A Night at the Opera from the January 2001 Actrix Newsletter
by Rob Zorn
Though we hear a lot about
Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Opera is the latest browser that seems to be
making a name for itself. It claims to excel the main browsers (Explorer and Navigator) by
being smaller, faster, simpler, more secure, and more state of the art.
I'm probably not that able to comment on Opera being more secure, and I'm not quite sure why they make that claim. However, it is no doubt true that because the browser is less well known, it is less likely to attract the would-be hackers who would seek to exploit any vulnerabilities it might have. They're usually more interested in exploiting browsers that are most commonly used. What is good about Opera is that it gives you little warnings if it notices anything odd or suspicious about the cookies a site may be trying to place on your hard drive. That's pretty smart. The other browsers simply allow you to turn cookie acceptance on or off. They don't seem to make any effort to investigate cookies before they accept them. You can find out more about cookies here.
While I like the browser and will continue to use it sometimes, the claim to being "state of the art" is doubtful. Version 4.02 doesn't recognise "alt" tags (the bits of html code which make those yellow boxes pop up when your mouse hovers over images) and it really struggles with transparent gifs. Opera have released 5.02 recently, and these problems may have been fixed in later versions.
Opera's claim to be faster than Explorer or Netscape is an interesting one. Firstly, the speed at which a browser can travel around the Internet is dependent mostly on the behaviour and busy-ness of the various servers and "upstream providers" that it has to negotiate through, and, of course, the amount of available bandwidth. No matter how good a browser is, it has no control over these things. However, it is true that Opera does seem to zip along very fast in comparison to Explorer, and that's why I have decided to stick with it for general browsing.
Why would this be? My guess is that Opera's apparent speed is related to its
simplicity. The big boy browsers (Explorer and Navigator) are so big and unwieldy that
they tend to drive like slow buses with bad suspensions sometimes. The full Java-enabled
version of Opera is around 10 megabytes in total size, which is much, much, much smaller
than the big boys. It doesn't need to be as big because it doesn't try to do as much. It
also doesn't seem to like multi-tasking (meaning it can only do one thing at a time) so
perhaps Opera is faster because it just gets on with the job of finding the requested
server and loading the page.
Opera comes with a tidy little e-mail program that can handle multiple accounts, and a very rudimentary newsreader, and these seem to work fine, if you're into a "no-frills" approach. The only thing I didn't like about the e-mail program was that it doesn't report very well. Outlook Express will pop up a box for you showing exactly where the program is at in terms of checking your e-mail. It will then give you a list of any problems it encountered. With Opera, you tell it to check your e-mail, and if something goes wrong, you just don't hear back. Also, the e-mail program is hard to find. It took me ages, but there it was, under the "View/Hotlist" menu for some reason.
Obviously, it is the browser that makes Opera attractive. It can be a bit like Netscape sometimes (downloading the whole page into its memory before displaying it, so you have to wait for a while before you can see whether you really want to be at that page). However, it is very good at telling you what it is doing while it is doing it. Along the bottom of the browser there is a series of tiny windows (see picture).
These little windows reveal that I am requesting the home page at www.startech.co.nz, that Opera has been attempting to receive this page for four seconds, that I am connected to that site at a rate of 2.8 kilobytes per second, that it has downloaded 11 kilobytes of data so far, that it has downloaded zero out of eight images that exist on the page, and that it has downloaded 100% of the page's text. That's pretty cool, and makes browsing more interesting. Knowledge is power, and it feels good to know what's going on. You're also able to see that your browser is working and making progress. With Navigator, and especially with Explorer, it's often hard to tell just what they think they are supposed to be doing.
To sum up, Opera gets my stamp of approval, and I think it might be the rising star program to watch. The problem is that if you really want it permanently, you have to pay for it. The version I used was 4.01. I downloaded it from a free CD that came with NET magazine, and it will expire in 30 days. Opera 5.02 has now been released, and the site claims it is free to download. However, the free version has forced advertising, which means that advertisements are pumped down the line to you while you are surfing. This would be an annoyance, and would eat some of your surfing bandwidth. If you would like to register your version for $39 US (too pricey for most Kiwis) the advertising shuts off. I can see Opera's dilemma. They have to get revenue from somewhere, but the fact is that advertising or $85NZ price tags are not going to help their product's rise.
If you'd like to give Opera a try, surf on over to www.opera.com. Don't be tempted by the 2 Meg non-Java version. Java is now a fact of Internet life, and a lot of sites won't work well without it. The Java enabled version is just under 10 Megabytes in size, and may take a while to download, but I suspect you'll find it worth it.
If there are experienced Opera users out there (I know there are some) who'd like to contribute or comment, please feel free to e-mail me at editor@actrix.co.nz.
If you'd like to read past articles comparing Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer, try the following links: