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Opera 5.0 TP1 released

updated 02:00 am EST, Thu February 22, 2001

Opera 5.0 Technology Preview 1 for Mac is now available for download. We posted a report regarding the alternative Web browser on Tuesday. Opera 5.0 TP1 will expire in one month. Users having trouble downloading the file from the direct link should try browsing the FTP directory.

by MacNN Staff

(51)

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02/22, 02:38am | report spam | close Reply | delete
pffft!!!

NOW IF ONLY DOWNLOADING IT ACTUALLY WORKED!!!!!

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02/22, 02:41am | report spam | close Reply | delete
nice

I downloaded it using Monica. (Monica is a great piece of work. Go get it.)

This is my second site visiting and so far it's faster than IE or Netscape (any versions).

And it has a professional look that I was worried about it having.

I'm impressed.

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02/22, 02:42am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Crazy fast

Damn, I was downloading a 10 MB file from Apple at a pokey 20-30 KB/sec... fired up Opera, and I downloaded the same file *at the same time* at 400-500 KB/sec. AMAZING.

Anyone know how it does this magic?

Oh, and browsing is faster all around... this is a real piece of work... and just an alpha release!

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02/22, 02:47am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Really impressed

I have to admit, I was septic at first, but I'm really impressed by Opera for Mac, really fast, magnitude faster than IE or Netscape, or event iCab. Up/Down arrow keys are so fun to use now ! I don't mind paying for such a good product, and its event just a alpha :)

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02/22, 02:52am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Mirrors?

Could anyone post this to their homepage? Opera's FTP is down.

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02/22, 03:03am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Opera is fast!

I'm also impressed. It's always bugged me how the PC seems faster (responsiveness) than the Mac in simple web browsing. This is as close to winbloze as I've seen a Mac. Very fast and only an Alpha.

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02/22, 03:46am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Mirrors!

I have w/o problems downloaded from the Norwegian site ftp://ftp.opera.no/pub/opera/mac/5.0/english/TP1/

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02/22, 04:06am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Wow, now non septic!

Wow, it helped that one guy not be septic any more! Wow!

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02/22, 04:07am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Quick Observations

Looks good so far, it renders the box acid test okay, but fails to render alpha channel translucency in PNG files. PNG is useless without that.

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02/22, 04:26am | report spam | close Reply | delete
no kidding!

The first page I loaded was so shockingly fast I thought it was cached (but that couldn't be! it's launched for the first time). After trying out Netscape 6.01, IE5, iCab and Mozilla 0.8, this is a breath of fresh air! This IS one fast browser, and I'm loving it!

GO OPERA!

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02/22, 04:27am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Speedy but...

It is very speedy. Never seen such a fast browser on any platform. But there are some things that definitely need to happen for it to compete with iCab in my book.

First they need to do something about the font size problem. When you set the default font to something reasonable, like 12 or 14 (16 is way too huge in my book), the text on MacNN comments is completely unreadable.

Second, I need shared menu support- URL Manager Pro is very important to me, I use way too many browsers to use their built in bookmark stuff.

Third, I'd really like to see some more configurability along the lines of iCab. Things like being able to disable Javascript on a site by site basis, turning on and off specific buttons on the toolbar, etc. There are some nice options in Opera, and I like the built in search box, but the preference options in iCab are a lot more detailed.

Of course there are some nice things like CSS and user style sheets supported in Opera that aren't done in iCab yet, but I have to say the things I mentioned are more important to me in a browser.

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02/22, 04:44am | report spam | close Reply | delete
re:customizability

re: the last post, buttons are very customizable. there's an xml file and all the images, and even a how-to.

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02/22, 05:09am | report spam | close Reply | delete
HOLY S*!T

This thing is fast! What does Opera know that IE, Netscape, and iCab don't? Can't wait to see the final product!

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02/22, 07:23am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Oh m'god

This is seriously rapid. Sine this is only a preview I am sure that the final version will have many more features, fonts and resoloution alteration included.

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02/22, 07:25am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Better than others but...

I hate having to learn something new. Spacebar? Bookmarks on toolbar. And adjusting fonts??? I can't cycle thru open windows.

