Tag: Opera

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Lisa the Barbarian: A woman poses with a viking helmet and a sword…and an Opera Browser T-shirt. (via Espenao’s Opera the Barbarian)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), which is also worth a read. (via Slashdot)

Edit: Forgot to list the (temporary?) resurrection of 1994-era home.mcom.com, the website of what was then Mosaic Communications Corporation and would soon be renamed Netscape. Subsequently picked up by Boing Boing and Slashdot. For more old web browsers, check out the Browser Archive at evolt.org. (via Justin Mason)

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Opera BrowserWe may soon have a winner! It looked like WebKit was going to be the first to pass the Acid3 test, passing 98 of 100 sub-tests earlier today, but internal builds of Opera pulled ahead, and have just reached 100/100!

This doesn’t constitute passing the full test, as the resulting page needs to look exactly like the reference image, but it means they’re very close.

These fixes won’t appear in the upcoming Opera 9.5, since it’s in the stabilization phase as it approaches release (just like any new Acid3-related changes in Firefox won’t make it into Firefox 3), but will probably find their way into the next major version.

We’re in the home stretch. Opera’s nearly there, but WebKit is close behind. WebKit could still catch up while Opera polishes off the rendering issues, in which case Safari would be the first browser to pass both Acid2 and Acid3.

Congratulations to the Opera team, and best of luck in the final lap of the race!

SafariUpdate: Just a few hours later, and WebKit has caught up, also passing 100/100. And as they point out, it’s a public build, one you can download and try out yourself! The race to pass is going to be very close. Though at this point, it’s almost certain that WebKit will be the first to be publicly accessible.

(via CSS3.info. More at OperaWatch and The Good Life.)

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Opera.Firefox.I’ve been using the Opera 9.5 previews across the board since September, and the Firefox 3 beta 2 on my secondary work computer for the past month, and I just can’t bring myself to go back. The full-history search available in both browsers has got to be the most useful new feature I’ve seen in a browser since inline spell-check.

Really, the only things holding me back from jumping up to Firefox 3 on my main computers at home and at work were Firebug and some of the HTML validator extensions. Firebug is complicated enough that I didn’t want to rely on the Nightly Tester Tools to disable the compatibility checks. Then I found out that there’s a Firebug beta that does work with Firefox 3. That was enough. Last night I took the plunge.

IE7Meanwhile, things look good on the ditch-IE6 front. After last month’s false alarm due to a local maximum, it looks like IE7 has solidly overtaken IE6 on this site! For the first 13½ days of January, Internet Explorer accounted for 62.5% of total hits. IE7 was 33.5%, and IE6 was only 28.4%. Even better, that’s barely over 1 percentage point from Firefox’s 27.2%!

Most likely, a lot of people got new computers for Christmas. New Windows boxes would mostly be Vista, and would ship with IE7. Another factor might be techies visiting their relatives and helping clean up/update their computers. They might have taken the opportunity to install IE7 or Firefox.

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I’ve been meaning to post these photos for a while now, but with the discussion on Netscape’s impending doom, I should post them now.

Back in February, I was wandering the aisles at Micro Center and noticed a couple of odd software titles on the shelf:

  • Netscape Basics, a jewel-cased CD-ROM which contained Netscape Communicator 4.5 and boasted compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98.
  • Opera for Windows, a boxed copy of I forget-which-version, but judging by the “New! Voice Enabled!” badge, it’s probably 8.0.

Keep in mind that this was February 2007. So that was an 8-year old Netscape box, and a 2-year-old Opera box. Netscape had been free for 9 years, and Opera had been free for 1½ years.

Someone had sensibly marked the Netscape CD down repeatedly, ending with a price tag of $0.42. I was half-tempted to buy it just to prove that I’d found it, but decided taking a picture would be better, since it wouldn’t clutter up my desk. Incredibly, no one had thought to mark down the Opera box. They were still asking $39.99 for it.

Did I mention pictures?

Netscape Basics CD for $0.42 Opera for Windows for… $39.99

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Organization for Transformative Works – dedicated to protecting the expression of fan fiction, fan art, etc. (via Naomi Novik)

Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)

Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.

Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.