Opera 9 just around the corner; Grand marketing campaign in the works
Published June 16th, 2006 2:37 PM EDT By Daniel GoldmanOpera is gearing up for the release of Opera 9.
The new browser would presumably be released this coming Tuesday (June 20th) at a formal event Opera is holding in Seattle, WA. There has been lots of speculation about what Opera will do at this event in Seattle, but it seems clear to me that Opera will kick start a grand marketing campaign aimed at increasing their market share of the desktop browser.
The company has been pretty much mum about its plans for the Seattle event. One company official told me that the plans are tight-lipped. But one thing is clear; Opera is gearing up for a serious marketing campaign, according to many indications I’ve gotten from Opera’s marketing department.
The event will feature top company executives, people from the W3C, and others. Thankfully Opera invited me to this event.
I will (hopefully) blog live from the event, and will post lots of photos too. I have scheduled interviews with Opera’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner and other company executives.
Opera Watch will be the place to watch this coming week.
I’m off to Seattle.
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There still many regressions, I’m not counting just bugs…
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Hopefully they will just announce new version of the browser, and show some Release Candidate or Beta 3…
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Hmm.. I hope they sort out all the issues before launch. Build 8493 has already crashed twice for me (in less than 24 hours).
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Digg this article
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Enjoy the weather here. It’s supposed to be nice on the 20th, so we shall see if the sun shines on the annoucement. hehe..
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There are always regressions… But there are incredibly important fixes (rich text!), and they could more than make up for a few minor to major regressions.
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I don’t think Opera 9 is ready to be released, but maybe at Opera they know better than us
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I’ll probably upgrade to 9.0 at home, but most definitely not from work. Somehow I don’t fancy the idea of having tens of thousands of new files on the drive thanks to mail and RSS, if that’s still the case - last time I read about it, every single item was supposed to be placed into a separate file… Awful.
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M, what do you mean by “tens of thousands of new files on the drive thanks to mail and RSS”?
Opera’s mail client and RSS reader are suprisingly small. They **entire** browser is under 4MB!
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From what I’ve understood by glancing at the forum, each e-mail or RSS item gets stored in a separate file on the drive in Opera 9. I recall reading something about preventing corruption and the developers not wanting to invent/implement a filesystem on top of a filesystem yet again - hence storing each item separately.
If that’s true, I’m definitely not upgrading at work. I’ve got several thousand e-mails and roughly 45.000 RSS items accumulated over time, so placing 50k new files on my drive is absolutely out of the question. With small embedded databases like SQLite, I don’t understand the need to do such things.
I hope I’m wrong about this, but if I’m not, Opera has done something worthy of The Daily WTF
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See you there bro!
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Latest weekly is ready for a major release, only Widgets are not-that-ready.
Everything that was a damn hassle has been fixed (GIF crazyness, weird RSS, phpbb and vbulletin fixes, tab changing crash).
I’d love to see that a click on the tray bar hides or closes Opera =P
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Opera really sucks. Tabs seem to be forced on top, the preference dialog is completely unorganized and there’s too many options, there’s no update patching, and it’s not an open source project where I can look at bugs filed.
Only good thing about Opera is the comparison to Gecko. Presto rocks.
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I’d really love to upgrade to a final version of Opera. So far, touchwood, the weeklies haven’t been any pain at all. The only problems I ran into were because of the installing the etch version over static which gave it a weird look. Otherwise, a qucikfix solution from the ever friendly opera forums fixed this pronto pronto.
@Chris: Opera Sucks? In what way? I know it is closed source but then Opera is far better alternative than any other browser. Though, each one to his.
Been happy with the weeklies and so far no headache on Linux box atleast. As for the bugs, Opera has it’s developers around to help you with it. On mailing lists/IRC/ Forums.
All the best Daniel. Hope you have a safe journey and enjoy having a blast!
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i hope there will be something new for opera mobile users on 20 th of june .
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If you put all mails into the same file, some anti virus programs like to remove the whole file if you get a single virus mail and then you would lose all mails.
