Opera browser (1 Viewer)

To Admin.

I like the "Latest UK Sightings" ticker bar but as I use the Opera browser I find that it does not scroll as it does with Internet Explorer.

Any chance of rectifying this?

I much prefer browsing wildlife to opera! >>>
Seriously though, I've heard good things about opera but as I'm used to Netscape and it seems to be working well, I'm one of the "if it aint broke don't fix it" brigade.

PS Personally I could live without the scrolling rarities... it seems a bit parochial for an international site:cat:

As someone who has been involved in developing public web sites I know how difficult it is to make a site work with every browser - it's difficult enough to make them work with IE and Netscape.

I have used Opera and it is a good browser, but I am not sure that the effort required to make something work with it will be justified when you think that 99.9% of users will be IE or Netscape.

Not a chance on that 99% figure, Robin. Mozilla is gathering market share like a goods train going downhill with a broken brake. Netscape is dead (yes - it's official, no more new version from AOL - which is just as well, seeing as to poor job they have made of the last 3 or 4 years worth of development). IE is stagnant and despite huge present market share has not improved in any significant way since 5.0 back in 1998 or 99. Opera has its fans (I'm one of them, BTW, registered, paid-for and happy) but has a tiny market share and does not look like growing it now that Mozilla is taking all before it.

Opera, by the way, has it weirdnesses, and BristolBirder's problem is bound to be one of them. My Opera V6.05 has the same problem. I haven't upgraded to 7.x yet - I'd have to spend money and Mozilla is so good now that I wonder if it's worth it or not.

On the whole, though, I wonder if the scrolling rarities thing is a good idea anyway. It loads the site down and adds nothing from the point of non-rarities people, let alone those of us outside the UK. Essentially, I'm in the "Javascrpt is evil" camp, and always like to see as little as possible of the stuff. Plain vanilla HTML for me.

Hi Tannin,

Thanks for the low-down on the browsers! I had heard of mozilla but know nothing about it, have to think about getting it. Is it expensive, does it have any tricky quirks, do all websites work well with it?

Having just got a new computer at last I'm on IE now rather than netscape, though netscape still has some features I like that IE doesn't (notably the ability to turn off javascript which I also detest, and also the option to disallow pop-up adverts)

Of the rarities info, I don't like the scrolling at all, tricky to read moving script, and takes an eternity to wait for it all to scroll through. And a real pain to note down a grid reference before it scrolls out of view. It does have potential value to me (as it carries some reports which don't get onto my other main info source). I agree though it is very parochial now that BF's international clientele is increasing so much. So perhaps it would be better as an optional clickable link, where I and other UK members could read it easily, and non-UK members could ignore it if they wish.

Perhaps too, if the info can be arranged, also have rare bird alert links for other areas apart from Britain? I'd find these quite interesting to glance through, not because I'd have any hopes of getting to see them, but because I find it fascinating to see what UK common birds turn up as rarities elsewhere.

Michael

Tannin: I am going to disagree with you on the 99% figure - especially when you take into account that a lot of users are accessing from work. One of the commercial sites I am involved in collects stats on usage and 99.5% of users are IE let alone Netscape. I think for home usage that percentage might be lower but I still reckon way over 90% would be IE or Netscape. Certainly over here many home PC's are supplied with IE and most users will just stick with that.

robinm said:

but I am not sure that the effort required to make something work with it will be justified when you think that 99.9% of users will be IE or Netscape.

Click to expand...

Yep sounds about right. The stats collected on the browsers accessing slashdot, a site whose users are passonate about being anti-microsoft, found that the vast majority of accesses were from IE.

Last time I looked at numbers, IE had around 90%. That's a long way different from 99.9%!

Mozilla is completely free and entirely open source. That means that you can not only download the program, you can download te sourcecode - and, if you want to, modify it any way you like.

But this means nothing to the non-programmer, doesn't it? [b[No![/b] Read on, and I'll explain why.

