Situation

I wanted a wireless nunchuck for the Wii.

Step 1

I bought a “Wii Kama Wireless Controller” by Nyko for $30 from Amazon.

It wouldn’t sync.

I called the toll-free number for tech support and was shoved to a voicemail box and told to leave a message and someone would call me back.

That was two weeks ago, and I’m still waiting.

Actually, I’m not. I returned it to Amazon.

Step 2

I saw the same product for the same price at Wal-Mart.

I bought another one. (Call me an idealist.)

I couldn’t get it to sync.

I was about to return it, but asked my wife to try.

She got it to sync.

The Review

It worked OK but not great.

I tried it with The Force Unleashed for Wii and there are several points in the game when it dropped the connection (it reconnects quickly, but when you’re in battle, every second counts).

The fatal flaw is that when you have to twist the nunchuck in a specific way to fight the bad guys (and gals), the Nyko controller just could not do it.

The Verdict

Returned.

Step 3

I purchased a “Wii Wireless Nunchuck Controller” by Intec for $40.

I can hear someone complain, “But, but, but…. that’s $10 MORE than the other one!”

Yes, it’s true. But (and this “but” is so big that Sir Mix-a-Lot would like to marry it) there’s one huge difference:

It’s rechargeable.

It comes with a simple USB charger which you can plug into the back of your Wii (I had totally forgotten there were USB ports back there) and it will recharge when not in use.

(The other one uses two AAA batteries.)

AND if you would like to use a non-slip “sleeve” for the Nunchuck, the recharge port can still be accessed with the sleeve on it.

The Review

It worked flawlessly.

It synced on the first try.

It worked fine with The Force Unleashed test mentioned above.

The Verdict

I’ll probably buy another one.

Note

As of 2008-10-16 there is only one review for the Intec unit at Amazon. Someone claims that they bought two and one stopped working two days after he bought it. To me, that falls in the category of “Stuff Happens”. Return it for a replacement (I believe shipping will be free) and try again. YMMV. Caveat emptor.

Minor Nit

The Intec unit flashes constantly when it has synced. The Nyko stopped flashing when the sync was successful. There’s no reason it ought to flash when everything is OK. A flashing light ought to mean that your attention is required. A solid light ought to mean “Everything is working fine.”

Update:

The main annoyance with it after a few days is that it does not always sync after it has been idle/asleep. The base (which connect to the Wii remote) doesn’t seem to start the sync process.

While I am a huge computer geek, I’m not a huge gamer, and haven’t been since the demise of the Atari 7800 (which I still own and love).

Lego My Wii!

We picked up a copy of Lego Star Wars for the Wii several months ago.

At first I was annoyed at how hard it is. And it is. I’ve yelled at the TV plenty of times. There are things I don’t think you can figure out without the excellent free Lego Star Wars FAQ/Walkthrough.

Save that page, bookmark it, learn it, love it.

Having said that, once you get used to how Lego Star Wars works, you can figure out the game, and it remains challenging and fun. I think it’s the most fun game that I’ve played on the Wii, and I’m strongly considering getting the Lego Indiana Jones and Batman games as well.

The Force Unleashed

The Force Unleashed has been on pre-order since the day it was announced. I watched, and re-watched, the trailer for the game several times. I was, as the kids say, “stoked”.

Last night I finished the game.

And it was… good.

But if you’ve got $50 to spend on just one Star Wars game for the Wii, get the Lego one.

Why?

1. Two Players:

   • The Force Unleashed has a “Duel Mode” but not “Dual Mode”. Which is to say that you can fight against one another, but not with one another. This seems a huge oversight for such a group-oriented platform as the Wii, especially when so many of these games have a multi-player mode.
   • Lego Star Wars lets two players fight together, and allows one player to drop out at any time. This means that Ethan and I can play together for awhile, and if I get a phone call or he gets bored, we can either pause it, or the other person can keep playing.

2. Saving Games

   • The Force Unleashed makes it far to easy to accidentally overwrite a saved game. I know, because it happened to me.
   • Lego Star Wars offers much better control.

3. Length of Game Play

   • Lego Star Wars takes a long time to complete, but once you’re done with it, you really feel like you’ve gotten a lot out of the game. And we’re still playing despite having completed it.

• The Force Unleashed took me a few days to finish, and during that time I had two frustrations: things that were too easy, and things that were too hard. The mindless drones (e.g. storm troopers) are easy to pick off, but there are a lot of them. The bigger enemies are really difficult to kill off, but once you figure out The Secrets, it actually gets to be fairly boring. I found myself thinking “OK, I know what I have to do to defeat this guy, but man it’s taking a long time.”

1. Overall Challenge
   • Lego Star Wars is hard. Sometimes maddeningly so. Without the guide mentioned above, I never would have finished it. But

• The Force Unleashed is hard, but a lot less enjoyable so. It’s not so much a matter of figuring things out as it is “Keep doing these things over and over again until you win.”

Force Unleashed Secrets Unleashed

1. When fighting major enemy, you will see either a nunchuck or Wii remote on the screen with 4 arrows (up/down/left/right). When you see that shake the holy hell out of the one shown and only the one shown. If you get it wrong, you will not cause as much damage.

2. Do not die. Major enemies will regain a bunch of strength if you do. This is probably the most frustrating part of the game, as they seem to get a disproportionate amount of their strength back.

3. In order not to die, use the “Force Dash”. A lot. Get behind stuff and then hit it. This is “the only way” to win. Also, when you are thrown or knocked off your feet, press “B” repeatedly and turn it into a jump.

4. When you are low on strength, be sure to run around and check the corners of whatever space you are in (room, field, whatever) for little red/orange canisters which will renew your strength.

5. Build up your “Force Lightning” strength by buying it in the “Force Powers”. Let’s you do damage from afar.

I’m not saying this because I think it’s a bad review of Opera (it is) but because it is a bad review of all 3 browsers. How bad? If this review was a high school report I would give the reviewer an “F” and send a note home for a parent teacher conference and possibly a drug test.

First of all: comparing Opera 9 final to Firefox 2 Beta and IE7 beta? Hello? What’s next, a comparison of a gourmet meal with raw McDonald’s ingredients?