Are you sure that your file system can’t handle some tens of thousands files well?
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@Abhishek
Saw this article on Digg and posted some gripes about Opera to see if anyone knew how to make better. Opera sucks in those ways, but other than that, it’s awesome.
Most of the stuff is minor annoyances, like the default layout which takes some tweaking but isn’t bad. My biggest gripe being the “Advanced” tab in “Preferences”. There’s way too many options there that should probably be in opera:config. I only use Opera for Wikipedia because the long horizontal scroll never shows up. Love that feature
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i wish better UI for OS X.
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I wonder if they’ll have all platforms at once, or stagger with a Windows lead. And furthermore, I wonder if the Mac version will be a Universal Binary.
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Looks like the RAM cache change is permanent. Yay for people who say it consumes too much RAM.
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Oh, I didn’t here about this until just now.
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@ M (see his posting above)
“I’ve got several thousand e-mails and roughly 45.000 RSS items accumulated over time, so placing 50k new files on my drive is absolutely out of the question. With small embedded databases like SQLite, I don’t understand the need to do such things.”
POOR BOY!
I can do little to augment your understanding capabilities, but I can help you with a real-world example of a workstation I am using now:
- 8 HDDs in RAID-configuration;
- 17 drive partitions total;
- 1st one has 57.000 files
- 2nd one has 118.000 files
- 3rd, aso. hold ~40.000-80.000 files
- NAT for daily (!) backups of the stuff
As you can see, my NAT ins holding close to 1 million files. Same for the main file system.
I would not not care a pin if the workstation should hold extra 40.000 files some day. Apart from reading log files really closely, I would not notice it at all.
Get down from your high, quit smoking ****, or both. In your spare time think of a dedicated system–this is what makes my customers tick, and my coffers full.
Yours,
YBK
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Wow, YBK, I wish I could be like you! It’s my wet dream to have eight drives in a RAID configuration and a NAT backup. I’d sacrifice my first-born child to have that!!!1 Your e-***** (intentional typo due to WP filtering) must be really, really big - oh how I envy you!
BigOwl: Yes, my filesystem can hold that many files. But I don’t want it to. That’s a task for a RDBMS. You won’t find many people with 45.000 e-mails, but 45.000 RSS items is something one can easily accumulate in under a year. As for AV programs, they’re badly written if they can’t handle a simple MBX format and have to delete the e-mail instead of the attachment, so it’s a poor excuse since I don’t hear about those problems with other e-mail clients. But whatever.
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Opera really sucks because its tab handling is different from Firefox (forced on top? Opera had “open in background” before Firefox was in diapers!), its preferences dialog is different from Firefox, it is more configurable than Firefox, and it doesn’t have a single feature that Firefox got just recently? Wow
As for open source… Yeah, I am sure you edit the source code and compile Firefox on your own all the time. And open source or not determines the quality of the actual program. Yes indeed! Ahh… Firefox fanboys
All at the same time as always, and yes, a UB.
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I love opera, unfortunately though it crashes when trying to view cnn video half the time
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re: 45.000 files
Opera stores it like this:
store\year\month\day\item1
store\year\month\day\item2
So it’ll be rather easy.
RDMS is for large sets of data you need to search through.
Oh… And why would you keep old RSS items? I’m sure some have a need to, But it seems overkill to me.
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I certainly hope not its got major stability issues
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“I love opera, unfortunately though it crashes when trying to view cnn video half the time”
That should have been fixed in the latest weekly: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/show.dml/300994
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I have tried Opera, and I might use it, except it doesn’t work with Ebay’s uploading picture service. Until this happens, I can’t use it. Why don’t they fix this?
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I’m not sure it’s ready to be released either. But hmm we’ll have to see what the finished product looks like on the day!
———————–
web design uk
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DD32:
Databases are, well, for data. A filesystem is for files, not for data items, such as e-mails or RSS items. Imagine what it would be like if every row in a financial database was its own file!