But first, why is Mozilla free? Who is paying for it? No-one. The people who write it are highly skilled - you have to be highly skilled to write modern software. As such, they can and do command high salaries in their day jobs. These guys don't need money, they have got money. They work on Mozilla for kudos. Not kudos from you or me - what do they care for our opinions? What do we know about the minuitae of writing software? No, kudos from one another. That's their motivation. And here is how it works.

Imagine you are having a new house built. Your builder - call him Bob - isn't working for money (he's already wealthy enough), he's working so his mate Jim the carpenter can look at the house he built and say "Wow! Great job, Bob!" If Jim (and Fred and Louise and all the rest of them) don't say "great job", then Bob has wasted his time building you a house.

So far so good: but now we get to the really clever bit: this isn't just free software, it's open source software - i.e., as part of the deal, Bob has to not only let anyone look at the "house", he also has to provide the source code. In other words, he works away at building it, knowing all the time that his mates will not only inspect the finished product, they will read his original code, examine all his workings. If software was a house, open source software like Mozilla is a house made with glass walls, and Bob's mates will be looking at it trying to find every little mistake, every last bet nail or not-quite-right-angle joint.

And, of course, because it's software not really a house, and because programmers are an anti-social and compettive breed by nature, they will be only too pleased to fix those little mistakes and tell Bob all about it.

When it comes to quality control, there is nothing that produces the goods like open source. Mozilla has gone from dreadful (two years ago) to clunky but very stable (one year ago) to the unquestioned most stable browser on the planet (as of about 6 months ago). As a matter of routine, I have 50 or 60 windows open nearly all the time, and reboot maybe once every three or our weeks, or when I change hardware, whichever comes first.

Those of you using Netscape probably already know that there are, essentially, three different Netscape browsers.

(1) The old ones: 4.8 and below. Good in their day, but their day was a long, long time ago. THey can't cope with even the basics of modern web design, notably CSS, which almost every web page uses now.

(2) Netscape 6.x. Dreadful things! These were based on very early, pre-release versions of Mozilla, and they were big, slow, and ultra-buggy. Ugly as sin too.

(3) Netscape 7.x. Vastly improved. These were based on Mozilla 1.0x - i.e., the same as early Mozilla versions, but with stuff added. It's the added stuff that makes Netscape such a poxy browser: it's loads of advertising and commercial junk that serves no useful purpose (bar attempt to attract you to AOL's site and the sites of the various cronies they hang out with) so as to be able to extract money from you, or bombard you with extra ads, or inflict the dubious delights of REal Player on you.

Sure, recent Netscape versions are rebranded Mozilla with extra crud to make it bigger, slower and uglier, but don't judge Mozilla by Netscape 7.x - by the time AOL programmers have finished adding in the advertising stuff to Netscape 7.x, the version of Mozilla they are starting from is long since outdated and has been replaced by a better one. Honestly, I can't think of one single reason to use Netscape anymore. It is unable to do anything that Mozilla can't do better, fster, and more reliably.

The ad-blocking in Netscape 7.1, of course, is (like everything else in NS) second-hand from Moz. Mozilla has had it for ages.

Poor old IE, depite its massive (and illegally gained) market share, hasn't done anything of note by way of development for 4 years or more. Since 5.0, we have seen 5.5 (which added nothing) and 6.0 (which added more nothing). I "upgraded from 5.0 to 6.0 a little while ago, and I honestly can't think of anything that 6.0 gives me that 5.0 didn't already do. Except waiting - 6.0 is noticably slower, and it has a minor video display problen with overlapping windows which 5.0 never had.

In the meantime, all the ideas have come from the two enginerooms of browser development: Opera and Mozilla. Tabbed browsing? Opera invented it, Mozilla copied it, Microsoft still don't have it. Ad-blocking? Mozilla invented it. Skins? An Opera development. Meaningful user-security tools? Mozilla again. Pop-up control? Opera. Are you getting the picture?

I have also seen site stats that confirm that the majority of surfers use IE. I can't remember the website that monitors general Internet facts and figures, but I know that indicates that IE is the most used browser.

I have never tried Opera or Mozilla, and despite building a few websites, I have never tested them in either. At a push I try to test the site in Netscape, but, as Robin says, that is not always easy.