It even started out strangely with this quote: “So, three new browsers in the same year, after no action for a half decade.” (citation). Um, what? 2 of those new browsers have been churning out new versions pretty much constantly. It’s only IE which has been idle for 5 years.

Then there’s the chart at Features at a glance has apparently been updated since people started pointing out mistakes on the feedback page but it still lists Opera as not having Anti-Phishing features.

Um, excuse me but… Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Opera introduced anti-phishing capabilities with the Opera 8 release over a damn year ago. I believe that Opera was the first major browser to introduce this feature.

Then there’s “Built-in search with multiple engine choice” which lists “Yes” for all 3 browsers. Ok, great, but Opera 9 will let you click on any search engine box on any website and easily add that to your list of available browsers. That’s a different league than anything else I’ve seen any other browser do.

Then there’s this one: “One-Click Button to add Favorites: 1) Firefox2: No. 2) IE: Yes. 3) Opera 9: No.”

First of all, talk about solving a problem that no one has. Because for years no one has been able to figure out how to bookmark. Thank God that IE7 has finally figured this one out! Maybe next time they can help us help me figure out how to blink my eyes.

“Can remember open tabs for next session” Opera and IE: Yes, Firefox2: No. Except that it can. I know almost nothing about Firefox 2, but even I knew that it could do this. And if I didn’t I could have, oh, I don’t know, maybe used Google which led me to Tweak Firefox 2.0’s Session Restore Feature which explains the 5 step process (really 4):

1. Start Firefox. (Ok these are apparently idiot-proof instructions)
2. In the Address Bar type “about:config” and press Enter.
3. Right-Click and select New->Boolean.
4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter “browser.sessionstore.resume_session” (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
5. Select “True” from the box and press OK again.

Good lord, I just posted a Firefox tweak… Forget the Middle East situation, that may be the sign of the apocalypse.

OK, so there’s two major factual mistakes: 1 for Opera, and 1 for Firefox. Failure to do basic fact checking.

“Macintosh/Linux version” Obviously IE does not have this. So advantage to Opera and Firefox, right? Sure, but how about the fact that IE7 won’t run on anything less than Windows XP? So how about revising the chart “Macintosh/Linux/Windows 98/ME/2000” and leaving the chart as-is: Firefox/Opera: Yes. IE: No. See this reporting thing is supposed to involve getting beyond the obvious.

Folks who know me well know that my biggest complaint about using MacOpera (compared to WinOpera) is that all of the installations of Opera will share the same preferences.

WinOpera users can install separate versions of Opera and have completely separate preferences, which is a huge boon for beta testing, especially because you can have more than one version of Opera running at the same time.

A MacOpera using friend recently directed my attention to rooSwitch, a $15 utility which basically allows you to have an unlimited number of profiles for the various Mac apps that you use.

This solves part of the problem; namely, it lets me have different profiles. However it does not solve the bigger problem of letting me run two different versions of MacOpera at the same time with different preferences.

But some progress is better than no progress, so I’m testing it out, and so far it’s working OK once you tweak rooSwitch just a little bit.

The basic idea is that rooSwitch will look at the various preference files/folders which an app (such as Opera) uses, and makes a copy of them. Then if you totally bork your installation, you have a safety net to go back to.

rooSwitch told me that these were the folders and files which Opera uses:

~/Library/Application Support/Opera
~/Library/Caches/Opera
~/Library/Preferences/com.operasoftware.Opera.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences

Update:

Note (2006/07/13): this section original article has been edited from its original form as the rest of it it referred to a process of working around a bug which no longer exists as of the 1.0.3 release.

The developer contacted me about the issues I brought up in my original post and has issued a new version 1.0.3 (360) which fixes both of the previous issues mentioned below less than 24 hours after I posted them here. I have confirmed that both of the issues are fixed and that the update process was dead simple (whereas most apps send you to a website to download the latest version, rooSwitch updated itself, unpacked the update, and all I had to do was click and wait (not very long).

Here’s what happened when I updated rooSwitch:






(I clicked on the “Restart rooSwitch” one too quick to get a screenshot of it!)

Ah… Perfection…. Here is what it looks like when you create a new blank profile:

I should point out again (I mentioned this in the comments below) that I didn’t even draw his attention to this issue, although I had meant to — oops! So $15 from my AdSense budget from this site will go towards a rooSwitch license very soon!

And now back to the original article, already in progress….

Final note for the easily annoyed

If you find the confirmation dialog annoying:

Then go to the preferences dialog and turn it off, as shown here.

Why Blockbuster Online instead of the better-known Netflix?

Simple: With Blockbuster Online I get a coupon every week for a free in-store rental. Rentals are about $4.50/movie. If we use all 4 of the coupons (and so far we have) it pays of the cost of Blockbuster Online. 1

The turn-around speed has been pretty good. I get an email from them when something is received, and later that day another one goes out, and it is usually here in 2-3 days. About all I can say against it is that it appears that if movies are received back on a Saturday, nothing happens until sometime Monday.

There are a couple of up-shots to the whole deal. You’ve probably heard about the whole “End of Late Fees” thing that Blockbuster has been promoting for awhile now. You’ve probably also heard that it isn’t so much that they stop charging you late fees, it’s that you get to keep the movie longer, but if you keep it too long you effectively buy it from them at a price that they set. 2

Sidestepping the whole debate, the fact is that the price you pay for to buy the movie you don’t return (call it “$X”) takes into account the amount of your initial rental fee (call it $4.50). $X of course changes depending on what movie it is, otherwise I wouldn’t have called it $X. But if you have ever rented a movie and thought: “Wow, that’s pretty cool, I wish I had bought it (generally $15-20) rather than renting it. If you buy it after you rent it, you’ve spent extra money ($4.50 for the rental plus $15-20 to buy it). You could wait and see if it ends up on the “Previously Viewed” table and hope you get there before anyone else, but who has that sort of free time?

Well we’ve already bought one movie that we rented using the in-store coupon. So the $4.50 that we saved on the initial rental then gets applied to the cost of buying it.