A RDBMS allows you to filter data based on a certain criteria. I’m not familiar with M2’s internals, but it looks like they’re inventing something similar on their own. Again, why, when there are small embedded databases available? I’d absolutely love if I could tell Opera’s RSS store “give me everything from 2006-03-01 to 2006-03-05 that contains the word Opera and is coming from .org and .com domains”. That would be possible (and fast) with SQLite or something similar.
I keep old RSS items because they’re very valuable, and many store things that aren’t available via Google cache or web.archive.org anymore. Two of them are like a changelog for a couple of intranet sites that replace their content and don’t archive the old one (don’t ask…).
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Opera is no doubt a well designed browser with a
tinysmall footprint. I really like the widgets which bring nice memories of Konfabulator (now yahoo widgets) when I was using Windows. But it needs a lot of polish to bring it at par with the desktop widgets one finds in OSX and Windows. I hope the soon to be released ver 9.0 will have a better collection of widgets sans the glitches.using
I’ve been ecstatic with it on Linux. Unless they do something remarkably new and necessary, I won’t be upgrading. Heck, I’m already some versions behind, using 8.51! You young’uns can wrangle with the bleeding edge, I’ll just trot along with my serial trackball mouse and Linux 2.4 kernel…
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Good luck to them, seriously. Playing with the Opera 9 betas has honestly made me think “hmmm, maybe I should ditch Firefox…”
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I hope they fix Flash on FreeBSD so that it works like in native Konqueror. It’s been asked many times without being addressed…
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Didn’t we go out of track here? We were execting some news for the eventual release.
I forgot to mention to Daniel that he could do us all a favour by posting the torrent download on the blog. I intend to do the same and hopefully we wouldn’t see the server meltdown, as happened earlier on.
@Chris, I d agree about the “annoyances” you mention, but well the configuration part has been since long, as far as I can remember. For the “fit to width” thingy, this is a life saver and so used to it now that can’t imagine life without it earlier on. These nifty utilties make Opera a charm.
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Daniel, any idea on what this marketing push might be ?
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using ff, but feeling excited about new opera
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Sohil, I have no word on it yet.
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Opera 9 is comming soon! Let’s be excited!
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any usefull features? scnr
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It Will BE Opera9 coming out. NOT DS.
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And it works very well on Vista beta!
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what time is it?
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The event is set for 10:30 PST Tuesday morning.
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Released on June 20th in the States? It now June 20th in Europe and Opera website hasnt changed yet!!
Im so excited about this wonderful release.
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Opera 9 final is out. At least 9.00.
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Sorry, i meant this Browser.
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Name, you’re free to post with any browser
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ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/900/int/
Opera 9 International Setup.exe
ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/900/en/
Opera 9 Classic Setup.exe
Opera 9 Eng Setup.exe
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In Europe we will have to wait for the release until evening. Why Seattle? oO Why not Hawaii??? oO
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Opera9 officially released
http://www.opera.com
http://my.opera.com/community/
Release Party at:
http://my.opera.com/welcome%20to%209/blog/show.dml/306342
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Jakub81, the US market is an important market to enter.
US is a good choice for the product launch as on first thought it is the best market to raise desktop revenue again (which halved after Opera ASA made desktop Opera free software).
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Just got the RSS feed, Opera 9 is out.
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2006/06/20/
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Yay, Opera 9 Released!
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For all the users of weeklies, the Opera 9 final is build 8501 (Windows), build 3447(Mac), build 344 (UNIX): in other words the last weeklies, so there is no point of install it.
However, Olli says: [quote]We will not stop work now that 9.0 is out and we do continue to fix issues. Stay tuned, the show goes on [/quote]
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How to set opera 9 as default in windows vista beta 2?? It doesn’t work
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i donwloaded the opera 9 and each time i open it, i get a drunkard singing a curse-ridden version of santa claus is coming to town….funny as hell, but not for the kiddies,and should be looked into. Im saving my version for laughs sake….but its really twisted!