My Browser is better than yours!

[UtwigMU]

If you would like to test Opera without adds, there's astalavista search plugin for Firefox on http://mycroft.mozdev.org.

[az]

LOL Utwig.

As a matte of fact, if you want more search engines in Opera, download Opsed, and you get access to hundreds of search engines with an abundance of options yadda yadda.

BTW, how can you search in firefox? Can you doubleclick any word and then select your search engine to search for this word in a new window? Can you rightclick selected text and do the same? Can you type "g string" in the address bar and search google for "string" with that? (or "a string" for alltheweb, or in my case "w string" for wikipedia, "leo string" for the leo dictionary etc. etc.). Do you have a sidebar where you can enter your searchword and hit any of the multitude of buttons there to search with the corresponding engine? I know you can search using the separate search bar, one of the Opera features FF copied (which is OK).

AZ

[Jessterw]

* Doubleclick and rightclick - Yes (they are combined, doubleclick selects the word and rightclick brings up the menu)

* Address bar searching is possible, but not by default if I remember correctly, so got one there.

* No, no sidebar by default either, but again this is where extensions come into play. Out of the box, nope, but then sidebars are just annoying

As I said before, Opera is not just a browser and so it really can't be compared to a browser that is meant to be barebones.

[VJ]

Funny, following this thread, I decided to upgrade the firefox I have (0.6) to 1.0 and compare with Opera (yes, az, despite my comments, I was using Opera! ).

First question: how do I get the tabs in Firefox at the bottom of the window?


Jörg

[William]

Originally posted by az
Obviously, they use some kind of browser sniffing. It's not really Opera's fault (other than having too little market share, so some companies don't care).

AZ

Not Opera's fault? They promise to be able to masquarade as another browser. If they did that properly, then Motorola wouldn't know, would they?

[az]

Actually, they never promised that. It was a deliberate decision to have Opera always be detectable (otherwise, they would just vanish out of browser statistics). But I completely spoofed the ID using a proxy, but there are other means with which to detect browsers (every browser does some things a little differently than others, you can detect for these differences). It is the fault of the website developer, because he does two things: He doesn't adhere to standards (kind of forgiveable, many people don't, although it's not nice. It IS possible to write nice, standards-conform websites, the problem is, IE displays most of them wrongly), and he uses either code that is very very browser-specific or does too strict browser-filtering (many sites just filter if something is either IE or Mozilla, and when not, they simply serve you nothing, or crap. This is NOT the browsers' fault).

AZ

[dshumake]

What is missing when viewing motorola with Opera?
When I checked there doesn't appear to be a difference between firefox 1.0, netscape 7.2 or opera 7.54?

dshumake

[az]

Try the specific link William gave. They don't even bother sending opera the site, so opera doesn't even have a chance to try and display it.

AZ

[William]

Originally posted by az
uses either code that is very very browser-specific or does too strict browser-filtering (many sites just filter if something is either IE or Mozilla, and when not, they simply serve you nothing, or crap. This is NOT the browsers' fault).

AZ

I suspect over zealous filtering personally. However, that doesn't meant that Opera can't solve it. Every developer hour they spend on things like the mail client is an hour not used on the core part of the product -the browser. After several years, it renders the news part of formula1.com incorrectly F1 news story If you look at the same page in IE, you'll see that it has cut off the bottom part of the news story. And it doesn't send clicks correctly to digikey when sorting large lists of components. I wish they would prioritise on fixing things like this before adding fancy mail and newsreaders that you can get rid of in the same way as you can get rid of OE from windows by uninstalling it. </rant>

[az]

Well, report these sites on http://my.opera.com/forums/ then - how should they fix them if they don't know they don't work (or if they know it, but have other priorities because no one tells them he needs those sites )

AZ

[William]

I seem to recall reporting them to one of their newsgroups (I can't remember which now) a few years ago. I'm apparentley not that important.

[az]

Maybe it's just too hard.. there are sites that simply WON'T work without using ActiveX or whatever, and there are other sites that simply refuse to let Opera in (detecting it and sending it different code than other browsers. dpreview does this, but here, it can be circumvented by spoofing your browser id, which does not work on that motorola site).

Ah well, just wait for the next big corporate identity change and associated complete website overhaul...

AZ

[az]

I must say the creator of that motorola site tried very hard not to let opera in...

anyways, there is a dedicated forum for this sort of thing now: Open The Web Forum.

AZ

[az]

WILLIAM: In Opera, hit F12 and disable Javascript, then go to that Motorola site. Then write their webmaster.

AZ

[Mcollector]

Originally posted by Jesterzwild
* Doubleclick and rightclick - Yes (they are combined, doubleclick selects the word and rightclick brings up the menu)

Nice feature. Didn't know about that one.

* Address bar searching is possible, but not by default if I remember correctly, so got one there.

Apparently Address bar searching is possible by default. I've typed the search term there by accident several times. It works like the "I'm feeling lucky" option of a google search and takes you right to the site.