Peter's Blog

I'm back on the new beta of Opera version 9. It seems a bit more stable than the alpha version I tried before. It is generally compatible with most sites I have visited, only having problems with some Microsoft sites so far, not a big surprise.

Opera is a nice piece of software, it 'feels' less bloaty than firefox and yet has more features built in (Gestures, email) that don't come with vanilla firefox and you don't have to mess with extensions.

I am back with Google Desktop Search. I was using MSN desktop search but I got tired of it not shutting down with the computer. I have moaned about GDS in the past, particularly that I don't like the idea of results appearing in a web browser because the only thing you can do is open them, you don't have Windows Explorer's right-click context menu. After months of using MSN search I have decided that this is not a big deal: on the whole I can remember where things are and I use salamander to access them, I only use search when I have lost something.

GDS integrates better with thunderbird than MSN search did: I installed an MSN thunderbird plugin but it never worked. GDS supports it out-of-the-box, although as I use IMAP it will only index the messages I actually open, not the 2400 messages in my archives (unless I view them all one at a time).

I have come to appreciate the various plugins available for the GDS sidebar, especially the email preview thing: in fact I find myself reading email on that rather than switching to thunderbird. There are many plugins available but their installation programs often seem excessively large (megabytes) for something that is hosted by another application and appears in a window two inches square.

I have stopped using Opera for now: it's mail reader was not showing me the contents of some messages so I abandoned it. Some emails can crash it and it is still not as compatible with web sites as firefox. It has got me hooked on gestures and I find myself gesturing in FireFox to no avail (except at microsoft.com). I have installed a gesture extension and am hoping the next point release of firefox doesn't break it.

Been using the Opera web browser for two days now and I like it more and more. Why?

• The full screen mode (F11) is truly full screen: all controls disappear, it's just you and the web page. On my Dell D410 laptop with it's 12" screen this means I get max screen area. I find it best to customise the toolbars to get a pop-up progress bar so you can see your downloads working because you don't get the spinning thing in the top right that tells you something is happening.
• No rendering problems so far, no worse than Firefox: this may be a sideeffect of Firefox's growing share of the browser market, forcing developers to make standards compliant web sites. All Opera has to do is follow the standards.
• Comprehensive set of keyboard shortcuts and an online tutorial on how to live without a mouse. Worth mastering this to avoid using the trackpad. Example: Z and X to go back and forward a page. Once you try it you wonder how you lived without it.
• Email client is growing on me too: flip from web browser to email in no time. The email client is quirky, like nothing else I have used, and I am still learning it. One thing I don't like about it is that there seems to be no way to suppress images in email so dodgy spam is shown in it's glory.

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

• Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
• gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
• email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
• It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

• Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
• Connect phone to USB
• Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
• Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
• On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
• Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
• For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
• Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
• Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
• Enjoy

My work pc (450MHz, 256M ram, Win XP) is very slow, particularly when Firefox is running. Firefox uses about 30M of ram and if I minimise it and use other applications, when I go back to it I have to wait about a minute for it to swap back from disk. If, when it does show itself, I start typing in the google search bar it takes about five seconds to show each letter.

I gave Opera a try in the hope that it would be better. When I have tried it in the past it had had problems redering some sites, more so than firefox but I can always live with that. However this time the javascript on gmail made it crash. No solution. While it was running it was also using 30M ram. It is as if these webbrowsers just create a huge bitmap of the website in memory and display that.

Don't mention IE. I'm looking for something lean, not just mean.

I have another PC I am using (1.7G, 512 ram, Win2K) and it flies. Even while compiling a huge Visual C++ project (1000 source files) and with firefox loaded it has over 200M of ram still free.

I think I'd much rather use a fast PC running Win2k than a slow PC running XP. It would help if I could think of just one feature of XP that I miss.

Moral: ask your boss for a faster PC.