Opera 10 Beta available
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3925 messages posted)
I like Mozilla browsers because of the community-created extensions,
but the gap has closed a bit with Opera 10 Beta.[1]
With the latest Windoze versions of Gecko/Firefox being NT-only[2],
the fact that Opera continues to support Win9x is a BIG plus.
The fact that you can use Opera on almost _any_ platform (Linux, Mac, etc.)
is a **GIANT** plus.
For those still stuck using Internet Exploder 6, think about this:
On the Acid3 standards compliance test for browsers,
Opera 10 Beta (based on the Presto engine) gets 100 out of 100.
Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome[3] (all based on the WebKit engine)
have gotten 100% on Acid3 for many months now, BTW.
No version of Internet Exploder has yet cracked 20% on Acid3.
cache
of http://miglius.lt/acid-3-browser-test/1457
...and, of course, IE6 can't even pass Acid2.
I mentioned Mozilla's extensions.
For a while, Opera has had community-generated scripts
that HIDE Flash objects *AFTER* you've wasted bandwidth downloading them.
In addition to Presto's recent speed optimizations,
Beta 10 has an optional feature that loads images faster (via compression)
and can BLOCK unwanted plug-in-based stuff,
really revving up pageloads on slow connections / bloated pages.
The way they do the compressing and filtering
is to feed your requests thru their proxy servers.
(Privacy sticklers may bristle at this point.)
Here's a page listing their new whiz-bang stuff:
cache
of http://www.opera.com/browser/next
...and when you finally DO dump The Borg and use an OS with REAL security,
cache
of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint
both Opera and Mozilla will be there waiting for you.
[1] It bugs me the way M$ perverted the original meaning of "beta"
from "This is for in-house use only" to "We're too lazy to test this; you do it".
[2] There *is* a tweak you can make to 98/ME
to get Firefox 3, OpenOffice 3, Flash 10, etc. working under 9x:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win98/1244047289
[3] Google Chrome runs under Windoze
--but not YOUR Windoze (if you're running 9x).
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