Opera’s Tim Altman talks about extension support in Opera, mail client enhancements, and more
Published February 21st, 2007 11:59 AM EST By Daniel GoldmanI must have missed Tim’s blog post while I was on vacation last month, luckily I read about it on Pallab’s blog.
Tim makes some interesting points about whether Opera should include support for API extensions, the future of Opera’s mail, how Opera deals with Google services that don’t work in the browser, and more. It’s a good read. Check it out.
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You know, I’m pretty satisfied with Opera at the moment to not care if full-fledged extension support is ever added. UserJS is very powerful in the right hands.
That said, however, there is something that needs to be implemented in it; local storage. Widgets sort of have it, but I generally don’t need them for anything. I need the ability to store configuration or website data locally for more elaborate scripts to get some extra functionality. And considering the only manner of storage now is a cookie (limited in size, and transferred with every request), it makes UserJS much too restricted in that respect.
As for Firefox, I know he’s trying to play nice, but let’s face it: its open-source nature, packed full of extraneous libraries and code which isn’t optimized directly for any particular system, leave the browser incredibly bloated and slow by nature. So when you put extensions on top of an already slow engine, you end up with yet more bloat. As with most open-source products, sure, it has its advantages and uses, but not on my desktop as the default browser.
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Unfortunately, extensions also have some essential functionality for me. Ever try Google browser sync? http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/
It keeps bookmarks/history/cookies/passwords synchronized across every the browser for every computer/OS you use. Wouldn’t this be nice for a multi-platform browser like Opera?
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@ Jammyu,
There will be something like that in a future version of Opera.
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Very good read. Thanks for finding it, Daniel.
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”
There will be something like that in a future version of Opera.
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That makes me very pleased
Thanks for the reply
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It is funny that most of the popular Firefox extensions mimick Opera invented features like Mouse Gestures. Opera has already lots of functionality without any weird language, Opera should extend the pure HTML/SVG Widget support and look into ways to implement a “Scale down” version support of Widgets for Opera Mobile/Mini, again, pure HTML/SVG way of doing it.