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Opera 10 Beta ‘Turbo’ – Does It Still Have What It Takes?

Stefan Neagu — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:01:05 +0000

Opera, I think, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Maybe it’s the marketing, maybe people remember just the old days when Opera was shareware. Today we’re going to look at Opera Beta build 10.00 1, also dubbed as ‘Turbo’.

Opera, today, is closed source and distributed as freeware. It has a very clean and simple interface, while still supporting a wide range of extensions which enhances its default capabilities. Accessing the ‘Panels’, which contain bookmarks, history, widgets, notes and transfers, is a single click affair to the main bar ‘wrench’ icon. If you’re used to keyboard shortcuts like ‘Ctrl+B’, don’t worry, Opera supports most of them.

Opera Turbo is faster at start-up than Firefox 3.1, with an average 5 tab cold start-up at 3.1 seconds compared to 3.9 seconds. Chrome 2.01, by far the fastest, started in just 2.1 seconds. Testing was done 3 times on a Windows XP SP3 machine with a 2,4Ghz single core AMD Turion 64 and 1GB RAM.

Looking at the release notes for this build of Opera Beta, I can tell you that if you’re looking for cutting edge innovation and performance, you might not find it here. The so-called ‘turbo’ mode is just an implementation of their mobile web caching technology that is used for Opera Mobile to slim down download sizes for web pages. And the result isn’t exactly usable in some cases. Graphics intensive websites are literally transformed into something not very eye-catching. While this may help in low bandwidth situations, it’s not where the world is going.

Other features worth mentioning are:

Speed Dial, familiar to Chrome, IE8 or Safari 3 users, shows thumbnails of your most visited websites when you open a new tab. Opera let’s you manually choose which pages you want to appear.
Opera Link, similar to Foxmarks, synchronizes your bookmarks, Speed Dial and notes over multiple desktops or mobile devices. “In Opera write a note – copy directions, create shopping lists or jot down anything you need to remember – and access it on any Opera browser by simply logging in.”
Security also gets a boost, with a 3 step authentication method for websites and phishing/malware protection from 3 providers: NetCraft, PhishingTank and Haute Secure.
100/100 score in the Acid 3 test. An improved javascript engine to come in a future version.

Opera, like its open source counterpart, Firefox, is very customizable: extensions, themes and now widgets. However, I think the Opera Widgets should be removed because it duplicates the functionality of more advanced, versatile software, which is integrated into virtually every mainstream operating system.

Opera has come a long way since I first met it, version 6, I remember. It survived on the market for 13 years, and still does have some marketshare. I think it will gradually lose those die-hard fans to Google Chrome or to Firefox. Why? Because it seems to me that they’ve been treading water more or less for the past 2 years, not bringing true innovation to the table. But Opera will still be there as long as OEM’s integrate it in their mobile phones, gaming devices and set-top boxes. An estimate puts mobile versions of Opera at 40 million devices.

It’s your turn now, so tell us in the comments what you think about Opera and how could the developers improve it to win you as a fan.

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Enhance your Firefox Page Failure Options

Tina — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:46:35 +0000

There are many different scenarios behind broken links, dead websites or 404 errors. For one, the server could in fact be down or overloaded. Especially popular sites like Facebook or Twitter are often slow and timed out when hit by the masses. The same is true for pages that receive a short-lived hype via Digg, Del.icio.us and the like.

On the other hand it may be an issue on your side. Just think of a bumpy ISP or a bad wireless connection. In any case, it’s annoying when you cannot access a website, and constantly hitting the reload button doesn’t make it any better.
Here are three Firefox addons to ease your mind.

Resurrect Pages

When a page doesn’t load because the server is down, there are two options: wait until the server has recovered or load a cached version. Now viewing a cached version is rather easy. Yet this addon makes it even more comfortable by adding a menu with the most popular page caches right below the standard Firefox error page. All you need to do is pick a mirror from the list and wait for the cached clone to load.

In the latest version, the addon is also accessible via the context menu for the current page and all links, there is a toolbar button, and via the keyboard it opens when clicking Ctrl+Shift+U. Within the options for this extension you can select whether the page shall be resurrected in the current tab/window, a new tab or a new window.

ErrorZilla Mod

ErrorZilla is similar to Resurrect Pages, with the added bonus of a Ping, Trace and Whois button for the curious surfer. Unfortunately, the Retry This button is the same as the standard Try Again button and doesn’t allow for automatic page reloads.

Try Again

Resurrect Pages and ErrorZilla Mod are very good for when a site is dead, giving you a good selection of archives to choose from, and ways to find out where the connection has gone bad. However, when you’re fighting with a bad internet connection, even the page mirrors and pings will time out. This is where I recommend Try Again. Within the options for this extension, you can set a timeout timer and the amount of maximum times Try Again will attempt to automatically reload the page. You can hit the Try Again button to manually reload anytime thereafter, and you can access a cached version of the page via the links to Google Cache or the WayBack Archive.

Personally, I have used Resurrect Pages for a while, but Try Again now looks like the better and more flexible alternative. Which one do you prefer? Let’s hear!

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

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Control how Firefox Caches Websites with Better Cache

Shankar Ganesh — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:24:21 +0000

I’ve previously written about how you can save and monitor bandwidth when using Firefox. In that post, I wrote about a few settings that you can alter and a few extensions that you can install for optimising bandwidth usage. Now, I’d like to introduce a relatively unknown Firefox extension called Better Cache to all of you.

For those of you who don’t know, the cache is a place on your hard disk where Firefox stores the websites you’ve visited temporarily. Firefox caches visited sites so that when you access them the next time after you’ve closed them, it need not download the page again. This saves you potential bandwidth. But the downside is that the cached version will not display the recent changes to the site (meaning you need to refresh the page).

By default, Firefox doesn’t provide you with advanced configuration options on web site caching levels. Though you can specify the size of the cache in the Advanced Settings from Tools > Options in the menu bar, there’s nothing more you can do about the caching of web pages.

This is when the Better Cache Firefox Extension comes as a life-saver. With the Better Cache Firefox extension installed, you can control the cache settings and, in the process, save plenty of bandwidth.

In the Tools >> Add-ons window click Options, near Better Cache, to get access to the configurable choices:

You should of course have the first option checked in order to use Better Cache.

If you leave ‘Cache secure connections too’ option selected, you’re asking Firefox to store (cache) even those secure pages – the ones that you primarily logon by giving a password – like your bank account website, etc. Firefox won’t re-download the page every time you open it.

Under ‘Check pages for actuality’, you can tell Firefox when it should override the cache and download pages again.

1. If you leave the first option ‘Once per browser session’ checked, Firefox will download a website only once. If you close a web page and load it again later, it will not re-download that page from the internet. Instead, it will just display the cached version. And so until you restart your browser.

2. If the second option ‘Everytime a site opens’ is selected, Firefox will attempt to download the web page every time you access it – meaning you’ll be using a maximum of your bandwidth. It’s not recommended you use this setting.

3. The third option ‘Never’, when chosen, tells Firefox never to check for actuality of web pages. Firefox will never look up for the latest version of the page. It’ll just load the version that’s been cached already.

4. The fourth option tells Firefox tells Firefox to manage cache automatically – when it is selected, Firefox will control the cache as usual – this extension will not affect the default parameters/settings for cache management.

Download the Better Cache Firefox extension from here, and use less of your bandwidth!

(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Blogger and Freelance Writer from India. He blogs about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips.

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