Chris Mills on "Why Opera?"

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In: Interviews

By Matthew Pennell

Published on January 7, 2008

Whenwe look at the web browsers available today, we are seeing anincreasingly high level of web standards support (including somesupport for new and future standards such as CSS3 and HTML5),performance and available developer tools, and Operaare certainly no slouches in this regard. Their standards support issecond to none, they produce some of the most compact and fastestbrowsers in the world, and their mobile and alternative device browsers(including the Nintendo Wii browser) provide for a great webexperience, regardless of device, platform or taste.

wenow have a very robust and extremely fast rendering engine, which weare very proud of—the newest version has much better standardscompliance, and is more solid than before (we have fixed most of thebugs that got people’s backs up in the past). The new engine is beingshipped in all modern and future versions of Opera, and probablyfeatures the most complete web standards support in the industry.

DigitalWeb grabbed a few words with Jan Standal, director of the Opera productmanagement and developer relations team, and Chris Mills, Opera’sdeveloper relationship manager, to talk about why designers anddevelopers should consider choosing Opera, and spill the beans on whatOpera has got coming up in the near future in terms of their nextdesktop browser and other exciting technologies.
Digital Web: So what makes Opera cool, in general, and different from other browsers?
Chris Mills: Where to start? I’ll look at the other major browsers available first. Safariis a great browser, and wonderfully integrated on the Mac platform (I’ma Mac user myself—you can’t fault it on many things) and now also onthe PC too—if there was anything to criticize, then maybe it would bethe slightly limited options available for customisation. Firefoxis good in many ways, and obviously the darling of the web developercrowd because of the tools available for it. But it’s not withoutissues—its very open extension development policy does lead to securityissues, and it does tend to be a sludgy memory hog when you’re tryingto do a lot with it. And Internet Exploreris just Internet Explorer… let’s just say I’ve never been the biggestMicrosoft fan, but IE7 is certainly better than what went before, andstandards support will hopefully get even better, with IE8 promising tosupport Acid2 in the final release version.
Opera is cool for three main reasons. First, it’s got a very smallfootprint on your system, and runs faster than other browsers withouteating your system memory. Second, it’s available for pretty much anydevice you’d care to browse on, whether it’s a Linux, PC or Mac box,any mobile phone (Opera Mini will run on any phone with a JVMavailable) or even games consoles! Third, it’s got great standardssupport, so developers can pretty much be assured of their currentsites working in it, and also start to play with future technologiessuch as CSS3, HTML5 (including the <canvas> and <video> elements and web forms 2), and SVG 1.2.
And we’ve got major improvements on the horizon. Two main criticismsof Opera have always been the Mac version in general, and the lack ofdeveloper tools available. We’ve already improved the general Mac userexperience, look and feel and general performance with our latestrelease (check out beta 1 of Opera 9.5) and we’re currently working hard on a new range of developer tools that we think people will really be impressed with.
DW: Why should I test in Opera instead of Firefox? I need those plugins!
CM: Firefox possesses the hard-to-beat double whammy of Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar,but we have new tools on the way for early to mid 2008. Our developertools will feature all the essential stuff that developers want whendebugging, such as DOM and CSS inspectors, live CSS and JavaScriptupdating, JavaScript variable watchers, etc., but they will also letyou debug content on a device if necessary—for instance a webapplication running in Opera on a mobile phone—and you can make sure itworks in other non-desktop devices too, such as games consoles—this ishow we distinguish ourselves.
Jan Standal: Opera is simply the most customizablebrowser available, out of the box—you can set exactly the buttons youwant to appear on your toolbar, apply user CSS and JS files to certainsites, and set custom searches and site-specific behaviours. Our endusers love us for giving them this extreme degree of control.
In addition,
we now have a very robust andextremely fast rendering engine, which we are very proud of—the newestversion has much better standards compliance, and is more solid thanbefore (we have fixed most of the bugs that got people’s backs up inthe past). The new engine is being shipped in all modern and futureversions of Opera, and probably features the most complete webstandards support in the industry.

