Comments on: Opera’s Tim Altman talks about extension support in Opera, mail client enhancements, and more

By: Ilgaz

Ilgaz — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:04:44 +0000

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.

By: Jammyu

Jammyu — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 01:54:10 +0000

”
There will be something like that in a future version of Opera.
”

That makes me very pleased Thanks for the reply

By: IceArdor

IceArdor — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:55:31 +0000

Very good read. Thanks for finding it, Daniel.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:04:27 +0000

@ Jammyu,

There will be something like that in a future version of Opera.

By: Jammyu

Jammyu — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:59:03 +0000

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?

By: FyberOptic

FyberOptic — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:38:56 +0000

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.