Not a bad deal. Of course it depends on the movie, as I said before (remember $X?) and my guess is that you will get it for a better price if it is a newer release and they are likely to get stuck with a bunch of copies of (what do they tdo with 87 copies of The Ringer that they guaranteed to have in stock after the 34 people who actually wanted to see the movie have rented it?)

This works out for Blockbuster, of course, because we peruse the “Previously Viewed” racks when we go into the store and have bought several (yesterday’s big find was The Incredibles which is currently Ethan’s favorite movie).

It also works out for me because: A) there are a lot of movies which never make it to Gallipolis; B) even if they do make it here, we rarely get out to the movies, and C) I like a lot of movies that Tracey doesn’t. So, for example, I’ve seen both Saw and Saw II (and enjoyed both).

However, the problem is that there are a lot of movies out there that I know I’ve never heard of, and going by random reviews has not worked well on a few occasions, namely this one (yes, I get why it’s supposed to be funny, but with a few exceptions, the movie wasn’t) and that one which was so bad that I really think it might have been the first movie to go from “So godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity.” to “Proof that Jesus died in vain.” (Both of those quotes are lifted directly from Mr Cranky.com which is always a delightful place to go after you’ve seen a movie you didn’t like. He actually liked it more than I did and deemed it only “Consistently annoying” — high praise indeed!)

Actually, Mulholland Drive (which is the 2nd movie above, in case you don’t know how to figure that out) reminded me of Superman…. no, not the new one, one of the old ones. Remember when Lois Lane died and Superman is so upset that he flies around the earth so fast that it spins the other way, and therefore (wait for it) causes time to travel backwards? (Brilliant!)

Well, after watching Mulholland Drive, I wished Superman would come spin the world back around on its axis so that he could prevent me from ever being born. Yes, that’s how bad it was. I have no one but myself to blame. I believed some review I read somewhere which said that if you liked Memento then you’d like Mulholland Drive. (Actually I take back what I said before, I would like Superman to prevent that person from ever having been born… is that wrong?) Well I really enjoyed Memento because like any really good movie, it makes you want to watch it again immediately so you can know at the beginning what you don’t find out until the end. Some great movies (12 Monkeys, Shawshank Redemption, The Game, and Se7en, to name a few which come to mind right away) make you want to see them again, but it’s never the same because “the secret” is out and the suspense is gone. The next best thing is to watch it again with someone who has never seen it and watch their expression as it unfolds, and marvel as you watch their Movie Virginity get swept away…

(By the way, don’t mistake Mulholland Drive for Arlington Road which was also a good suspense-but-not-scary movie with Tim Robbins, Jeff Bridges, and Joan Cusack. That’s a good movie too.)

Ok, where is all of this going? Well, I want you to feed my Blockbuster queue. Suggest movies that you love, especially (but not only!) ones that you think probably were not seen by a lot of people. (Extra credit if you link to IMDB.com.) Note: I will briefly turn off the need for you to be a TypeKey user to post comments here, at least for a few days.

It doesn’t need to be some fancy art-house black-and-white sub-titled tragedy about how crappy the world is, nor should you prevent yourself from suggesting popular movies that might have been overlooked, such as Playing By Heart (a chick-flick, but a good one) and Sneakers which seemed to go right under everyone’s radar but I thought was pretty good.

ALSO feel free to post about the movie that everyone else loved but you hated. For example: Titanic which was only good because what’s-his-name died at the end…. DiCaprio… who was also in the oh-God-please-let-me-take-an-ice-pick-to-my-brain-this-is-so-dull Aviator and Gangs of New York. They were almost as bad as my least-favorite of all-time movie Conspiracy Theory which I am convinced had a completely different ending when it was originally written, but was corrupted much the way that the sub-plot movie in Short Cuts which starts off as a movie script where the lead actress (“Who must be played by a nobody!”) dies after the lead actor (“Who must be played by a nobody!”) gets made into a movie where Bruce Willis eventually saves Julia Roberts “because the test marketing showed people hated the other ending”). Conspiracy Theory could have turned the audience on its ear by making Mel Gibson the unexpected bad guy, or by killing off his character (or both!) but in the end it chickened out and went for the safe Hollywood ending.

So, let me have it… what are your favorite and least favorite movies? Feed my queue!

Footnotes:

1. Plus, I’m sick of companies which sue to keep a monopoly on an idea. Patents are not supposed to be anti-competitive, or at least shouldn’t be, IMO, and in this case, as the customer “MO” is all that matters. If Netflix can sue Blockbuster over rentals through the mail, why can’t Blockbuster [or whoever “invented” the idea] sue Netflix over the idea of renting movies rather than buying them?! ↩

2. NJ sued Blockbuster over that one (printer-friendly) and I guess they might be right that it’s “deceptive” but I don’t know anyone of sound-mind over the age of disaffected college students who didn’t figure out that there was some fine-print somewhere. I love how Blockbuster has new ads where someone says “Great! I can keep it forever!” and someone else says “I think you’re a little unclear on the meaning of rental” or some such. ↩

The author noted one problem, which I believe is easily solved:

But the biggest problem I’ve encountered with Opera is sometimes it does not redraw the browser window when you are scrolling. Restarting it clears the problem but it does return in time. (Yet again I appreciated Opera remembering which pages I had open) Without this problem, Opera would have been my favorite browser by a wide margin.

The simplest fix for this is to go to the View → Toolbars → Customize, as shown here:

Then click on the “Skin” tab and uncheck the “Enable special effects” as shown here:

That should solve the problem (which should be fixed in the next version of Opera). Turning off Special Effects will have minimal effect, most notably the Opera’s Notifications will appear and disappear more quickly.

Also rather than restarting you might want to try refreshing (which is different from reloading) by going to Tools → Advanced → Reload from cache. That may solve the problem as well. (See Reload vs Refresh for more.)

BTW the cool little circle mouse highlighting was done using the nifty freeware program Mouseposé.

A few days after the MacWorld review Arstechnica reviewed Mac RSS readers and left out Opera completely with the head-scratching reason that they decided to focus on Mac-only readers. Apparently now we want to penalize software companies for support Mac and other operating systems (not just Windows but Linux and FreeBSD and Solaris)? That seems strange to me.

