Opera 10.5 PRE-ALPHA - THINK THRICE BEFORE USING

R

Richard

Mord's imaginary friend
Veteran
I've been using the latest version (a pre-alpha) from the Opera Labs and it's quite good. They're definitely going with a minimalistic look and borrowing the tabs-on-title feature from Chrome - please don't say Tabs-on-Top was invented by Chrome, I was using tabs-on-top before Google even thought about Chrome :devilish:. Here's a screenie of my setup (I clean up a lot of stuff - see the bottom of this post for default pics).

min_opera.jpg


It crashes occasionally and there's a nasty regression with the bookmark middle-clicking but I'm loving the speed too much to care. Not just benchmark numbers but actual real-life speed: heavy-duty JS sites are much faster. They've also cleanified a lot of the modal windows so the experience is a lot smoother. Since I've already been using dim-to-find in my favourite text editor the new find-in-page experience is quite nice but I can see why some people might not like it.

It now supports jump-lists and superbar thumbnails but still no 7/Vista save dialogue window (grrrr).

If you're feeling adventurous and understand what pre-alpha means go here for the download and a run-down of the major features.
 
I'm looking forward to a version that is stable enough for me to switch from O10.10

About minimalistic layouts; I've been using a minimalistic layout in Opera for years, and have some questions about your layout:
- why do you keep the navigation buttons in the address bar? Doesn't your mouse sport the 4th and 5th thumb buttons to go back/forward? and if not, aren't you using the hold-right mouse button, click left mouse button (and the other way round) shortcut?
- Doesn't it annoy you that when you place the panel tab button in the address bar, that it changes its position when you click it? That makes it impossible to quickly unhide/hide the panel bar for a quick peek without moving the mouse.
- Where's your closed tabs button? I find it incredibly usefull.
- Same for the menubar-in-a-button button?
 
dZeus said:
- why do you keep the navigation buttons in the address bar? Doesn't your mouse sport the 4th and 5th thumb buttons to go back/forward? and if not, aren't you using the hold-right mouse button, click left mouse button (and the other way round) shortcut?
Click to expand...

My (lappy) mouse doesn't have 4th button. I also don't use mouse gestures. They're fine when I think about them but I find myself not using them when my brain registers "must move back".

- Doesn't it annoy you that when you place the panel tab button in the address bar, that it changes its position when you click it? That makes it impossible to quickly unhide/hide the panel bar for a quick peek without moving the mouse.
Click to expand...

My panels open on the right so they don't change the position of any of the buttons (except the padlock one on the far right). Another reason why I put panels on the right is because most websites are left-oriented and I didn't like seeing the website [strike]shit[/strike] shift dramatically whenever I opened panels.

- Where's your closed tabs button? I find it incredibly usefull.
Click to expand...

I have it on my O10.1 layout but I rarely use it (i.e. I've yet to find the need since I've installed 10.5). I prefer to type something in the address bar since it shows my session history.

- Same for the menubar-in-a-button button?
Click to expand...

Since I rarely use the menu I prefer to use the Alt key. The new App menu in O10.5 is okay, I guess. I'd prefer if it was more like the File tab in Office 2010.

Here's my Opera 10.1 layout for comparison:

min_opera_old.jpg
 
Certainly faster, and some of the best scrolling speed/smoothness out there.

While this is not Operas fault however, from the font rendering it appears they're using Direct2D's DirectWrite - and oh jeebus does it look awful. I can't believe MS really think this looks acceptable, Cleartype's accuracy and spacing was always an issue but at least it looked crisp. DirectWrite now doesn't even look crisp, the aliasing is even worse.

Really, MS has to get their text rendering tech up to par, it has such an obvious impact on the aesthetic of a GUI and DirectWrite looks the worst out of Linux/OSX/Adobe from what I've seen so far.
 
I'm confused - what's the point of putting tabs at the top of the window? It just creates a greater disconnect between the tab and the page it represents - meaning eyes have to move farther to interpret the image, increasing latency.

And, it just looks fookin weird!
 
Durr, where they've typically been placed, just above the actual web page area?
 
