Opera (web browser)

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Opera
Opera 8.5 under Windows XP showing the Wikipedia Main page.
Maintainer:	Opera Software
Latest release:	8.50 / September 20, 2005
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Internet suite
Website:	www.opera.com

Opera is a computer application for dealing with many of the most common internet-related tasks, including: web browsing, sending and receiving messages, managing contacts and online chat.

Opera is developed by Opera Software, based in Oslo, Norway and is designed to run on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac and Linux. It has gained a leading role for use in mobile phones, smartphones and Personal Digital Assistants, and is also used in Interactive televisions. Technology from Opera is also licensed by other companies for use in such products as Adobe Creative Suite.

Desktop versions of Opera are available free of charge, and trial versions are available for mobile phones.

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History

Around 1992, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy were part of a research group at the Norwegian state phone company, then known as Televerket. The group took part in developing the now-defunct Open Document Architecture, a standards based system for storage and retrieval of documents, images and other content. Not satisfied with Mosaic, and inspired by the ODA project, the group proposed to build a new document browser from scratch. The parent company agreed to the project and by late 1993 the first prototype was complete.

With the Norwegian telecommunications market heading towards full deregulation in 1998, Televerket was unsure whether a browser development fitted into the company's plans. In 1994 it became a state-owned stock company, and von Tetzchner and Ivarsøy were allowed to continue development on their own in the offices of Televerket. By the end of 1995 Televerket was renamed as Telenor, and the company Opera Software was created, still in the same offices. The browser was, until version 2.0, called MultiTorg Opera and was not available to the public — although online documents show it at The Third International WWW Conference in 1995.^[1] It was known for its multiple document interface (MDI) and 'hotlist' (sidebar), which made browsing several pages at once much easier.

In January 2003, Opera 7 was released and introduced a new layout engine "Presto", with improved Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), client-side scripting, and Document Object Model (DOM) support.

In August 2004, Opera 7.6 began limited alpha testing. It had more advanced standards support, and introduced voice support for Opera, as well as support for Voice XML. Opera also announced a new browser for Interactive Television, which included a fit to width option Opera 8 introduced. Fit to Width is a technology that initially utilized the power of CSS, but it is now internal Opera technology. Pages are dynamically resized by making images and/or text smaller, and even removing images with specific dimensions to make it fit on any screen width, improving the experience on smaller screens dramatically. Opera 7.6 was never officially released as a final version.

On April 19, 2005, version 8.0 was released. Besides supporting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Tiny, multimodal features and User JavaScript^[2], the default user interface has been cleaned up and simplified. The default home page is an improved search portal^[3]. The changes displeased a number of existing users since some advanced settings became hidden^[4].

On January 12, 2005 Opera Software announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions^[5] — a change from the previous cost of 1000 USD for unlimited licenses. Schools that opted for the free license included Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, University of Oxford, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Duke University.

With the release of Opera 8.50 on September 20, 2005, Opera announced that their browser would be available free of charge and without advertisments from then onwards, although the company still sells support contracts.^[6] Enhancments included: automatic client-side fixing of web sites that did not render correctly, and a number of security fixes.

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Latest release versions

Note: The latest version number may differ between languages; these numbers are for the original English (US) version.

Microsoft Windows: 8.50 (Windows 95 and later)
Microsoft Windows: 3.62 (Windows 3.x)
Mac OS X: 8.50; Mac OS: 6.03
Linux: 8.50
FreeBSD: 8.50
Solaris: 8.50
OS/2: 5.12
BeOS: 3.62
QNX: 6.0.1
Symbian OS Series 60: 8.00 (Series 60 2nd Edition)
Symbian OS Series 60: 6.20 (Series 60 1st Edition)
Symbian OS UIQ: 6.31
Windows Mobile: 8.00u1
J2ME (Opera Mini): 1.0.1479

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Latest preview versions

Beta releases for the desktop platforms (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) are tested by a selected group of beta testers. Announcements of technical preview versions are posted on Opera's newsgroup, forums^[7], and the mailing-list, so the public can test and discuss new features.

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Features

The Opera suite consists of:

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Accessibility

Opera was designed on run on low-end and small computers, and with a commitment to computer accessibility for users who may have visual or mobility impairments.