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02/22, 09:05am | report spam | close Reply | delete
WOW.

Opera has been a great alternative for the PC world, across multiple OS'es as an awesome browser. The first text file I read saying what wasn't supported in the preview made me a bit nervous, but now that I have it installed, I have to say I'm impressed. It's incredibly fast, there's no "interface clutter" and while you probably won't see certain things on pages (flash, java, etc.) it's the first alternative browser I've tried on the Mac that does the things I want to do (I've tried Mozilla, iCab, Netscape 6, HotJava) and it does them with no lag between browser windows, like IE 5. I can't wait for a final release, I'd be likely to fork the cash for it.

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02/22, 09:19am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Buttons gone

I have to admit, for a technology preview, this is one nice browser already! But, after using it for about 30 minutes, the buttons on the button bar dissapeared and I have tryed for about 15 minutes to get them back. No such luck.

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02/22, 09:35am | report spam | close Reply | delete
toolbar....

how do I add to the toolbar?

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02/22, 09:36am | report spam | close Reply | delete
and I thought IE is fast

Man this Opera thing is fast, it loads pages faster then IE or even iCab... I'm impressed! Where do I buy it? :)

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02/22, 09:44am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Bye IE, iCab, NutCase_

But when this browser becomes final, All you guys are GONE!

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02/22, 10:01am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Not too shabby!

Very snappy!
Downloads are faster as well (and I'm already on a cable modem), but I don't want a sequence of popup boxes for every download. ("Opera can't read this", etc, "what do you want to do?", and then finally "save it to...." Too Windows-ish

Font rendering/sizing leaves a little to be desired, but not a deal-killer.

After the flaccid release of NN 6, this is a breath of fresh air!

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02/22, 10:12am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Good, but still...

I've tried it on a shared T1 and on a dial-up 33.6.

It was amazingly fast on the T1 - yippee!! Although on the 33.6, I wasn't nearly as impressed - iCab works just as well, and I have a tiny screen for the 33.6 , rendering the 16 default font size... impossible to work with. Also, opera just loads the images faster than iCab; I'm generally more of a text w/ images rather than an images w/ text person, making iCab (which loads the text first) a better choice for me anyways.

Sorry, Opera. If you fix a few things (font size, cycling, getting to the location bar shortcut, quicktime support and java minimums as plugins), then I'll consider. Until then, vi ses!

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02/22, 10:17am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Opera

I have to say that after all the s*** I gave these guys over their poor delivery dates I feel quite guilty. This was worth the wait. It's still a little rough and I don't like the cheesy looking icons etc. but that's no big deal. What it does offer so well is super fast browsing - I had the same experience of the Apple download as someone else here did. I normally have a lot of problems downloading Apple stuff as I live in the UK (and Apple refuse to put mirrors in Europe apparently) but with Opera I just ripped through that file down my crummy 56K connection. When this is finished, browsing using Opera and DSL together is going to be incredible. Well done guys.

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02/22, 10:35am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Faster than iCab?! (LOL)

To the guys who love iCab: Well are you now bragging about iCab NOW, well ARE YOU?! And this is a alpha! :)

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02/22, 11:55am | report spam | close Reply | delete
awesome speed

it might just be my browser of choice from now on ...

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02/22, 12:52pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Good evening gentlemen!

All Your Base Are Belong To Us!

Sincerely,
Opera Development Team

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02/22, 01:02pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
impressed

I like iCab. But this opera browser is more impressive for a first release. No crashes and very fast. Basic building blocks first I suppose. This is going to be great! Really beat all my expectatons. Keep it cooking! But please get the java, plugin and carbon support in. Great work! I'm looking forward to all new developments.

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02/22, 01:02pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
New life to old macs!

Anybody out there who hasnt felt a fast browser on their older computer since Netscape 2.0 was popular should try this!

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02/22, 01:19pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Woah!

I downloaded Opera this morning and played with it for about an hour. I really only had a half hour but it was so fast and nice to use I couldn't stop clicking on things.

I have not always been a fan of releasing "Previews" to the public as they are usually very bad (remember Netscape 6?) and I felt the adverse publicity offset any advantage gained. Well this is one instance where it was right and is going to reap benefits.