Grall said:
I'm confused - what's the point of putting tabs at the top of the window? It just creates a greater disconnect between the tab and the page it represents - meaning eyes have to move farther to interpret the image, increasing latency.

And, it just looks fookin weird!
Click to expand...

surely you don't mean that the address bar should be placed above the tabs as in firefox and MSIE? That would increase the disconnect between the address and the page it represents - meaning you have to move the mouse valuable pixels further to type a different address, increasing latency!

And on top of that, it just looks plain weird!

PS: if you insist on using the weird firefox layout, there are ways to rearrange the bars in Opera.
PPS: the build released just a few days ago is much more stable than the first alpha!
 
dZeus said:
surely you don't mean that the address bar should be placed above the tabs as in firefox and MSIE?
Click to expand...
I sure as hell do; as I use the tabs a lot more than I use the address bar it makes a hella lot more sense to keep the tabs close to the page area than it does keeping the address bar close.

In fact, I almost never use the address bar. I have every site I visit regularly bookmarked, and typically keep 3-5 tabs open. The times I've manually typed an address over the course of the last month can be counted on one hand, easily.
 
you mean you manually click on a tab with the mouse to select them??? In opera there are much faster ways to switch tabs (right-mousebutton + scrollwheel, cycle in tab bar order, without showing lists).

As for the address bar, in opera you can do search queries in it (which people use a lot).
In addition, the amount of clicks needed to access bookmarks (other than on the speeddial) is as great if not greater than typing the first few characters in the address bar of the page you'd like to visit.

What I'm trying to tell here is that the preferential layout is very subjective, with pros and cons for both options. Saying one is not logical is rather dogmatic.
 
I prefer tabs-on-top too since I use the nav buttons a lot more often than I use the tabs. It's also consistent with Office 2010/2007. Like dZeus mentioned, I search directly from the address bar, be it local, history or internet searches.

dZeus: they still haven't fixed the bookmark middle-click bug though. :grrr:
 
Searching from the address bar is an abomination! The address bar is to show the page's address and nothing else, death to you infidels!

;)

I actually don't like searching from the address bar. I feel it's a messy solution to a non-problem and I always turn that shit off every time I do a fresh OS install.
 
dZeus said:
What I'm trying to tell here is that the preferential layout is very subjective, with pros and cons for both options. Saying one is not logical is rather dogmatic.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Chrome uses these by default, and I've grown to like that very quickly. Opera has been my favorite browser for a long time though, and it's only recently having to share screen space here with Chrome and Firefox
 
how good is javascript ? In terms of compatibility not speed.
I use to play a browser-based game which is greatly enhanced by greasemonkey scripts...
So far Opera 10.0 was not able to run all of these, the most important fail even after using custom script that adds "gm-compatibility" :(
 
Just a heads-up that 10.50 is now in Beta (Windows at least).
Opera has released 3 builds in the last 2 days, seems they seriously accelerated their dev. process.

Just found some minor UI Bugs and annoyances so far.
 
Final was released today

stable but still very buggy in other departments (graphical interface, controls, etc). General opinion of beta-testers seems to be that it has been rushed for the Windows Browser Ballot Screen. Opera 10.51 will probably be the version fit for everyday use as primary browser.
 
It was indeed rushed. They've done an awful lot in a very short time though - 2 months of crunch basically.

I hope they release 10.51 in the near future.
 
It was rushed, I'm still using one of the beta-snapshots actually. Reading over the RC changelogs make it clear Opera wasn't keen on fixing the bugs but only hiding them to hit a deadline. Tons of regressions, etc.

Will keep 10.1 as a backup for my 10.5 beta for some time now.
 
dZeus said:
Final was released today

stable but still very buggy in other departments (graphical interface, controls, etc). General opinion of beta-testers seems to be that it has been rushed for the Windows Browser Ballot Screen. Opera [strike]10.51[/strike] ?10.52? will probably be the version fit for everyday use as primary browser.
Click to expand...

Fixed post; 10.51 is a security release with few improvements in other departments.
 
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