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Opera is a web browser and Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks, including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, and online chat. Opera is developed by Opera Software, based in Oslo, Norway. It runs on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux systems. It is also used in mobile phones, smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants, game consoles and interactive televisions. Technology from Opera is also licensed by other companies for use in such products as Adobe Creative Suite. Opera desktop and Opera Mini are available free of charge.
History Opera began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995 it branched out into an independent company named Opera Software ASA. The Opera 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. It was known for its multiple document interface (MDI) and 'hotlist' (sidebar), which made browsing several pages at once much easier, as well as being the first browser to completely focus on adhering to the W3C standards. Future development Opera 10 will be the new browser that will directly compete with Internet Explorer 7 to gain marketshare. Opera 10 will be based on crossplatform experience which will allow the user to start reading a web page on the desktop and then continue on a mobile phone or PDA. Opera 10 will also include long anticipated developer tools. Opera 10 vision Features In addition to the web browser, the other main component in the desktop versions of the Opera suite is the Opera Mail client, previously known as M2. Opera Mail supports regular POP and SMTP mail as well as IMAP. It also has an Address book. Opera Mail also features a newsreader and a newsfeed reader for RSS and Atom, as well as an IRC client for online chat. Smartphones & PDAs 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 Cascading Style Sheets for the media "handheld". Mobile Versions of Opera which utilize this technology are available on a number of smartphones and PDAs, including those produced by Nokia, BenQ, Sony Ericsson, Sharp Corporation, Sendo, Kyocera, Motorola, and Psion. Mobile phones
Nintendo DS
Nintendo Wii On May 10 2006 Opera announced that it will be developing a browser for Nintendo's upcoming Wii console. "For our Wii console launch in 2006, we required a browser that was fast and secure with support for the latest standards including AJAX. Opera proved perfect for our purposes and is an exceptional addition to both the Nintendo DS and the Wii console," said Genyo Takeda, senior managing director and general manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd. • Sony mylo On Aug 23 2006 Opera announced that it will be supplying the browser for the soon to be released Sony mylo handheld instant messaging / web browsing multi-media device. Main Opera powered devices Compatibility Common compatibility problems are caused by websites not following standards, or using outdated methods for detecting the browser being used. Websites are sometimes tested only with Internet Explorer, and fail to work correctly with other browsers. To cope with outdated detection methods or poorly built websites, Opera enables users to change the information that is sent to websites to identify what kind of browser is being used -- known as the user-agent. In previous years, Opera came preconfigured to partially "cloak" itself as Internet Explorer, but still included the word "Opera" in the user-agent information allowing the browser to be counted in web statistics. As websites modernized themselves and Opera 9 became more compatible with IE code, Opera began to use its own identification by default. Later versions of Opera offer more advanced methods of cloaking, such as the ua.ini file. The ua.ini file does not allow the user to write arbitrary user-agent strings, but rather it allows selections from a pre-defined range including Mozilla and Internet Explorer. If needed, Opera can mask completely as Internet Explorer or Mozilla, leaving out the reference to Opera in the UA string and Javascript objects. Version 8 of Opera introduced a further provision for dealing with faulty coding, by providing a set of scripts that can rewrite known broken pages as they are being opened. The closely-related UserJS (similar to Mozilla's Greasemonkey), allows users to run their own code at various times in the processing of a page. These techniques have allowed many popular but incompatible sites to be used fully with Opera. Opera periodically updates itself with the latest version of BrowserJS and ua.ini . Usage share Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers As of July 2006, usage data gives Opera's overall global share of the browser market as being between 0.5% and 1.0%, although Opera's usage share is over 11% in Ukraine •, over 8% in Russia , over 7% in Poland• and over 6% in Lithuania •. Since its first release in 1996, the browser has had limited success on desktop computers in the face of competitors including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Netscape. Opera Software has had more success in the area of mobile browsing, with product releases for a variety of platforms. There is not currently any substantial data on mobile browsing statistics (perhaps due to the tiny proportion of browsing that occurs on equipment other than desktop or laptop computers). Opera's availability on many platforms has given users access to a highly functional browser where this choice did not previously exist. Novell distributes the Linux version of Opera (based on the Qt Library) with its SUSE Linux distribution. Prior to version 3, Xandros included Opera in its Open Circulation Edition as the default browser, but now distributes Firefox. Available for Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite is an opera version that comes on a regular DS game card, but with an additional GameBoy cardridge for extra memory that can be plugged into the DS's 2nd port. This will allow the Nintendo DS to access the World Wide Web. The Wii will also use Opera, which will come free with the console until June 2007, after that it will be downloadable using the Wii Points system. The browser will be stored on the Wii's internal flash memory. Ubuntu is cooperating with their 6.x versions so Ubuntu users can easily download Opera 9. Gentoo allows users to download and install Opera using the Portage package management system. Latest release versions Note: The latest version number may differ between languages; these numbers are for the original English (US) version. 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, and the mailing-list, so the public can test and discuss new features. On 20 April, 2006, a beta version of Opera v9 was released. The public beta for version 9.0 became the first Microsoft Windows browser to pass the Acid2 browser test.. Weekly versions Since February 13, 2006, Opera has been releasing a new weekly build every Friday, and sometimes a "mid-week" build before then. Builds for Windows, Mac, and Unix variants (Linux or FreeBSD) are released. These weekly builds are available at The Desktop Team blog. They are more experimental than Technical Preview builds and should only be used for testing purposes. A list of all of the weeklies is available at Opera build releases Criticisms Opera has been criticized for: Bug tracking system Opera Software has been criticized for not running an open-readable bug tracking system. This means that users are less likely to submit good (or any) bug reports - compiling a bug report can take considerable time and the reporter has no idea if they are wasting time because they cannot know if the bug is already reported. Further to is the "one-way street" nature of bug reports to Opera, in that reports are sent to, but seldom replied to or acknowledged in any non-automatic way by Opera developers. These criticisms were brought to the attention of Opera Software in January 2006 Slashdot interview with Jon von Tetzchner the CEO of Opera Software, however no change has been made to address these issues since the interview. Website rendering Opera has been criticized for different or incorrect website rendering. There are several reasons why Opera sometimes does not render a website as the others do: It is notable in the face of criticisms of rendering accuracy, that Opera 9.0 passes the Acid2 rendering test by the Web Standards Project, which is designed to test compliance with the latest HTML, CSS and other web standards. Browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 do not pass this test, and Microsoft has stated publicly that it does not intend to make IE W3C and CSS 2.0 standards compliant to the point where they will.• 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. 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 (which is a hack to fix an old Netscape bug) is this: ul 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. 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. 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. Opera Software have cited the above incidents as supporting the theory 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 paid this money, or why. Many speculate that it was Microsoft paying to avoid embarrassment in court over the MSN issues. Browser upgrade Opera users must download a whole setup file for every minor release, where some other browsers have implemented incremental updates. Functionality Although Opera does not provide an architecture to add application extensions to the browser as seen in Firefox, User JavaScript and Widget functionality have been added in recent versions. See also Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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