Way to go Opera. Keep up the good work and I will be chucking all the other browsers as soon as you go prime time. (please don't s**** it up between now and then)

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02/22, 02:02pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
OS X version...

I wonder what the odds are on getting them to do the OS X version before the 68K version. This would easily

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02/22, 02:03pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
comment got snipped...

... would easily become my default OS X browser. It's so much faster than IE or OmniWeb at the moment, it's not even close. Relatively easy to use, and very nice rendering for a first release - heck, it even supports CSS, which icab still hasn't gotten around to all that well.

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02/22, 02:08pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Back on IE5 for now

Yes, it was fast, and yest its only an alpha, but I'm not ready to use it yet.

1) Fonts display way too small. It seems I can override the default fonts using "user mode" or somesuch, but nothing nice and obvious like IE's "Larger" button.

2) Datek's secure site doesn't work, among with many othr sites.

3) Worst of all, if you want to type a new address in the adress bar, you have to triple click to get the whole old address selected. This is horrible compared to IE5 where a single click in the address bar selects the whole address.

4) Autocomplete for URLs not present.

5) Favorite sites toolbar

Opera may be technically much better than IE, but IE has the features user's like me crave.

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02/22, 03:48pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Fonts

To make the fonts larger just go to Preferences:Document and set the minimum font size to 12 or 14 instead of the default 6. Voila, readable pages!!!

I'm sure the other features will appear relatively soon ...

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02/22, 03:54pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
More Opera Concerns

Two more things I noticed about Opera that I miss from iCab, you can't use the space bar to scroll the page (I have a scroll wheel but I hate it- I much prefer to use the keyboard for scrolling), and you can only turn animated gifs on or off, there's no loop once option like in iCab.

Opera is really fast but I think it's going to have to improve a lot of these little things before I can consider it as a replacement to iCab.

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02/22, 04:09pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Fast???

Most of the comments so far have commented on Opera's speed but it doesn't seem that fast to me. In fact, I tried loading several pages that take a while to load and opera was always at least 5 seconds slower than IE.

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02/22, 04:16pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
All Your Base

Don't Quite belong to us. ~_^

WHY DID YOU TAKE SO LONG?

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02/22, 04:20pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
wow

i'm also impressed, renders pages AT LEAST twice as fast as IE... get some easier to use font adjustment controls and Apple-L to open a location and i'm all over this (oh, and it crashes on password protected sites)...

can't wait to see the next release..!

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02/22, 06:58pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
response

Ok this is the last response to a whinge I can be bothered posting. Read the keyboard shortcuts and you will find out that you can page up and down as wel as scrolling smoothly with the up and down arrow keys.

Secondly password-protected sites work fine for me (advfn and iii to name two).

Please dont complain about a program until you have actually tried it out properly.

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02/22, 07:01pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
response

Ok this is the last response to a whinge I can be bothered posting. Read the keyboard shortcuts and you will find out that you can page up and down as wel as scrolling smoothly with the up and down arrow keys.

Secondly password-protected sites work fine for me (advfn and iii to name two).

Please dont complain about a program until you have actually tried it out properly. Sometimes it seems lie this forum is ful of people complaining - talk about the good things as well as the bad.

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02/22, 07:05pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Paging with space bar

It's nice and all that you can scroll with the up and down arrows, but that doesn't negate the need for supporting the space bar for scrolling as well. All the other major Mac browsers support the space bar for scrolling- Netscape (including Mozilla), IE, and iCab. There's no good reason it should not be supported under Opera as well. I don't think this is a deal breaker, it just reflects a lack of familiarity with some of the traditional Mac browser features, and as long as they add the feature, I don't expect it to be a big problem.

I'm not passing final judgement on Opera, but this first version has too many nits for me to pick to use it as my main browser. I'll stick with iCab, at least until we've seen some improvement in some of these areas.

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02/22, 08:24pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
General Speed

If they can keep the page loading speed, and smooth out the scrolling with a wheel equipped mouse (I'm using Microsoft's Trackball Explorer) I'd even be more pleased. This thing is fast. Can't wait for the finished product!