So it was a frustrating week. Since we had been told that there would be “an updated review, coming soon” I decided to wait before responding more publicly than I did on the MacWorld forum.

So finally MacWorld released the updated review. Well, “review” is probably overstating it. This is a 174 word review-ette, or perhaps we should call it a “training review”. Maybe it hopes to be a real review when it grows up. By contrast, OmniWeb had well over 200 words dedicated to it as part of the original “Browser Roundup” article. So a stand-alone review of Opera merits fewer words than another browser was given as part of a larger review? That’s all the space and time Opera merits after having released its browser for free? What’s worse is that the standalone review is little more than some slightly reworded comments from the original article with “but hey, it’s free!” tagged on. And they raised the review from 3.5 mice to 4.

Sounds like MacWorld doesn’t have not a lot of interest in spending any time looking at MacOpera. Which is too bad, because it deserves better than this.

(I encourage you to read both of the reviews on your own before reading further. They are linked above. Note that they will open in new windows/tabs depending on how you have your browser configured. My apologies to anyone who is offended by this. You will have to close the windows rather than using the “Back” button to come back to this page.)

So let’s look at what MacWorld has to say about Opera, and how much of it is valid. First, let’s look at the relevant part of the original review:

Opera is the only browser reviewed here that comes in both a free and a for-pay version ($39). (OmniWeb costs $30 up front and has no free version.) The free version of Opera sports little, slightly annoying advertisements at the top of the browser. When you pay for Opera, the only thing that changes is that the ad banner at the top of the application disappears; paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features that the other browsers don’t provide.

Ok, this made me really upset. Hanlon’s Razor would lead me to say that, at best this is just shoddy writing, and at worst it is terrible reporting. I first read this as “paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features which you don’t get by using the free version. But that is not what he wrote. He wrote “paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features that the other browsers don’t provide.”

That is incorrect. As in erroneous, untrue, and ficticious. That is shoddy reporting.

Let’s examine that more closely. At its core, the author is saying “You have to pay for Opera, but you don’t get any features in Opera which aren’t available in other browsers.” That is completely false. Either the author is ignorant or uninformed. Either way, it reflects poorly in MacWorld to publish such a lie, and a retraction ought to be issued and a revision ought to be posted.

I’m going to ignore the part of the sentence which referred to “paying for” Opera because Opera is now completely free. (But even when Opera was originally reviewed, the statement was untrue because paying for Opera did not unlock any of these features, they were all available in the sponsored version.) Opera does offer you features other browsers don’t provide. To say anything else is a lie. Opera offers features such as spatial navigation, sidebars, F12 access to quick preferences, IRC chat support, sessions, RSS support, Usenet support, multiple customized stylesheets, mouse gestures, and a highly configurable user interface…to name but a few.

Perhaps the author feels that the features that Opera provides (which other browsers do not) are not significant enough to merit paying for. But that is not what he wrote.

How in the world did the author say that Opera does not offer any features that other browsers don’t provide? Sure you can find some of those features in other browsers (OmniWeb, for example, offers a feature like sessions, but Safari and Firefox do not). This isn’t some random blog posting, it’s a MacWorld review, and I think we ought to expect that they will get their basic facts right. They did not. A correction should be issued in the print version of the magazine and on the web page (HTML provides specific tags for updating an existing web page).

Let’s move on… From the original article:

Opera has several strange interface quirks that kept me guessing. For example, pressing Command-T brings up a new tabbed window in the other browsers, but in Opera the same key combination brings up a bookmark window.

When you configure the program to block pop-up windows, it pops up its own little windows telling you when a pop-up has been blocked. Although you can turn off this preference, many such oddities that mar the browsing experience appear from time to time.

From the revised article:

Opera does still have some interface quirks. For example, all the other browsers we looked at let you press command-T to open a new tab, while the same set of keystrokes in Opera opens a bookmark window. And in Opera 8.0.2, there were pop-up windows that told you the browser had blocked a pop-up window. (The coincidence is not lost on us.) Those annoying notices are now gone.

A minor browser-history lesson: While Opera may not have been the first browser to introduce tabs, it has had them for far longer than any of the other reviewed browser. It has used cmd + T for “Bookmark Page” since before most of the other browsers ever existed. That said, new users will probably not know (nor care) about that history. Fair enough.

But he failed to mention that Opera’s command for a “new window” is cmd + n which is the same command that you find in just about every other Mac application to open a new window or new page. It should take about 0.0005 seconds to get used to this. And if you can’t get used to it, about 30 seconds worth of effort can remap the key to cmd + T. Curiously, the review talks about how configurable Opera is, but fails to mention this simple example.

Conversely, an internet shortcut that I have grown accustomed to is F5 to reload the current page. Safari does not include that shortcut. And there is no way to add it. So why isn’t Safari marked down for failing to include a “standard” shortcut and failing to include any way to add it?

From the new article, redux:

And in Opera 8.0.2, there were pop-up windows that told you the browser had blocked a pop-up window. (The coincidence is not lost on us.) Those annoying notices are now gone.

First of all, the word the author was looking for is “irony” not “coincidence”…. the irony was not lost on him. There was nothing coincidental about the notifications, they were an intentional way of informing the user that a popup window had been blocked.

(By the way, if you think I’m being picky, I’m not. This is basic English vocabulary. Something more advanced would be to point out that “The coincidence is not lost on us” should be “The coincidence was not lost on us” but that’s a common mistake which most people would not notice and which is not confusing.)

Also note that the Google Toolbar and Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP SP2 also includes notifications when popups are blocked. So tell me again why Opera is marked down for offering the same feature as other browsers even though it offered a way to turn them off?

Furthermore, the implication of the criticism was this: “Opera is stopping a popup and responding with a popup, isn’t that stupid?” No, it isn’t. First of all, the reason that people hate pop-up/pop-under ads is that they either take over (pop up) or lurk in the background (pop under). Opera’s notification window did neither. It simply briefly appeared and then disappeared. Anyone with any browsing experience knows that there are times when popup windows convey important information, such as offers for free shipping at some (admittedly poorly designed) sites.

