When is Opera going to jump boat?

I have been using Opera since Opera 10.10. I tried it when it was in Opera 8 and while I loved the features, it was significantly slower than Firefox and the UI was terrible.

I tried Opera 10.10, and absolutely loved it. Now it's at Opera 10.52, and it has been a very very good experience. The UI is great and minimalistic, it's fast, and doesn't crash. The only thing I have to complain about it is the poor flash performance.

So this is where my question leads to, when is Opera going to support HTML5 and H.264 playback? Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and now the new Internet explorer all are starting to support it, so when is it Opera's turn?

 

That's Opera's Achilles heel IMO, Flash. I sometimes find pages don't load properly, loop or get stuck depending on the amount of flash on the page. Disable flash and it works.

Other than that I really like Opera a lot and the new UI is great !

 

Opera supports Ogg just like FF and Chrome.

 

more importantly for me , is WHEN will opera release 10.50 for Linux?

i get that they were pushing windows really hard to get it in time for the EU Browser Ballot in March 1st, but its been 2 months already and no love for linux and mac os x

 

Never.

"Ruario promised you a Unix beta soon, and here is the release candidate for Opera 10.53 Beta for Unix". Probably this month 10.53 will be out for linux.

 

Opera has hit v10.52, now at 10.53, I'm expecting 10.54 in the next week, Carakan/Vega is evolving rapidly (and increasing performance/accuracy by leaps & bounds over the other browsers) and already includes a lot of HTML5 code under the covers.

re: plugins; with any browser, including Opera, you really should upgrade or install the browser FIRST, and then any multimedia plugins like codecguide, CCCP, flash, silverlight, AIR, Quicktime, etc.

With Adobe products in particular, it is helpful to fully deinstall plugins, do your browser work, then reinstall the plugins/players.

About the only player/plugin that I don't have to do this with is Java, thank goodness. Even the stuff from codecguide.com comes with a nice codec control applet that can fix bad install paths and plugin registration.

Why?? I don't know really but I've seen problems with install directories, system paths, and system-wide variables for all of the major players/plugins. Operas major problem is that they depend on others to play by the rules and stick to published documentation while other browsers. Chrome in particular appears to cater to bad programming practices on the part of the plugin/player community. You want to write sloppy code and have it run with the warts hidden, target Chrome. You want to write tight, correct, documented code, target Opera.

This is one of the major challenges with HTML5 in that third party support can often be described as a kindergarten as far as development/deployment disciplines go. If the HTML5 people don't get their act together in terms of solid documentation and implementations along with publicly thrashing people who break the standard (Apple, are you listening?!?!) HTML5 will sit in the 'almost a good idea' bin.

The other challenge with HTML5 is the H.264 codecs. Theora is a non-starter and H.264 has just as many patent problems as the Ogg codec does. Problems as in who owns them, who is going to sue who, and what will it cost the end user. I can easily believe that there are at least three companies assembling patent war chests/portfolios in preparation to Sue the World. The most recent example of this is MSFT and their now successful Fat12/16 lawsuits against the flash memory and camera makers. There is likely a huge pot of money to be made in controlling H.264

But the long-way-around-the-block method of installing/reinstalling plugins/players seems to work pretty consistently for Opera, Chrome, and FF.

 

hello there. I just moved to Opera and really like it, but i wonder if opera has addons as: IE tab and i really miss MacAfee site advisor,as on FF. Is compatible with opera?And where can i get them?

Thanks.

 

Flash with Opera I don't really have a problem with. I have noticed that IE6 uses significantly less CPU than Opera with Flash (and is much, much slower with everything else), but Opera is good enough with Flash that I don't notice any performance problems, which I ultimately care about more than CPU utilization. Haven't done a proper comparison between Opera and browsers other than IE6 that support Flash, but even if some other browser were better, it wouldn't be a factor in which browser I use most of the time. Perhaps if I wanted to view a 1080p Flash movie on battery I would use IE6 or Netscape 4.7 instead of Opera to watch that movie, but in general I see no reason to.

(Yes, Netscape 4.7 does support the latest version of Flash Player. Doesn't auto-start playing on YouTube, but otherwise works just fine. At least on sites that don't cause Netscape to crash)

At this point I don't really care a whole lot about HTML 5 video or H.264. And Opera already supports HTML 5 video with Ogg Theora. And I don't think there's a convincing reason for Opera to jump ship to H.264. Firefox is on board with Opera on this, supporting the open Ogg Theora instead of the proprietary H.264 (which only makes sense for the open-source Firefox). And Chrome supports both Ogg Theora and H.264. Safari is H.264-only, but who uses Safari on anything but OSX? IE9 may be H.264-only, but it's long been in a slow decline. The HTML5 Video format war isn't over yet, even if it does look like an uphill battle.

There is the potential patent war issue, but HTML5 isn't in the clear on that, either, with its 2016 question. If someone does go postal on the patents like Unisys did with GIF and start suing every average Joe with HTML5 video on his website, they'll suffer from the bad publicity and Adobe and Flash will probably be the winners.

I care more about Silverlight than HTML 5 given the relative prevalence on the Web. And right now, Silverlight is quite crashy on Opera, in my experience, such that I do not have it installed on my system. From what I've read this is due to Opera not precisely following the Netscape API and Microsoft not being willing to customize Silverlight given Opera's relatively small market share.

Been using Opera as a primary browser since 9.20 or 9.21. First started using it in the 9.0x range, but used Firefox as a primary browser for awhile there. The continuing innovation is promising. Vega seems to be a bit of a coup - no other browser that I know of has a similar feature, and when IE9 adds a similar feature it will only support it on Vista or later. Although, tbh, graphics seemed perfectly fast to me before 10.50, it's good to know Opera is still optimizing performance.

I know of no such thing as an IE tab in Opera - if you want an IE tab for a certain site, use IE to view that site. There's not really much reason to want to introduce IE's problems to Opera, and if you're running Windows and want IE for a certain site, it's already going to be installed anyway. However, you can mask Opera as IE, as described in this KB article, to get around those pesky sites that claim to only support IE but actually would work just fine with Opera.

No idea about the McAfee site advisor as I don't run McAfee. If it runs with Firefox there's a good chance that it'll run with Opera as well, as both Firefox and Opera more or less support the Netscape plug-in model and are thusly mostly plug-in compatible.

 

It's not operas fault, it's the flash plugin, you should try it under linux...
Opera has special builds that already support HTML5 and other goodies (even webGL IIRC)
just wait for it or try the special builds.

 

everyone remember that HTML5 isn't even going to the W3 Consortium for standards debate and approval UNTIL mid-2012. The spec, on-paper, isn't even 50% fleshed out yet.

2012. With approval coming sometime after that.

Also remember that msft and appl have only pledged H.264 to be 'free' (but still requiring a license!!) until March of 2016.

So, 2+ years until HTML5 even has a chance of being a approved and the primary video codec is only 'free' for 4 years after that.

Relax.