DW: So are there any existing plugins or add-ons?
CM: Our main add-ons are called widgets, and there are a whole host of them available from widgets.opera.com.Our widgets benefit from an advanced security model (we have to approvethem before they are published) and work in a similar fashion to otherbrowsers’ extensions/add-ons, although ours are mainly rendered outsidethe main browser window, so they do not clog up the interface any morethan strictly necessary. In addition to widgets, we also have theability to apply user-defined JavaScript to sites, to fix issues withthose sites.
DW: Tell me a bit more about Opera’s mobile browsers.
CM: We have Opera Mobile, and Opera Mini. Opera Mobileis a pretty full-featured mobile browser, with the same standardssupport as the desktop browser (it is based on the same core code) andmany of the same features, including widget support. Because of this,it needs a reasonably high spec phone to run, but it is very powerful.The next release (version 9) will blow people away—we think it willprovide a better web user experience than the iPhone, and of courseOpera can run on other handsets, so you’re not locked in.
Opera Mini on the otherhand, is a very clever browser designed to run on pretty much any phonethat can run a JVM. You install the teensy little client, and then whenyou make a request, it is sent to our bank of Opera Mini servers. Thoseservers then find the page you want, specially format it and compressit by about 80%, and send it to your phone for viewing. The result is avery small file size, saving you bandwidth and therefore money as wellas time, and a page that you can view even on your low spec phones. Ithas some limitations (such as limited Ajax support—see here for more on the exact nature of these limitations)because of the way the service works, but then again it should providean impressive experience for any page on the web, as long as they aredesigned with best practices in mind, such as progressive enhancement.
DW: What was the motivation to build Opera in the first place?
JS: Opera is thelongest standing web browser company in the world. It originated froman R&D activity in Telenor (a Norwegian telecom company) back in1994 and the first public version was Opera 3, which shipped in 1997.The founders, Jon von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsoy, believed from thevery beginning that the Internet of the future was going to beavailable for any device, and as such Opera has, since the verybeginning, been designed to run on any hardware.
DW: Why should I use it for regular desktop browsing?
CM: Many reasons.Again, there’s the sheer speed that it renders pages with. And thenthere’s the many great features we have, such as speed dial to accessyour favorite sites with a single shortcut, mouse gestures to allow youto perform common browsing activities with a single mouse movement,session restoring so that if your OS crashes or you accidentally closethe window, it will bring all your windows and tabs back up just theway they were, integrated mail and RSS clients to save you the troubleof having multiple programs open, a great ad blocking feature, instantsearches right in the address bar (for example, type in “g apples” tosearch for apples in Google), and full text history search (so you cansearch for pages in your browsing history by all the text in the pages,not just by page title or URL). For even more great features, see http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/features/.
Some readers may be quick to point out that a lot of Opera’s bestfeatures are also available in other browsers. That’s fair enough, butremember that we were the innovators for a lot of these features—weinvented many of the popular features you see in most browsers thesedays, such as tabbed browsing.
DW: Are there any cool tricks we should know?
JS: One of themost useful features for me is the “create search”. With this featureyou can make any search engine into an integrated search in thebrowser. This is extremely useful for me and provides, for example,quick access to whitepages or our intranet.
DW: What do you see for the future with Opera? As an Opera developer, what is on your wish list?
JS: We are seeingmore and more that people want to access their online data and servicesfrom all sorts of devices, so we are making this easier for people byfocusing on convergence of these different devices. We work hard toensure an equivalent user experience across all devices and platforms,and are starting to provide services such as Opera Link,which allows you to store all your bookmarks and other settings on theweb, and access them from any device. This is only the tip of theiceberg—more enhancements and new technologies will follow, allowing usto keep up our reputation as one of the most innovative browsercompanies.