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02/22, 10:19pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Font Size and Resolution

Opera needs to adopt the practice of letting users specify the actual DPI of their screen for better font scaling results. IE 5 and NS 6 both do this, to great success.

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02/22, 10:22pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Still very beta

It seems they still have a good way to go with Opera.

In an attemt to take control of the worst font handling I've seen in a browser (and that is BAD) I notice that a lot of the font preferences don't work yet. For example, sans-serif is set to Ariel (Blech!) by default and any attempt to set it poperly to Helvetica doesn't stick. Nor does the minimum font size option..this should be 9 not 6!

Furthermore the interface looks more like a Windows app. I would expect that only from M$!!

I do want to extend my thanks to the developers though for finally bringing this to us. Please, don't stop, you aren't that far away from giving us something that is badly needed!

Sadly, returning to IE.
-Josh

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02/22, 10:24pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Forgot that minor QUIT!!

Also, if there is no window open, you can't Quit Opera!! CMD-Q and choosing it from the menu do nothing. It took me a few minutes to figure out to open a new browser window and then quit. How the h*** do you miss that!??

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02/22, 11:57pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
You don't miss it...

I noticed it right away in the "Known Issues" item on their site. Remember, the proper sequence is RTFM then complain, not complain first then RTFM!!!

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02/23, 12:23am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Not bad...but

How the h*** do you actually import your explorer favorites without it just opening another window? I guess I shouldn't be lazy and actually look on the help site...

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02/23, 04:26am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Font Workaround

Picked up a tip on the Opera newsgroup to resolve the really teeny font situation. You can set a minimum font size. I set mine to 12 and now I can reduce the base font size to 12 without getting anything smaller ending up unreadable. I hope the situation gets better in future releases, but this is good for now.

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02/23, 10:49am | report spam | close Reply | delete
loction problem

OK one complant. In the location field if you incorrectly type in a wrong url you get a message "you specified an invalid host name" and when you dismiss the alert window your left with the url of the page your at. Now I may have mistyped the url and just need to fix one letter but instead I have to type the whole url again. This does not happen if your in a new window with no page up. A small problem but annoying to me. I don't know it's probably a feature.

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02/23, 11:14am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Not half bad

Seemed pretty quick�haven't had the chance to replicate the wild downlaod stories posted here. I liked the way it rendered a lot of the pages I looked at. The toolbar really needs to be organized a bit differently�why put refresh between forward and back? Also, they should get someone to do some non Windowsy icons. But, hey, it's a beta and I bet good things will come of it. It does need to be a bit more Mac-like.

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02/23, 11:50am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Eeny fonts

I think those 6 point fonts it tends to use are awfully small. But it seems very crisp and snappy. Downloads are fast. Still kinda reeks of Windoze�the things that make a good Mac program can be subtle. Like, no apply box in preferences. Anyway, these folks have made a good effort.

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02/23, 12:00pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Document vs user mode

Hey, try this, it's pretty amazing. Toggling document or user mode lets you specify whether the page is displayed according to your spec or the designer's. Now, this is very very cool, though some web designers won't love it. This is a must have feature. Opera rules!

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Opera 5.0 TP1 released

updated 02:00 am EST, Thu February 22, 2001

Related Articles

Recent Articles

pffft!!!

nice

Crazy fast

Really impressed

Mirrors?

Opera is fast!

Mirrors!

Wow, now non septic!

Quick Observations

no kidding!

Speedy but...

re:customizability

HOLY S*!T

Oh m'god

Better than others but...

WOW.

Buttons gone

toolbar....

and I thought IE is fast

Bye IE, iCab, NutCase_

Not too shabby!

Good, but still...

Opera

Faster than iCab?! (LOL)

awesome speed

Good evening gentlemen!

impressed

New life to old macs!

Woah!

OS X version...

comment got snipped...

Back on IE5 for now

Fonts

More Opera Concerns

Fast???

All Your Base

wow

response

response

Paging with space bar

General Speed

Font Size and Resolution

Still very beta

Forgot that minor QUIT!!

You don't miss it...

Not bad...but

Font Workaround

loction problem

Not half bad

Eeny fonts

Document vs user mode

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