The Browser Den

Asa Dotzler mentions the Heise Security article about Opera 9.10 which was released in December. The release notes fail to mention two fairly critical security problems that were fixed in 9.10 but were present in the previous version 9.02. The main features listed in 9.10 were the online fraud protection and some stability updates.

The main concern being raised is that by not mentioning the security updates is that people may just choose to skip this release if none of the new features appeal to them but they would be more likely to upgrade if they knew that it fixes security issues.

This could be Opera trying to hide security problems from their users to appear more secure in their minds or it may just be an omission that should have made it but didn’t through a breakdown in internal communication.

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Opera 9 was chosen as one of the top products of 2006 by eWeek. It’s the only browser to receive an award from eWeek for 2006.

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I almost forgot about the .mobi domains as I’ve always personally seen them as pointless so it’s good to see that Opera’s CEO agrees with that.

Opera is the leader in mobile phone based browsers and they’ve produced a small screen rendering mode which tries (successfully most of the time) to make ordinary web sites display well on the small screen. It’s also possible to use the media attribute on CSS to provide custom stylesheets for each different display mechanism. (more…)

Most Mac OS X applications are fairly easy to install compared to their Windows counterparts. But I was pleasantly surprised at how Opera managed to make it even easier when I finally got round to installing version 9.02 (more…)

With the recent launch of IE7 and Firefox 2.0 is not far away a lot of new ‘browser war‘ headlines will pop up all over the place. However, it’s only Microsoft who remained stagnant for so long, after IE6 stood still many others came to fill the void. There’s a bunch of ‘browsers’ that are basically shells that wrap around the IE rendering engine and added features that were not in IE6, then there were other browsers such as Opera that offered new features and didn’t rely on the IE rendering engine.

Netscape didn’t die after the release of IE6 but it was on its last legs as a browser people would take seriously. The biggest blow to their reputation was rushing out Netscape 6.0 before IE6. Netscape 6.0 was based on a very early pre-release of Mozilla which was still too slow and buggy for everyday use, add to the fact that they added loads of needless marketing bloat (AOL icons, sponsored links - some not removable, extra software such as RealPlayer) made it an instant failure. After IE6 was released, Netscape released more up to date versions 6.1 and 6.2 which were significantly improved but 6.0 had already done damage and those in the know stuck with Mozilla to avoid the advertising bloat.

With Netscape’s market share on a rapid downward decline Microsoft went into maintenence mode, although at this time both Opera and Mozilla had tabbed browsing and other new features that most browsers have as standard neither of these browsers captured the imagination of the public.

Firefox came about after some Mozilla contributors most of whom had previously had worked at Netscape were frustrated at having the features of a browser dictated by a marketing department and decided to rewrite the front end of the browser from scratch aiming at user friendliness and the target audience was the day to day user rather than someone more technical. For the more demanding users an extensions mechanism was written to support features that were considered not needed by the majority of users.

Thanks to this and a lot of security holes in IE6 which were to blame for adware and spyware infestations a lot of people were looking for a new browser and Firefox fitted this mould. Simple enough that users familiar with IE6 would be comfortable and wasn’t vulnerable to the IE only browser attacks around at the time a community grew around the browser and it is now gained enough popularity (11-45% depending on country and demographic) that most websites are tested in both IE and Firefox (and will therefore work in most other standards compliant browsers).

So is this a new browser war? Let’s hope not. A war means casualties and the last thing we want again is a world where one browser is so dominant that the others pale into insignificance, if Firefox hadn’t become so popular most of us would still be using IE 6 now with no version 7 around the corner. We need competition to push the bar further, everyone needs to know of the alternatives and choose which one they prefer whether that is IE7, Firefox, Opera or one of the many browsers that exist on Linux and Mac OS X.