It is possible to control every aspect of the browser using only the keyboard, and the default keyboard shortcuts can be modified to suit the user. Opera also supports the use of access keys. Opera was also one of the first browsers to support mouse gestures,^[8] allowing particular patterns of mouse movement to trigger browser actions, such as "back" or "reload".

Page zooming allows text, images and other content such as Macromedia Flash, Java and Scalable Vector Graphics to be increased or decreased in size to help those with impaired vision.

Voice control, codeveloped with IBM, allows control of the browser without the use of a keyboard or mouse. It can also read aloud pages and marked text. IBM has a browser[?] based on Opera^[9].

A "Fit to Window" feature that relies on technology similar to Opera Mini's Small Screen Rendering (SSR), allowing websites to fit within a smaller screen without the need for horizontal scrolling.

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Sessions

Opera allows the user to save a collection of open pages as a session. This set of pages can then be opened later in a new Opera window, or inserted into the current one. Opera can also be set up to start with the pages that were open when the browser was last closed. A saved session includes the independent history of each page and the settings each page had, such as scrolling position, images on/off, etc.

Each session is saved in a file that can be transferred to another computer via mail or otherwise.

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MDI and Tabs

The Opera browser with a customized interface and MDI.

Opera supports tabbed browsing and has a true multiple document interface. This means multiple Web pages can be opened within the same application window and resized, moved, tiled and cascaded like normal application windows in the operating system.

In subsequent years MDI has lost ground in favour of the simpler concept of tabs. With version 6.0, Opera offered users the choice of three modes: Tabs, MDI, and SDI (No tabs).

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Pop-up blocking

Opera lets the user control whether Web sites can open pop up windows. By default Opera blocks all unrequested popups, but can work in a variety of different ways, such as opening a pop-up as a background window, or only blocking pop-ups when they do not result from a user action like clicking on a link.

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Download manager

Allows the user to queue, pause, resume or restart the downloading of files.

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Standards

Opera has supported CSS since version 3.5, and one of the inventors of CSS is an employee at Opera^[10]. Up to 6.0 Opera supported most common web standards, Netscape plugins and some other recent standards such as WAP and WML for wireless devices, but its implementation of ECMAScript with the HTML DOM always left a bit to be desired, especially on highly dynamic pages.

This completely changed with version 7.0, which introduced the Presto layout engine: Opera introduced a completely new browser, which not only supports all standards the old Elektra layout engine did, but also has nearly full support for the HTML DOM and other standards. Additionally, since Presto's first release the ECMAScript ("Javascript") engine in Opera has been the fastest in any web browser.

Opera has a presentation mode called Opera Show, which allows the use of a single HTML or XML document for large-screen presentations, and web browsing. The appearance of the web-page in full screen is changed with CSS when specific code for 'projections' is in place.

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Messaging and online chat

Opera's mail client supports regular POP and SMTP mail as well as IMAP. In addition it has a newsreader and a newsfeed reader for RSS and Atom, as well as an IRC client for online chat.

See the main M2 (email client) article for details.

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Mobile devices

Opera can dynamically reformat any webpage for narrow tall viewports, such as smartphones and PDA displays. This can also be used with Panels. The technology in itself is proprietary, but authors can affect how webpages look in SSR by using CSS stylesheets for the media "handheld".

Opera is available on a number of smartphones and PDAs including those produced by Nokia, BenQ, Sony Ericsson, Sharp Corporation, Sendo, Kyocera, Motorola, and Psion.

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Opera Mini

Opera Mini is a very small web browser for Mobiles running J2ME.

See the main Opera Mini article for details

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Criticisms

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Advertising

Opera was commonly criticized for having been ad-sponsored. In the newer versions the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners, or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. Users could pay a licence fee to remove the advertisement bar. Since version 8.50, however, Opera is available for free without ads.

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Compatibility

A common problem online is that many websites are not based on standards, but either use outdated browser sniffers, a popular method for addressing different browsers bugs and quirks including Opera, or use nonstandard or simply incorrect code. The websites are often only tested in Internet Explorer, with the correct display reliant on the Internet Explorer rendering engine, which is tolerant of code that does not conform to official standards. Nonstandard websites have caused problems for Opera and its users, as they give the impression that the browser is broken.

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Hotmail

For a period Opera users could not empty their Hotmail trash can, due to buggy server-side browser sniffing^[11].