Opera defaulted to letting the user something had happened and Opera also includes a way to open blocked popups without having to reload the page and disable the popup stopper…another feature unique to Opera as far as I know. The screenshot even shows you that the notification offers to let you open the blocked popup and they failed to mention it. (Opera is also the only browser which will let you re-open windows which you have closed… another unique feature which was ignored. This can be a real time saver when you accidentally close a window.

From the new article:

As we stated in our comparative review, Opera includes several customizable search tools and shortcuts to help make Web browsing easier.

Really? Here’s what the original review said:

On a positive note, Opera is highly configurable, even allowing you to create your own shortcuts for search sites. So typing G (the shortcut for Google) and hogwash in the address field will execute a Google search for hogwash and display your search results.

and later the article noted:

Pros: Highly configurable; useful keyword shortcuts for search sites.

I will resist the urge to suggest any irony about the fact that the author of the original article chose the word “hogwash” and I will let the reader make their own connection between the review and the word “hogwash” if they so choose.

What is true? MacWorld’s original article did not state that Opera included several customizable search tools and shortcuts. MacWorld’s original article said that you could create your own shortcuts. Notice the difference? The original review implies that you have to add them youself, rather than mentioning that there are several built-in and you can add your own. They only mention one of the default searches (Google, which is present in all other browsers and probably easily ignored by a reader who would likely think “Big deal I can already search Google with my current browser”). The article completely ignored the fact that Opera includes preconfigured searches for Amazon.com, eBay, Download.com, Google Groups, Google News, Dictionary, Encyclopedia, currency conversion, and several translation features…to name a few.

MacWorld has shoddily reported on what it previously shoddily reported.

From the original article:

That said, should you pay for a browser when many are available for free? When it comes to Opera, the answer is no.

From the new article:

In our earlier Web browsers roundup, we stated that Opera 8.0.2 was not worth spending $39 to remove the annoying ads that came with the free version. But Opera Software has changed its tune: There is no longer a paid and a free version. At the low, low cost of zilch, Opera is a very good browser.

Actually MacWorld had said that it wasn’t worth $39 to remove what it called “slightly” annoying ads (the original article also completely failed to mention that Opera was already free for academic users ’ which has historically been a significant portion of Mac userbase ’ but that is now water under the bridge).

“Why are you so bothered by this?”

I’m sure many people who have read this are wondering why I am getting so upset about this. I should probably reiterate that I do not work for Opera or get any sort of compensation from them at all.

What bothers me is that there were so many things ignored in the article which I though were important. To name a few:

MacWorld also fell into the trap of listing Safari 2.0 as “free” when it only comes with Tiger. (Windows reviewers consistently make the same mistake when listing Internet Explorer as “free” but fail to mention that only Windows XP users can use the latest version.)

OmniWeb is well known for being slow and crash prone. Even its biggest fans will tell you that. Yet nowhere did that appear in the article. Now I have a registered copy of OmniWeb and think it may be the innovative and user friendly browser out there (OmniWeb does a better job implementing some features which Opera has had for a long time, such as the built-in searches and Workspaces, and the idea of thumbnail tabs is brilliant.) The author of the article clearly is not very familiar with OmniWeb either. This lack of familiarity was also echoed in this sentence:

The only problem with OmniWeb is that it may not be compatible with some Web sites because it’s not based on the Mozilla or the Internet Explorer engine. This can be inconvenient.

What the author failed to mention is that OmniWeb is based on the same rendering engine as Safari (WebCore). Safari has done an excellent job at achieving compatibility with a large number of websites, something which is sure to improve now that WebCore is open source. OmniWeb’s compatibility will certainly continue to improve.

As for “the Internet Explorer engine” I have no idea why that comment was made. Internet Explorer for Mac is dead, and the engine was never available to other browsers. Moreover, OmniWeb is now recommended by some sites which actively discourage people from using IE:Mac (AAA being one notable example I am aware of).

But what really bothers me the most is that the entire piece reads like it was written by a Firefox supporter, but is passed off as an objective evaluation of each browser. The author is clearly much more familiar with Firefox, spends a great deal of time talking about Firefox’s abilities, including saying that

Mozilla’s Firefox and Camino are the most versatile and extensible browsers in this review.

As long as you are willing to depend on 3rd party extensions. Opera will let you easily configure its user interface and customize its features, such as mouse gestures, which are only available with add-on software for Firefox.

[Firefox and Camino] are designed to accept third-party plug-ins, or extensions, which can add features, functionality, and different looks (or skins) to the program. But there are many more plug-ins available for Firefox than for Camino.

In fact, these extensions are what make Firefox so great.

There is no mention of the fact that extensions may not be available when a new version of Firefox is. Many Firefox fans love to talk about how rapid the development is, but when the new beta (1.5) was released, all of my extensions stopped working, and it took over a week for new versions to be released. Some extensions may conflict with one another.

To some that is not a problem, to me it is. The point is that the reviewer failed to mention this as a problem, even though it is well known to the Firefox community. Firefox is also often considered to be slower than Opera and Safari. Again, no mention of that.

Firefox recently made the news for several significant security holes. Again this was not mentioned in the article.

Let me make it clear: I have no problem with someone preferring Firefox. I like Firefox. I have it installed and find it handy to have around. I am glad it exists and glad that it is taking marketshare away from Internet Explorer on Windows. I am glad for what it is doing to raise awareness of alternative browsers. That is not my objection.

My objection is that the author is clearly a Firefox fan and wrote an article best described as “Why Firefox is better than your browser” and MacWorld sold it as an objective review of Mac browsers. It is not.

While most browsers lay a Find window right on top of the Web page you’re trying to search, Firefox simply brings up a little Find box at the bottom of the page.

The author makes it sound like Firefox is the only browser with that feature. This is exactly how Opera’s Inline Find works. And Inline Find has been around for ages, longer (I believe) than Firefox has had the feature. Opera also includes a feature to search just for text found in links (press . to search for text and , to search for link text only).

