Word: opera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...solution to this discord on the Net comes from an appropriately-named source: Opera. Until recently, Opera was just one of many "alternative" browsers. Like offerings from the NCSA and Spyglass, it was seen as an also-ran that couldn't handle the Web as well as the big boys could. Frequently, these off-market browsers could not properly handle the more complicated HTML pages found on major commercial Web sites...
With the release of Opera 3.1 for Windows 3.x and Windows 95, however, the program has emerged as a serious technical competitor, if not a market threat, to Netscape and IE. Opera's advantage is that it is not based on the old Mosaic technology found in both of the "big two" browsers. Instead, its developers coded it from the ground up as a new product, avoiding the inefficiencies of legacy code and slow library files...
...honest. I didn't believe the hyperbole I heard from the program's designers. But the industry buzz has been strong, with glowing mentions in Wired and other press sources. What hooked me, though, was the comment of Ziff-Davis's Jim Seymour, who claimed with astonishment that Opera could read 95 percent of all HTML pages more than twice as fast as Netscape or IE on any speed connection...
...astonishment, these claims actually understated Opera's speed. On my Pentium 200 with 64 megabytes of RAM, the ABC News web site took 13 seconds to load in Navigator 4.0. Opera handled the page equally well in an astonishing four seconds. PC World magazine loaded in Opera in seven seconds (versus Netscape Navigator's 22), and Time-Warner's Pathfinder site took a blazingly-quick three seconds in Opera instead of Netscape's 12. What's more, all of these pages were rendered properly by Opera, whose authors boast full HTML 3.2 compliance...
...course, nothing's perfect in this world. Opera's only real flaw is its lack of support for Java applets (although it renders in-line JavaScript just fine.) In reality, this is a small price to pay, since most stand-alone Java applets on the Web today are nothing more than stock or score tickers or flashy design. In addition, many specialized plug-ins are incompatible with the program, although the majors-RealAudio, Quicktime, etc.-work just fine...