As for the scrolling sightings, I don't like them either and I can't see the point for international members. I know that SUFF is Suffolk, but some of our overseas friends probably don't have a clue. The 'jittery' nature of the text scrolling across makes my eyes hurt. It's a good job I'm not epileptic!

What about compatibility?

Browser compatibility is all about standards. Essentially, it's very simple: there is a list of set rules for browser compatibility, produced by an international non-profit body called the W3C. It's up to each web developer and each browser manufacturer to learn these rules and comply with them. Some people are good at this, some people are not very good at it. The rules are freely available for anyone to see and download, so there are no excuses.

Traditionally, Opera was the most standards-compliant browser available. It was quirky in its ways (and to a lesser extent, still is), but it was the closest thing there was to a 100% standards compliant browser. In the last year or so, however, it has been eclipsed by Mozilla.

Microsoft, menwhile, have always had a different agenda. For them, the browser has always been a way not to help people browse the web but to drive rival corporations out of business and establist a monopoly over web content in much the same way as they have established a monopoly in so many other parts of the computer market . (And a very succesful way too, of course.) So, for them, standards are a very bad idea - particularly open standards which anyone can read and implement. For Microsft, the critical thing is that their web creation tools should, in some way, make it difficult to use any product that didn't come from them. For a while, it looked as though they were going to succeed - the FrontPage extensions were a notorious part of this campaign - but the rise of new alternative browsers to take the place of Netscape (which was by this time defunct in all but name) seems to have put a stop to this.

On the whole, web pages are pretty cross-browser friendly now. Mozilla goes just about everywhere, IE and Opera are close behind. But there are always a few particularly badly-written pages that you can't access with one or other of the browsers. Some Microsoft sires, for example, refuse to let you access them if you don't use IE. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that Opera gets such a tiny reported market share: Opera, in order to cope with such skulldugery, simply reports "I'm Internet Explorer" to any web site that asks. You can switch that off in your preferences, but most people don't bother. There is another reason Opera gets such small figures reported - not many people use it!

Anyway, the bottom line on compatibility is that no single browser can access every site. You need at least two different ones, and having two or thee is also a great convienience now and then.

In the end, it comes down to standards compliance. If the site you visit isn't readable, there are only two possible causes:

(a) Your browser is not standards-compliant. Download a better browser.

(b) The site is not standards compliant. Hire a better webmaster.

(PS: I've been here with Opera, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer, using systems that run on Windows 2000, OS/2, Windows 98, and Linux. Not counting the non-scrolling rarities list (which is neither here nor there in the overall scheme of things) I've never had a problem.)

Tannin said:

Last time I looked at numbers, IE had around 90%. That's a long way different from 99.9%!

Click to expand...

No one said that IE has a 99.9% share.

The problem with OS software is that it mostly addresses the issues of the day that the geeks writing it are concerned with not that of real users. Mozilla and NS7 have improved wonderfully and I use NS7 for all my web and mail reading.

However, I have some PHP code that I've written to record bird/insect/plant sightings and manage data associated with them. I would have liked to add birdsong wav files to the bird pages, but the pages crash NS7. I have the html correct but when a page loads into NS it crashes, frequently taking the entire machine down. No problem accessing the pages via IE. I think it is probably something to do with the NS plug ins or a clash with something else because it used to work but now it doesn't and I have no way of finding out why, nor do I care to find out either.

No need to combine Mozilla and NS7 together, although working from similar Gecko engines at some early point in their lives, the Mozilla updates have been speedily forthcoming (unlike stuck-in-the-mud Netscape). With the trio of Mozilla, Phoenix, and now Firebird offering such excellent software, they are important in the use of web development.

The scroller is free to anyone who wants to read it, if you want to pay £35 quid for the same info sent to your puter Im sure that we can add a password to read it?


over to you.

I'll have to look into Mozilla then thanks.