I have been a MacWorld subscriber since before I owned my first Mac (I started getting it when I bought my first iPod). I have come to expect good, neutral reporting and software evaluations. This article fell far short of that rather modest expectation. I’m a Mac user and an Opera lover, which puts me on the fringe of the fringe; but I have high expectations of the software that I use and believe that both my operating system and my browser are the right choice for a large majority of people, even if a large majority of people see no reason to change what they are already using.

By all means, write a critique of Opera which includes Opera’s shortcomings. List the things you would like to see changed or fixed. I’ll even help! I have a list myself. The difference is that if I were writing an article about Opera, I would freely talk about shortcomings and bugs (you can find several examples on this site). If you are a Firefox user writing an article about browsers, I expect you to do the same. In fact, credible journalism would suggest that you make an extra effort not to let your personal views influence your review. This author did not do that, and MacWorld’s editors didn’t correct it before publication. The review was filled with subjective evaluations as well as several completely false and/or misleading statements.

The initial review fell far short, and the 174-word barely-more-than-copy-and-paste revision (that took two weeks to put together?) left me feeling that MacWorld had chosen its favorite browser before the review ever began. I still believe that MacWorld ought to amend the original review to make it more clear everywhere that price is mentioned that Opera is now free, and ought to correct the factual errors and misleading statements which I have pointed out.

A final word about ads

I am extremely glad that Opera is now ad-free because I am so sick of the hypocrisy of sites like MacWorld (and CNet and others) who appeared morally offended by the presence of discreet, contextual, relevant ads in Opera while their own website displayed numerous, unrelated graphical ads. Even MacWorld’s so-called “printer friendly” pages contain multiple ads, including animated GIFs. Apparenly these websites believe that ads are only offensive if they are paying someone else’s bills.

A final word

Let me also say that I am not meaning to make this personal about Jeffery Battersby (the author of the original article). I have no doubt that he’s a good guy with his heart in the right place. He loves Firefox, I love Opera. We’d probably get along well if we met on the street, after all we both love Macs. I have enjoyed his previous articles and found his review of Pages to be spot-on. I take issue with what he wrote (much like I get chastized when I get something wrong about Firefox) but I find much greater fault with MacWorld’s editors for not doing a better job as editors in reviewing this article and giving it a more accurate title. I hope that Jeffery will not take this as a personal attack, although I know first-hand it is hard to read criticism of one’s writing without taking it personally. I think he made some honest mistakes here in his zeal to talk about Firefox. I know what that’s like and have been guilty of it myself. MacWorld should have stepped up and helped him craft it into something better. That’s what I expect of editors. Really my main complaint boils down to the fact that the author was not nearly familiar enough with Opera and Firefox’s shortcomings were ignored.

(Comments are currently open. Rational replies with evidence of effort toward proper spelling and punctuation will be published [i.e. all lowercase without punctuation comments will be deleted]. Personal attacks will be ignored. I’m not looking for Firefox vs Opera fodder. Corrections and disagreements are welcomed. This page may be edited if further review indicates I have gotten something wrong or have written something misleading … which is the same standard I hold MacWorld to.)

A few days after the MacWorld review Arstechnica reviewed Mac RSS readers and left out Opera completely with the head-scratching reason that they decided to focus on Mac-only readers. Apparently now we want to penalize software companies for support Mac and other operating systems (not just Windows but Linux and FreeBSD and Solaris)? That seems strange to me.

So it was a frustrating week. Since we had been told that there would be “an updated review, coming soon” I decided to wait before responding more publicly than I did on the MacWorld forum.

So finally MacWorld released the updated review. Well, “review” is probably overstating it. This is a 174 word review-ette, or perhaps we should call it a “training review”. Maybe it hopes to be a real review when it grows up. By contrast, OmniWeb had well over 200 words dedicated to it as part of the original “Browser Roundup” article. So a stand-alone review of Opera merits fewer words than another browser was given as part of a larger review? That’s all the space and time Opera merits after having released its browser for free? What’s worse is that the standalone review is little more than some slightly reworded comments from the original article with “but hey, it’s free!” tagged on. And they raised the review from 3.5 mice to 4.

Sounds like MacWorld doesn’t have not a lot of interest in spending any time looking at MacOpera. Which is too bad, because it deserves better than this.

(I encourage you to read both of the reviews on your own before reading further. They are linked above. Note that they will open in new windows/tabs depending on how you have your browser configured. My apologies to anyone who is offended by this. You will have to close the windows rather than using the “Back” button to come back to this page.)

So let’s look at what MacWorld has to say about Opera, and how much of it is valid. First, let’s look at the relevant part of the original review:

Opera is the only browser reviewed here that comes in both a free and a for-pay version ($39). (OmniWeb costs $30 up front and has no free version.) The free version of Opera sports little, slightly annoying advertisements at the top of the browser. When you pay for Opera, the only thing that changes is that the ad banner at the top of the application disappears; paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features that the other browsers don’t provide.

Ok, this made me really upset. Hanlon’s Razor would lead me to say that, at best this is just shoddy writing, and at worst it is terrible reporting. I first read this as “paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features which you don’t get by using the free version. But that is not what he wrote. He wrote “paying for Opera doesn’t gain you any features that the other browsers don’t provide.”

That is incorrect. As in erroneous, untrue, and ficticious. That is shoddy reporting.

Let’s examine that more closely. At its core, the author is saying “You have to pay for Opera, but you don’t get any features in Opera which aren’t available in other browsers.” That is completely false. Either the author is ignorant or uninformed. Either way, it reflects poorly in MacWorld to publish such a lie, and a retraction ought to be issued and a revision ought to be posted.

I’m going to ignore the part of the sentence which referred to “paying for” Opera because Opera is now completely free. (But even when Opera was originally reviewed, the statement was untrue because paying for Opera did not unlock any of these features, they were all available in the sponsored version.) Opera does offer you features other browsers don’t provide. To say anything else is a lie. Opera offers features such as spatial navigation, sidebars, F12 access to quick preferences, IRC chat support, sessions, RSS support, Usenet support, multiple customized stylesheets, mouse gestures, and a highly configurable user interface…to name but a few.