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Gmail

When Google released Gmail in April 2004, Opera was not supported. Gmail employs the use of XMLHttpRequest, a non-standard protocol implemented in some web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Opera 8, released a year (April 18, 2005) after the initial Gmail launch, now almost fully supports Gmail. There are still some problems with Opera and Gmail, though, such as the rich-text editor built into the compose form which cannot be used due to the lack of rich-text editing capabilities in Opera^[12].

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Yahoo Mail

There have been numerous problems with Yahoo Mail, the first of which was the broken "Move" button (caused by browser sniffing). After Yahoo Mail upgraded to a newer look, those problems vanished, but the "Move" button was a lot bigger than in other browsers. Other problems have included what is arguably a bad presentation, and has been attributed to the different style sheet Opera receives.

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MSN

The Microsoft-owned MSN website has caused several problems for Opera users:

In October 2001, the MSN web page was altered shortly after the launch of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 to exclude other browsers, including Opera and Mozilla. Users were told to upgrade to Internet Explorer 6 in order to view the page. When asked why Opera was excluded, Microsoft claimed it was because Opera did not support the latest XHTML standard. Opera responded that their browser did indeed support the standard, and following the controversy MSN made their page accessible to all browsers.^[13]^[14]

In February 2003, Opera Software employees discovered that the MSN home page sent a different style sheet to Opera users than it sent to Internet Explorer. The two most popular browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape each got a style sheet tailor made to them. Opera on the other hand was served a generic style sheet that worked only in older Netscape browsers. Because Opera did not have the same coding, the page did not appear correctly.

The code to blame for the faulty rendering is this, which is a hack to fix an old Netscape bug.

ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;}^[15]

Testing showed that Opera was served with this old style sheet only when it was possible to discern that it was Opera being used to fetch the page. If one used a user agent like oprah, one would get a more up to date stylesheet. Opera claimed that this was a deliberate action to discredit the browser. Microsoft denied the claims, blamed it on a coding error, and fixed it.^[16]

Regardless of Microsoft's claims, Opera went public with the story, and created a "Bork" edition of their browser, which garbled www.msn.com into the speech of the Swedish Chef. Opera says that this was a joke to show how easily a web-page can be changed if one actually wants. In the press-release, they reiterated its mantra that the web should be open to all.^[17]

Yet another incident occurred in May 2003, when MSN's servers caused users who had altered their preferred languages for websites to get a "server error" message. Although the error also affected users of Internet Explorer, Opera makes it easier for users to change languages, so Opera users were more likely to be affected. Opera supporters once again claimed that it was an attempt by Microsoft to discredit Opera. ^[18]

Opera Software have used the above incidents to claim that Microsoft has an anti-competitive agenda because Opera Software, as publishers of the Opera web browser, are a competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

In May 2004, an unknown entity made a 12.75 USD million payment to Opera Software. Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie said the settlement "Resolved an issue close to his heart", but no admission was made regarding who payed this money, or why. Many speculate that it was Microsoft paying to avoid embarrasement in court over the MSN issues.^[19]

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Market adoption

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Usage share

Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers

Since its first release in 1996, the browser has had limited success on desktop computers. However, Opera Software was one of the first companies active in the area of mobile devices, where it has gained significant market share. Its availability on many platforms has given users access to a highly functional browser where this choice did not previously exist.

On the Microsoft Windows platform, Opera has been unable gain significant market share over its competitors, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Application Suite and Mozilla Firefox.

As of October 2005, usage data gives Opera's share of the browser market as being between %0.23 to %1.2.

There are a number of possible reasons for the apparent lack Opera's desktop market share.

Almost all computers are supplied with a pre-installed browser, most likely Internet Explorer. Even the minority who do not use Windows have browsers provided by Mac OS X (Safari) or by Unix variants (Netscape, Mozilla, Konqueror, and others).
Opera can identify itself as Internet Explorer (the default setting) and various versions of Mozilla/Netscape. Some claim this has led to certain counting measures failing to identify Opera and consequently under reporting its market share.
Opera was at first only available in trial-versions and commercial versions, and only became available in an ad-sponsored version as of version 5.0 — and finally in a charge-free ad-free version on September 20, 2005.

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Industry adoption

Presto, the core layout engine of Opera, is licensed by companies such as Adobe and Macromedia, and is integrated into their developer tools Adobe Creative Suite and Dreamweaver MX.

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