I frankly don't pay much attention to the scrolling rare birds list, I'm only vaguely aware of what's common in the UK. While I think it's basically a good idea, and would be very interesting, it would be a huge job even for Europe much less for the whole world. It might require a separate forum altogether. I have a local forums for the US and Nevada rare birds.

bob

Mozilla may be great and Opera the best thing since sliced bread but it doesn't matter Microsoft have the market and that's the way its going to stay until some major seachange comes along. In the last 18 months my website has been visted by 99% IE and 1% Netscape consistently month on month. I have never tested it with anything else because it just doesn't seem worth it. Even with Netscape I only give it a quick run through every few months.

Those of you who are old enough may remember 20 years ago when Betamax was a vastly superior VCR format to VHS. In fact it was better then than VHS is today, but it doesn't matter the Sony consortium won and the whole world lives with the lesser system. So it is with IE.

Nothing lasts forever, a few years ago Man U and before them Liverpool looked invincible (sorry non brits) but I wouldn't bother testing any non commercial web site outside of IE (and maybe Netscape) for the next 10 years at least.

If any Mozilla or Opera users would like to look at my site and tell me that it could do with tweaking to make it compatible with them, I might download the browsers and have a look at it. In the meantime good luck to all the techies and nerds who want to change the world, I hope you succeed but don't expect success too quickly.

Hi Trevor,

Not sure I'd agree with that assessment - look at the way google have swamped the internet search engine scene (where are lycos and altavista now?!?), or the way Swarovski have stormed into the birders' optics market. Things can and do change, and personal recommendation & fashion seem to play a large part in it.

And as pointed out above, opera will appear as IE on your stats!

Michael

Hi Michael

The Swaroski and Google cases are somewhat different

Microsoft have world domination.

Swaroski probably have 35% of the UK top end market, probably less than 10% of the total UK optic markets and even less in world terms. In the US its probably someone like Bushnell who dominate. Like it or not its the US market that you have to win.

Google was simply much better than the competition and it takes nothing in cost or effort to switch to using a different search engine.

If I was a bookie I give good odds that Microsoft will have over 90% of the browser use in 5 years time. We can reconvene on 31 July 2008 to see if I was right.

For the average surfer the differences in browsers are miniscule, so long as IE is good enough people are unlikely to change.

Besides IE is going to be on most peoples computers for a long time, there are too many commercial advantages not to use it. We produce a browser based intranet information and workteam management system that only works under IE. We write CADCAM systems that require IE6 to be installed on the system to work properly. Do we care whether it works under Opera, Netscape, or some other browser?

NO.

Oh dear, there is some serious nonsense going on here. For the average user, Walwyn, there are major differences between the browsers: security, configurability, interface, and pop-up control. That last is no longer trivial: pop-ups (along with spam and spyware) have become major issues, and I ain't talking about nerd-land here, I'm talking Mr & Mrs Joe Average. (The people I work with and support every day.)

It's just as easy to produce a system that is standards compliant as it is to produce one that is tied to a particular proprietary product. The latter, however, reduces your potential market share, the former increases it. In this industry, momentum is everything: things change very fast when they change, and if you don't see it coming it can hit you like a freight train.

Forget Opera: that's a niche product and will always remain so. Forget Netscape, that's been a stone-dead product since the late 1990s. Explorer is stagnant, and Mozilla is catching on like wildfire.

TrevorC: I'll take that bet. In 5 years time, Explorer will still be big (hell - some people are still using Netscape 4.x!) but its time as the best product is well and truly over and its days of absolute market dominance are gone.

Most popups that users get are due to them having messaging turned on and has nothing to do with their browser.

Security, LOL. Whilst users are prepared to run any exec file they happen to find, click on "I LOVE YOU" emails, delete files in systems directories - because an email told them it was a virus, install things like "bonzi-buddy", and are happy to shell out money for 'personal' firewalls, surf unknown sites with scripting turned on, then their systems are totally insecure regardless of browser. If they know why not to do the above, they also know enough to turn on the browser security options.

You know I've yet to see mozilla running inside a windows GUI widget. What is the API like? Besides the testing and maintainence costs are very high to ensure that a complex solution works across all browsers.