Perhaps the author feels that the features that Opera provides (which other browsers do not) are not significant enough to merit paying for. But that is not what he wrote.

How in the world did the author say that Opera does not offer any features that other browsers don’t provide? Sure you can find some of those features in other browsers (OmniWeb, for example, offers a feature like sessions, but Safari and Firefox do not). This isn’t some random blog posting, it’s a MacWorld review, and I think we ought to expect that they will get their basic facts right. They did not. A correction should be issued in the print version of the magazine and on the web page (HTML provides specific tags for updating an existing web page).

Let’s move on… From the original article:

Opera has several strange interface quirks that kept me guessing. For example, pressing Command-T brings up a new tabbed window in the other browsers, but in Opera the same key combination brings up a bookmark window.

When you configure the program to block pop-up windows, it pops up its own little windows telling you when a pop-up has been blocked. Although you can turn off this preference, many such oddities that mar the browsing experience appear from time to time.

From the revised article:

Opera does still have some interface quirks. For example, all the other browsers we looked at let you press command-T to open a new tab, while the same set of keystrokes in Opera opens a bookmark window. And in Opera 8.0.2, there were pop-up windows that told you the browser had blocked a pop-up window. (The coincidence is not lost on us.) Those annoying notices are now gone.

A minor browser-history lesson: While Opera may not have been the first browser to introduce tabs, it has had them for far longer than any of the other reviewed browser. It has used cmd + T for “Bookmark Page” since before most of the other browsers ever existed. That said, new users will probably not know (nor care) about that history. Fair enough.

But he failed to mention that Opera’s command for a “new window” is cmd + n which is the same command that you find in just about every other Mac application to open a new window or new page. It should take about 0.0005 seconds to get used to this. And if you can’t get used to it, about 30 seconds worth of effort can remap the key to cmd + T. Curiously, the review talks about how configurable Opera is, but fails to mention this simple example.

Conversely, an internet shortcut that I have grown accustomed to is F5 to reload the current page. Safari does not include that shortcut. And there is no way to add it. So why isn’t Safari marked down for failing to include a “standard” shortcut and failing to include any way to add it?

From the new article, redux:

And in Opera 8.0.2, there were pop-up windows that told you the browser had blocked a pop-up window. (The coincidence is not lost on us.) Those annoying notices are now gone.

First of all, the word the author was looking for is “irony” not “coincidence”…. the irony was not lost on him. There was nothing coincidental about the notifications, they were an intentional way of informing the user that a popup window had been blocked.

(By the way, if you think I’m being picky, I’m not. This is basic English vocabulary. Something more advanced would be to point out that “The coincidence is not lost on us” should be “The coincidence was not lost on us” but that’s a common mistake which most people would not notice and which is not confusing.)

Also note that the Google Toolbar and Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP SP2 also includes notifications when popups are blocked. So tell me again why Opera is marked down for offering the same feature as other browsers even though it offered a way to turn them off?

Furthermore, the implication of the criticism was this: “Opera is stopping a popup and responding with a popup, isn’t that stupid?” No, it isn’t. First of all, the reason that people hate pop-up/pop-under ads is that they either take over (pop up) or lurk in the background (pop under). Opera’s notification window did neither. It simply briefly appeared and then disappeared. Anyone with any browsing experience knows that there are times when popup windows convey important information, such as offers for free shipping at some (admittedly poorly designed) sites.

Opera defaulted to letting the user something had happened and Opera also includes a way to open blocked popups without having to reload the page and disable the popup stopper…another feature unique to Opera as far as I know. The screenshot even shows you that the notification offers to let you open the blocked popup and they failed to mention it. (Opera is also the only browser which will let you re-open windows which you have closed… another unique feature which was ignored. This can be a real time saver when you accidentally close a window.

From the new article:

As we stated in our comparative review, Opera includes several customizable search tools and shortcuts to help make Web browsing easier.

Really? Here’s what the original review said:

On a positive note, Opera is highly configurable, even allowing you to create your own shortcuts for search sites. So typing G (the shortcut for Google) and hogwash in the address field will execute a Google search for hogwash and display your search results.

and later the article noted:

Pros: Highly configurable; useful keyword shortcuts for search sites.

I will resist the urge to suggest any irony about the fact that the author of the original article chose the word “hogwash” and I will let the reader make their own connection between the review and the word “hogwash” if they so choose.

What is true? MacWorld’s original article did not state that Opera included several customizable search tools and shortcuts. MacWorld’s original article said that you could create your own shortcuts. Notice the difference? The original review implies that you have to add them youself, rather than mentioning that there are several built-in and you can add your own. They only mention one of the default searches (Google, which is present in all other browsers and probably easily ignored by a reader who would likely think “Big deal I can already search Google with my current browser”). The article completely ignored the fact that Opera includes preconfigured searches for Amazon.com, eBay, Download.com, Google Groups, Google News, Dictionary, Encyclopedia, currency conversion, and several translation features…to name a few.

MacWorld has shoddily reported on what it previously shoddily reported.

From the original article:

That said, should you pay for a browser when many are available for free? When it comes to Opera, the answer is no.

From the new article:

In our earlier Web browsers roundup, we stated that Opera 8.0.2 was not worth spending $39 to remove the annoying ads that came with the free version. But Opera Software has changed its tune: There is no longer a paid and a free version. At the low, low cost of zilch, Opera is a very good browser.

Actually MacWorld had said that it wasn’t worth $39 to remove what it called “slightly” annoying ads (the original article also completely failed to mention that Opera was already free for academic users ’ which has historically been a significant portion of Mac userbase ’ but that is now water under the bridge).

“Why are you so bothered by this?”

I’m sure many people who have read this are wondering why I am getting so upset about this. I should probably reiterate that I do not work for Opera or get any sort of compensation from them at all.

What bothers me is that there were so many things ignored in the article which I though were important. To name a few:

MacWorld also fell into the trap of listing Safari 2.0 as “free” when it only comes with Tiger. (Windows reviewers consistently make the same mistake when listing Internet Explorer as “free” but fail to mention that only Windows XP users can use the latest version.)

