Tweak

After Hugin, here's the 9.x update for Munin. But it's now called OperaFox. Munin was originally designed as a simplified Opera, inspired by Firefox. But since Opera 8, the default Opera setup is already simplified and hides the mail stuff etc. So while I still use Hugin myself, I don't use Munin anymore.

OperaFox 0.9
For those who like the Firefox experience, here's a setup that tries to mimic the Firefox look and feel. You can even download a keyboard shortcuts setup that makes Opera behave just like Firefox/MSIE (at the cost of making some Opera-specific shortcuts more complex). The toolbar and menu should both the installed for this setup to work correctly. The shortcuts are optional. The nice skin using Firefox and Thunderbird icons was made by Ralf Demuth.

Edit 2007-04-17: the links point to 9.2-compatible setups now

• Toolbar
  
• Menu
  
• Keyboard shortcuts
  
• wFFTBrad Native skin
  

Oh, the irony...!

It is a perennial issue: why is Opera's marketshare not growing, when we have a product that attracts a large group of devoted users? I'll leave it to our sales and marketing department to look at this professionally, but one of the things that Firefox had going for it was a aggresive outreach campaign. Sometimes this devolved to rabid fanboyism (still does, actually). I see fanboyism as denying even reasonable complaints about your favorite browser, and issueing sweeping statements about the quality of other browsers not founded in reality, or without any knowledge of the underlying issues and history.

Opera has fanboys of its own. They seem mostly to be confined to the my.opera.com, sometimes venturing out to troll on the mozillazine forums and Asa's blog (though they don't see themselves as trolls, just like Firefox's fanboys). But it is interesting to see some more unabashed Opera promotion from people not linked to my.opera.com, especially when it well-balanced and argumented.

This recent blog post for example is not fanboyism, though it's title is promising: Why Opera beats Firefox. The blog post Opera Is Easily The Best Browser Avalible is politely bashing Firefox but with (IMHO) more shaky arguments.

This much linked blog posting is very positive for the self-image of Opera users, as the comments clearly show: What does your browser reveal about you?.

Then there are several Firefox-to-Opera converts: FireFox slides back. Opera Catches up. and "Opera 9"--- Is the fat lady singing?. Other Firefox fans are trying it out on friend's advice: they like what they see. Another advice to try Opera comes from The Battle of the Web Browsers - IE, Firefox and Opera - Which is Best. This blog post links to a nice review which states for Internet Explorer users, you can import your Favourites, so there really is no reason not to switch, and to a glowing review in Web user, a British magazine.

It helps of course if independent speed tests keep proving that Opera's JavaScript implementation is suberb nowadays. Now if only websites will start making use of Opera 9's improved JavaScript support, and stop sending unzipped content to Opera for example, the web might become an even nicer place for Opera's users. So to all Opera fans: keep telling your friends, especially if they only tried Opera years ago, and keep telling websites they should test in Opera!

One of the core goals of Opera has always been to provide you, to our best approximation, with the browser that makes the web available to everyone, and to give anyone the most comfortable way to surf the web. The way we handle features and configuration follows the following approximate formula:

• Normal browsing features: included, on by default
  
• Comfort features: included, can be disabled from the UI
  
• Features to make the web more accessible: feature included, UI to make use of feature might be second tier if it gets in the way for the majority that doesn't need it
  
• Finetuning features: configurable via Advanced prefs (if a significant minority might find it useful) or by editing text-based ini files
  
• Features to keep old users happy: feature included, disabled by default, configurable via UI or by editing text-based ini files
  

Note that "features to make the web more accessible" are not "bloat" or a "distraction for developers". Such features are very much needed for our mobile browsers, and it makes little sense to not make them available or try them out in the desktop version of Opera. Hence things like "Fit to window width" and "Voice". And from old times: disable image loading, plugins, javascript etc. In Opera 9 you will get site-specific preferences, to make it easier to use the accessiblity options when necessary, and use the web as the authors intended by default. Or the other way around! To keep a sane and understandable interface, not all preferences can be made site-specific in 9.0. Experience and feedback will tell how the UI will need to improve or make more or less prefs available in this context.

"Editing text-based ini files" can be somewhat hard to explain to potential power users. Opera 9 will include a built-in editor for opera6.ini to make this easier. Of course we can have long discussions about what the default settings should be, and which settings should be delegated to opera.ini. The built-in editor is not meant as a alternative interface for the Preferences, so the latter should contain all the things a 'normal' user might want to change once in a while.

This posting is inspired by Firefox developer Ben's latest post Battling Firefox Bloat. The problem I have with the Firefox philosophy: almost everyone is a member of a minority, and usually member of a few minorities. So with Firefox, everyone has to manage a set of extensions for necessary (for them) features or nice-to-have comfort features like "Mouse gestures" and "Paste and Go".

