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August 10, 2004

Opera Needs to Step Up

People who know me know that I'm a card carrying Opera supporter and evangelist. I am, however, also a believer in the free market and competition, and not just when it suits me, and not in a fanboy manner.

Opera has very rightly been making noise the past years on how IE has dominated the market to the point where IE development has stagnated. But now IE has implemented its first significant improvements in years and has announced plans (whether that means anything or not) for more to come. Similarly, Mozilla has been doing well in putting together Firefox, which has made the choice of browsers more and more interesting.

In particular, open source has very good at adding features to their apps, and making those features work well (just think of eMule vs eDonkey), regardless of what I think of the polish they can sometimes lack. For instance, the latest versions of Firefox have added to their extended search functions to the point where they can readily compete with Opera. Now you can do in Firefox what you used to do with the Opera Search.ini Editor - add searches. The only point at which Firefox lags is in the breadth of searches (soon remedied) and having more than one search box (which Opera's Personal Bar excels at). But really 2 things stand out as reasons why I'm sitting up and taking notice of "alternative" browsers, by which I mean browsers other than Opera: ad blocking and pop-up blocking.

The most convincing thing about Firefox is the implementation of CSS based ad-blocking. With this, the majority of ads on web pages are eliminated - and very elegantly so, since in most cases you don't get blank space where the ad used to be. Opera can do this, but only by combining a rather more rudimentary CSS blocking with the use of filter.ini - 2 steps to Firefox's one, and not as well implemented. The only way in which Opera is still slightly ahead is that CSS blocking can be turned off more easily by switching between user and author modes - but admittedly this only seems necessary because the ad blocking style sheet in Opera sometimes blocks useful images.

What IE excels at is what Mozilla needs to learn the most from - elegance. Either there really is stuff Microsoft knows that allows it to write better software for its own platform or their developers just have a more developed sense of taste - whatever the case, the new pop-up blocker in IE convincingly raises the bar. Both Opera and Firefox allow you to "block unwanted pop-ups" which has been a pretty good way of getting rid of those that aren't manually initiated by a click. IE goes one step further and provides a nice subtle (though perhaps not subtle enough) notification that pop-ups have been blocked (you can turn it off if you don't like it) and better yet you can allow pop-ups for those sites that require it, such as (conspiracy theorists get ready) with the new web based version of MSN Messenger. In Opera, this has to be got around each time by pressing F12.

Moral of the story is this, when the gods wish to punish us, they grant us our wishes. People have been complaining about lack of competition, well, competition's a-comin'. Probably the clearest sign of this was when I was trying to demonstrate the superior caching in Opera to someone, I embarassedly noticed that IE seems to have caught on to it, just as Firefox has (though neither is *quite* as instantaneous).

That said, there are just those things that Opera still does fantastically that serve as examples of how it's been able to implement my much vaunted praise of elegance. Opera definitely wins out in having a very light and responsive GUI - when I open a new page it is instantaneous and smooth. Similarly, Presto is still my favorite rendering engine - IE's is much too chunky and Gecko is far too bleah. For those that don't understand me, IE waits till the page loads to show you anything and just makes you wait before it plunks things on you, and Gecko is just poky. Opera does well in loading the html and then the css, so that you see the content first and gradually see how it gets positioned, so slow loading pages can still be used for navigation before the page loads completely.

So while I'm not saying that I'm switching browsers, I am looking at the other side, and some of the grass really is greener. If Opera wants to convincingly retain users and recruit more besides, it needs to take a look at what's going on and react appropriately. As Microsoft has shown with this round of improvements, it's not a crime to copy the features off others, especially when you do it better than the original. So yes, innovate and provide more and better useful features, but things definitely need to be done to make the browsing experience in Opera a more elegant and less stressful experience.

Posted by subtitles at August 10, 2004 10:20 AM | Computer Stuff

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