Opera

I just went to shockwave.com respectively atomfilms.com because I really like some stuff there. I wanted to try it with Opera, since the old Opera didn't work and the new Opera can completely cloak it's real identity.

The Problem the site has is that nothing happens when you hit the Play game or Play movie buttons. The pop-up with the game/movie just doesn't show up. Is this a javascript problem with Opera? Let's see:

The first thing I tried was just identifying as Mozilla and allowing all pop-ups (F12). When there was no change at all, I thought they might have a browser-detection scanning for the word Opera ("Opera" is still appended to the browser-id when identifying as Mozilla). Now Opera 8 allows 100% cloaking against specified sites, so now I opened the ua.ini (located in you profile directory) and appended the following two lines:

shockwave.com=4
atomfilms.com=4

Now when you go back to shockwave.com Opera is 100%ly undetectable... and voila... everything works. This means Opera is completely capable of handling the site. For some reasons the people at shockwave just don't want Opera users using their site. Usually I would boykott, but some flicks at atomfilms.com are just too funny or visually impressive.

Peace out
Matthias

FINALLY! Opera 8 is out and waiting to be downloaded. Unfortunately, nowadays alot of people have prejudices against commercial software like Opera and consider Firefox to be the Holy Grail. I really do like Firefox. If you need a simple and plain webbrowser and don't have much expectations in usability this is your browser of choice. I actually recommend it to non-experienced computer users (i.e. my parents). But there are people who expect more. People who appreciate speed, simplicity and all those nice features improving the web experience without bloating the software. I know you want this but I also know that Opera - in it's default configuration - might be a little detering. This article is supposed to help you get started with Opera and learn to see what surfing the web is supposed to be like.

If you live in Germany or have access to German magazines you should listen. Go and get the current issue (8/2005) of the c't magazine. The CD that comes with it gives you a code which allows you to get a free license key for Opera 7.54u2 (the current version). You get 3 keys for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You are allowed to use them on as many copies as you like inside your own household.

Opera 8 is announced to be out very soon. So it's very nice that the code from the CD will allow you to buy Opera 8 for EUR 8,- instead of EUR 34,-. So alltogether you will get a nice and legal Opera 8 for EUR 11,- (the 3,- for the c't included). A very good price for a great piece of software.

As you might already assume I'm a big Opera fan. I'm using it since version 6 and can't imagine an internet life without it :-). It's the smallest (just 3.4MB), fastest (see these benchmarks) and most feature-rich browser on earth. It was the first browser to introduce real tabbed browsing (and still the only one with a useable implementation) and the first to introduce mouse gestures. I haven't seen the latter in any other browser to work as good as in Opera. I could sum up all of Opera's wonderful features now (mail, rss, irc, ...) but someone else did that already: Why Opera

Just a last note of claryfication. I like Firefox, too. This is what I install on other people's computers. But I want more for myself. For me the difference between FF and Opera is like the difference between a Java 1.3 Swing GUI and a native Windows GUI. It just feels awkward.

Cheers
Matthias