or wrongly, in the lack of a more thorough analysis, this has my intuition tweaking. I'm starting to feel jerked around by decisions such as these. (And a corresponding one-way nature of communication, or outright lack of communication, on the matters.) I know, "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Keeping engineers busy engineering as opposed to "'splaining". And this is a feeling, not an analysis. So I won't claim the high ground, here. OTOH: Chrome has keep a family member's older laptop functional, where otherwise it probably would have been retired (Opera's recent speed improvements might now also compensate, but a number of sites they use fail in Opera while working in Chrome.)

samstokes 16y ago

Does Opera have an Awesome Bar (i.e. find-as-you-type in the address bar autocompleting from browser history and bookmarks)? Does that integrate with Delicious? That's probably the biggest reason I stick with Firefox. Chrome's autocompletion doesn't compare (it only does prefix search on the URLs or entire page titles, whereas Firefox does infix search on URLs and words in titles, which makes it much easier to recall a given page).

metamemetics 16y ago
Yes! [to first question. can't comment on 2nd because I don't have a delicious account and am not sure how well pre-existing widgets work for it] [ http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=del.icio.us http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=del.icio.u... http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=delicious http://widgets.opera.com/search/?order=name&q=delicious] [Opera's Awesome Bar is so Awesome it does intext searching too. Ex. If I have an HN page in my history containing a link called "blah ... analytics ... blah" that I never clicked on, I can still find the HN page containing that link by simply typing "analytics"]
endtime 16y ago
Well..."Opera 11 will have extensions" so probably.
- samstokes 16y ago
  "Yes because you can write your own" wasn't quite what I meant :P
  - endtime 16y ago
    Well, it kind of does have that bar already. The delicious integration would probably be an addon, though.
ramchip 16y ago
Yes, and it's better than what you describe. For example, I only typed "delic" and it found your post instantly, since it actually does a search on the full text of pages in the history.

ramchip 16y ago

Oh my God. I've been using Opera for close to 10 years and had no idea that I could ctrl-tab windows. Opera has a lot of features, even weird stuff like a BitTorrent client, text-to-speech reading of documents, custom search engines (eg. I can type "h [a] -> [a]" to look for Haskell functions of type [a]->[a] on Hoogle), yet it has excellent performance, even though I almost always have 20+ tabs open. Edit: I knew about the mouse wheel, though. If you hold the right mouse button and turn the wheel you can do the same thing as ctrl+tab.

metamemetics 16y ago
Assuming you decided to ditch the tabbar as well, I like to mentally model it like this: CTRL-N: new globally scoped window. Cycle with ALT-TAB. CTRL-T: new locally scoped window. Cycle with CTRL-TAB.
mahmud 16y ago
Here is a fun one. If you have multiple tabs, pinch any tab by its base and drag it down. Ooooooooh :-) icon previews of the sites :-)

pasbesoin 16y ago

Lack of MRU tab order for Control Tab behavior is just one way in which I've been becoming increasingly unhappy with UI developments in Chrome. In looking into it, I found a developer's blog entry explaining that it is a design decision; they don't see how MRU fits into their conception of work flow or how to achieve a "perfect" implementation (sorry, I don't have the URL for that entry at hand). With... v6, I think, of Chrome, they changed the padlock / SSL-TLS designation appearance, to my eye making it less clear when a site is secure. Such UI paradigms take a long time to establish themselves in (non-technical) users' minds, so particularly for security-focused ones, you shouldn't go changing them willy-nilly -- it defeats their primary purpose. (Separately, their own properties break their secure channel at times by including non-secured resources.) Rightly or wrongly, in the lack of a more thorough analysis, this has my intuition tweaking. I'm starting to feel jerked around by decisions such as these. (And a corresponding one-way nature of communication, or outright lack of communication, on the matters.) I know, "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Keeping engineers busy engineering as opposed to "'splaining". And this is a feeling, not an analysis. So I won't claim the high ground, here. OTOH: Chrome has keep a family member's older laptop functional, where otherwise it probably would have been retired (Opera's recent speed improvements might now also compensate, but a number of sites they use fail in Opera while working in Chrome.)