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Opera - a lightweight browser for Linux

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Introduction
Screenlayout & Look'n'Feel
Bookmark handling
Quality of browsing - what can Opera render?
Opera in comparison to Netscape
Customization
Technical Notes & Downloading
Installation
Conclusion

Introduction

Currently, the Linux community lacks a stable and fast web browser.

Of course, there's Netscape but it's neither fast nor 100% stable. Netscape will crash sometimes, especially when you're downloading large files over a slow internet link. (I will refer to Mozilla as Netscape here because it still is a "Netscape"-like browser.)

There are several alternatives out there but they all lack features that are required by most (multimedia) webpages like Java, Javascript, Frame support, tables, CSS and even Flash. My personal opinion is that most of this is just trash, not really needed for a decent website except tables.

Ported from the Windows world, Opera seems to fill the gap. It's still not a full replacement for Netscape on the Linux platform, but it's very close to reaching this goal.

This article focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of Opera, its concepts, and finally a comparison to Netscape.

Screenlayout & Look'n'Feel

A picture is always a good starting point. Click on the link below to see a screenshot of Opera.

Opera - as seen when started, browsing Slashdot [237 KB]

If you're used to the Windows version of Opera, you'll recognize that the screen layout is the same as in the Windows version.

The first thing that you'll recognize is a somewhat large banner containing advertisements. Opera is a commercial product so the try-before-you-buy version has a banner there. This banner can be controlled to show specific advertisements. But I do not recommend that because you'll lose some of your limited anonymity on the net.

The navigation buttons are familiar and most of them work the same way as in Netscape. However you'll notice the lack of a STOP button to cancel a transfer.

Opera uses some sort of multiple document interface. Contrary to Netscape, all document windows will be opened in the mainframe as subframes. You can choose between either a full view of a single document or you can see several subframes be open at the same time.

Just take a look at the two examples below....

Opera, two documents open at the same time, one is shown fullscreen [210 KB]

Opera, two documents open at the same time, both shown in seperate subframes [196 KB]

You'll notice that you have seperate buttons for each open document. This allows you to operate Opera even if theres no windowmanager running. Additional: frame switching is much faster compared to Netscape.

A very nice feature, borrowed from the MS IE, is the ability to switch to a real fullscreen mode. Press F11 and the current browser frame will be shown fullscreen, really filling the full screen, not only the subframe of the Opera window.

Disadvantages in this mode are that you can neither switch to other subframes nor use the forward and backward buttons.

You can customize the look'n'feel of Opera to the extend. Much more than Netscape. Display of documents is controlled by CSS. You may either use one from a web site on the net or supply your own. You can select a whole file to do this or you can customize color, font and size of the various objects as headers, paragraphs, etc.

Take a look at the customization dialog below:

customization dialog for applying personal CSS [49 KB]

You cannot customize that all in Netscape. Pretty cool feature.

Bookmark Handling

Bookmark handling is very good in Opera. You can import your Netscape bookmarks and your KDE shotcuts (if you have some). A feature, imported from the Windows version, is the possibility to import MS IE bookmarks as well. But I guess, no real Linux user has a need for that, IMHO. One drawback is that the import is readonly. That's somewhat limiting but acceptable.

You can switch between a view with bookmarks or without. The default layout is close to the MS IE ones.

Opera, with imported Netscape bookmarks open [246 KB]

Note that import of foreign bookmarks is done automatically.

Quality of browsing - what can Opera render?

Well, Opera renders almost any decent HTML code. Tables, Frames, CSS, all are no problem. In that way it has the full quality of Netscape, not found in many alternative browsers on the Linux platform.

In particular, the CSS support is even better than in Netscape. Just compare a site relying completely on CSS and optimized for MS IE. View this page with the MS IE, with Netscape and finally with Opera.
As far as I have noticed so far, Opera's output is closer to the MS IE than Netscape. But that may be subjective.

Opera has three or four features that it does not do properly:

Java Support - not implemented yet
Javascript - well works for most things but not for all
Flash - no support for this
no Netscape plugins

But IMHO no one really needs Javascript, this one is really annoying. Flash is for multimedia freaks and Java, well if you need this, you can still use Netscape.

Opera is able to display PNG pictures, a feature not supported by most alternative browsers.

Opera in comparison to Netscape

Take a look at the following table, then select for yourself.

I haven't used the Konqueror from KDE2 yet - so I cannot give you an comparative overview of that one with Opera.

	Opera	Netscape
Cost	free - but advertisement is shown	free - for non-commercial use
Size	average (statically linked) small (dynamic linked)	big (statically linked only)
Speed	startup is fast document loading and rendering is fast	startup is very slow, even with much RAM document loading and rendering is average
Rendering quality of text (compared to the Windows versions)	average (at least with my font settings)	average to bad (depends on the font sizes in CSS and fonts used)
Table support	yes	yes
Frames support	yes	yes
JavaScript support	yes but incomplete	yes
Java support	no - but seems to be planned for the future	yes
CSS support	yes	yes but incomplete
Stability	rather good sometimes crashes without a reason (at least on my system)	average to good