Cool Mac Gear

Opera released its Opera 5.0 for Mac Beta 3 browser on Friday, and I've been checking it out over the weekend. Nothing revolutionary to report. It's an incremental upgrade that polishes and refines the Mac port of Opera a bit more.

Opera is still very fast on some sites, although there are also ones on which it's a tad sluggish. I love the little toggle picture loading button that snaps a web page's text into view almost instantly when clicked.

However, the test of software, especially browsers, is how comfortable you feel with them after using them for a while, and on that score Opera still feels short of the mark for me.

The browser I've used most over the last three years is iCab, which does just about everything I want a browser to do, except for JavaScript support, which is not fully implemented yet. iCab is small, fast, stable, has a great Download Manager, and handles its Hot List (Bookmarks) intelligently and intuitively.

Another browser I've been using a lot lately is Mozilla Mozilla, which, beginning with the 0.9.2 to build in May, became a really usable browser at last. Mozilla isnow as stable as a rock, fast, and I like it better and better the more I use it. Actually Mozilla released a new beta 0.9.4 on Friday as well, and I will be reporting on it later on this week.

Opera, on the other hand, while I admire it for its many virtues -- its speed, small size, modest RAM demands, and innovative interface, still hasn't really "clicked" with me. The potential is definitely there, but the follow-through hasn't been realized yet. When I'm using iCab or Mozilla, I very rarely get frustrated and wish I was using another browser, something that happens frequently when I'm using Opera in its present state of development.

A couple of things I personally find annoying with Opera are the lack of a save as text only option (a deficiency of its shares with Mozilla), and the fact that text copy and paste from Opera has PC-style line breaks (Mozilla text copies cleanly). Other issues with Opera are that it does not support drag and drop into text fields on Web sites, and it still crashes much too frequently. Mozilla, by contrast, is now probably the most stable Mac browser of all.

It's interesting to compare these three browsers on my favorite test Web page, the National Post homepage. iCab brings the text, which is what I'm usually interested in, up fastest, and scrolls the page smoothly. Mozilla brings the text into view less quickly, and for some reason has serious problems scrolling it, which it does slowly and jerkily. Opera makes you wait a while to see the text, but scrolls fine.

Times to load the entire National Post home page contents are:

iCab - 1 minute
Mozilla - 1 minute, 11 seconds
Opera - 1 minute

Note well that this is over my very slow rural dialup connection with a connection speed of 26,400 bps. Most users will experience faster load times.

The tests were conducted with a fresh restart and all caches purged.

On the Applelinks home page, iCab was fastest hands-down, with Mozilla and Opera are about equal to each other.

iCab - 43 seconds
Mozilla - 55 seconds
Opera - 53 seconds

So, in these tests at least, Opera's claim to be "the fastest browser on earth" does not really hold up. I expect that like Mozilla, Opera will eventually hit a "sweet spot" in its beta development, but it's not quite there yet. However, I still like it a lot better than Internet Explorer.

Opera 5.0 for Mac Beta 3 will work with systems 7.5.3 up to 9.2 and for Mac OS x in the Classic mode. Opera 5.0 for Mac Beta 3 supports the following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards: 128-bit encryption, TLS 1.0, SSL 2 and 3, CSS1 and CSS2, XML, HTML 4.01, HTTP 1.1, ECMAScript, DOM and WAP/WML.

You can download Opera 5.0 for Mac Beta 3 from http://www.opera.com/download for free. Users will have to upgrade their beta version when it times out, in this case on November 1, 2001.

Charles W. Moore