And it has become clear that you can not trust the extension developers to stay passionately involved over many years, so it can be days or months after installing a new Firefox version before it is working again as it used to do. Opera's text-based ini files can be a bit more clunky to work with, and less powerful, but the advantage is that anyone with a text editor can find out how to do it. To write an Firefox extension, you need to know a fair bit of JavaScript at least, if not XUL.

Update: also read David Baron's concerns about Firefox maybe relying too much on extensions.

Firefox user interface developer Ben Goodger, payed by Google, tells about usability tests they have been doing. Conclusions: a close button that is not on the tab is hardly noticed, and returning to the originating page after closing a tab is often expected behavior.

The title of this posting is a bit cheeky, after all Opera is not the only browser that opted for close buttons on tabs. Safari and Epiphany preceded us.

So, what do you do if the major point of your marketing campaign is 'we are more secure', and you have to release monthly security updates just like MSIE anyway? And you have some minor open issues anyway? You spin it. I'm glad Opera 8's PR is not focusing solely on the security!

In your next post, you bash your competetitor by saying "it's almost as good as our product now", ignoring that many people obviously think the bigger feature set makes that other product already much more usable, despite a few trivial quibbles you have with it (Offering some information during the installation? A text selection cursor? Is that the best you can come up with?).

To make it complete, you then describe a new experimental feature not available in your normal builds, which might one day come to normal releases, as the best thing since sliced bread, and completely fail to mention that the competitor previously dismissed on trivial grounds has pioneered the very same thing a few years ago, introducing the name and concept, and honed it to perfection by now.

Ah well, spinning is part of his job I suppose. But this sequence of postings is something special...

Compare


and



Note: this is an interesting comparison today, 2004-12-10, these dynamically generated images might not look that special after Firefox patches some issues. Snapshot.

The security update 7.54u this evening fixes two Secunia advisories, only one is taken into account at the moment, so actually the red widge should represent only 3.5% of the circle.


Update 2005-03-08: On this joyful day 'Opera 7' is given a green circle by Secunia. Never mind that they are actually looking at Opera 8 beta 2, reinforcing the title of this post...

I'm helping out at my daughters school, in the parents team for ICT. The school computer network uses Windows 2000 workstations. Last night we had another maintainance evening, and the school's ICT guy wanted to install Firefox on some of the clients, aiming to replace MSIE. So I went along, installed on one workstation, and found a little tool to copy this installation to other PCs. Well, that tool didn't do exactly as promised, the most helpful option did hang the tool. But even after I put something together to install a prepared package on other machines, there were still some problems with Firefox:

• Installing plugins is only possible if you 'allow websites to install software', a pref that I would prefer to leave OFF!


• The public website of the school is made with MS FrontPage, and uses FP options that totally prevent it from working in Firefox and Opera!

Sigh.

I should ask Divisha if primary schools can get a Opera free license...

What did Firefox do right to get this attention? And more importantly, will it be sustainable? Getting lots of people to try FF (again) does not mean they will actually continue to use it. Will Firefox continue to draw new users away from MSIE? What can Opera learn from this?

Things in favor of Firefox:
- open source geek appeal
- capitalizing on IE security fears
- the promise of simplicity
- slick and focused product websites
- inheritance of the Netscape goodwill of 1994
- a few additions to the standard browser feature set

Am I missing important items?

Things in favor of Opera:
- lots of extra features, integrated!
- full user control at your fingertips
- easy customizing (skins, toolbars)
- integrated package with Mail, RSS, IRC
- capitalizing on IE security fears
- image of fast & small

Am I missing important items? I don't mean specific features. And if I'm correct about the list above, are we communicating these things?

You may note I don't mention standards support here. 99% of the potential users could not care less, even supposed they understood what it means. Remember I'm talking about people who are not already using Opera or Firefox...

Asa Dotzler, a Mozillan, has been campaigning to get lots of positive reviews for Firefox at download.com:
<http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005970.html>

Of course, Firefox is a great browser. But Opera is even better! So it might be smart to get Opera's number of reviews and rating up as well.

Exclipy called for action in the opera.general newsgroup.

Just drawing everyone's attention to a thread at MyOpera.
<http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=60748>
Basically, we're calling for Opera lovers to post a review at Download.com to boost our user satisfaction percentages, after a similar tactic in the Firefox community.

At the moment, Opera has about 100 reviews (78% good, 22% bad) and Firefox has about 1100 (96% good, 4% bad). So I think we're being a bit outnumbered, and need your support. But keep it clean! There's been a tendency to bash Firefox, and basically, Don't Do It because it makes the Opera community look bad. And anyway, we should be bashing IE

All you have to do is:
1. Go to <http://www.download.com/3302-2356-10301035.html>
2. Use the form in the top-right corner.
3. It'll ask you to register. This is very easy and quick, don't let it put you off.
[end quote]

I couldn't agree more!