OmniWeb is well known for being slow and crash prone. Even its biggest fans will tell you that. Yet nowhere did that appear in the article. Now I have a registered copy of OmniWeb and think it may be the innovative and user friendly browser out there (OmniWeb does a better job implementing some features which Opera has had for a long time, such as the built-in searches and Workspaces, and the idea of thumbnail tabs is brilliant.) The author of the article clearly is not very familiar with OmniWeb either. This lack of familiarity was also echoed in this sentence:

The only problem with OmniWeb is that it may not be compatible with some Web sites because it’s not based on the Mozilla or the Internet Explorer engine. This can be inconvenient.

What the author failed to mention is that OmniWeb is based on the same rendering engine as Safari (WebCore). Safari has done an excellent job at achieving compatibility with a large number of websites, something which is sure to improve now that WebCore is open source. OmniWeb’s compatibility will certainly continue to improve.

As for “the Internet Explorer engine” I have no idea why that comment was made. Internet Explorer for Mac is dead, and the engine was never available to other browsers. Moreover, OmniWeb is now recommended by some sites which actively discourage people from using IE:Mac (AAA being one notable example I am aware of).

But what really bothers me the most is that the entire piece reads like it was written by a Firefox supporter, but is passed off as an objective evaluation of each browser. The author is clearly much more familiar with Firefox, spends a great deal of time talking about Firefox’s abilities, including saying that

Mozilla’s Firefox and Camino are the most versatile and extensible browsers in this review.

As long as you are willing to depend on 3rd party extensions. Opera will let you easily configure its user interface and customize its features, such as mouse gestures, which are only available with add-on software for Firefox.

[Firefox and Camino] are designed to accept third-party plug-ins, or extensions, which can add features, functionality, and different looks (or skins) to the program. But there are many more plug-ins available for Firefox than for Camino.

In fact, these extensions are what make Firefox so great.

There is no mention of the fact that extensions may not be available when a new version of Firefox is. Many Firefox fans love to talk about how rapid the development is, but when the new beta (1.5) was released, all of my extensions stopped working, and it took over a week for new versions to be released. Some extensions may conflict with one another.

To some that is not a problem, to me it is. The point is that the reviewer failed to mention this as a problem, even though it is well known to the Firefox community. Firefox is also often considered to be slower than Opera and Safari. Again, no mention of that.

Firefox recently made the news for several significant security holes. Again this was not mentioned in the article.

Let me make it clear: I have no problem with someone preferring Firefox. I like Firefox. I have it installed and find it handy to have around. I am glad it exists and glad that it is taking marketshare away from Internet Explorer on Windows. I am glad for what it is doing to raise awareness of alternative browsers. That is not my objection.

My objection is that the author is clearly a Firefox fan and wrote an article best described as “Why Firefox is better than your browser” and MacWorld sold it as an objective review of Mac browsers. It is not.

While most browsers lay a Find window right on top of the Web page you’re trying to search, Firefox simply brings up a little Find box at the bottom of the page.

The author makes it sound like Firefox is the only browser with that feature. This is exactly how Opera’s Inline Find works. And Inline Find has been around for ages, longer (I believe) than Firefox has had the feature. Opera also includes a feature to search just for text found in links (press . to search for text and , to search for link text only).

I have been a MacWorld subscriber since before I owned my first Mac (I started getting it when I bought my first iPod). I have come to expect good, neutral reporting and software evaluations. This article fell far short of that rather modest expectation. I’m a Mac user and an Opera lover, which puts me on the fringe of the fringe; but I have high expectations of the software that I use and believe that both my operating system and my browser are the right choice for a large majority of people, even if a large majority of people see no reason to change what they are already using.

By all means, write a critique of Opera which includes Opera’s shortcomings. List the things you would like to see changed or fixed. I’ll even help! I have a list myself. The difference is that if I were writing an article about Opera, I would freely talk about shortcomings and bugs (you can find several examples on this site). If you are a Firefox user writing an article about browsers, I expect you to do the same. In fact, credible journalism would suggest that you make an extra effort not to let your personal views influence your review. This author did not do that, and MacWorld’s editors didn’t correct it before publication. The review was filled with subjective evaluations as well as several completely false and/or misleading statements.

The initial review fell far short, and the 174-word barely-more-than-copy-and-paste revision (that took two weeks to put together?) left me feeling that MacWorld had chosen its favorite browser before the review ever began. I still believe that MacWorld ought to amend the original review to make it more clear everywhere that price is mentioned that Opera is now free, and ought to correct the factual errors and misleading statements which I have pointed out.

A final word about ads

I am extremely glad that Opera is now ad-free because I am so sick of the hypocrisy of sites like MacWorld (and CNet and others) who appeared morally offended by the presence of discreet, contextual, relevant ads in Opera while their own website displayed numerous, unrelated graphical ads. Even MacWorld’s so-called “printer friendly” pages contain multiple ads, including animated GIFs. Apparenly these websites believe that ads are only offensive if they are paying someone else’s bills.

A final word

Let me also say that I am not meaning to make this personal about Jeffery Battersby (the author of the original article). I have no doubt that he’s a good guy with his heart in the right place. He loves Firefox, I love Opera. We’d probably get along well if we met on the street, after all we both love Macs. I have enjoyed his previous articles and found his review of Pages to be spot-on. I take issue with what he wrote (much like I get chastized when I get something wrong about Firefox) but I find much greater fault with MacWorld’s editors for not doing a better job as editors in reviewing this article and giving it a more accurate title. I hope that Jeffery will not take this as a personal attack, although I know first-hand it is hard to read criticism of one’s writing without taking it personally. I think he made some honest mistakes here in his zeal to talk about Firefox. I know what that’s like and have been guilty of it myself. MacWorld should have stepped up and helped him craft it into something better. That’s what I expect of editors. Really my main complaint boils down to the fact that the author was not nearly familiar enough with Opera and Firefox’s shortcomings were ignored.

(Comments are currently open. Rational replies with evidence of effort toward proper spelling and punctuation will be published [i.e. all lowercase without punctuation comments will be deleted]. Personal attacks will be ignored. I’m not looking for Firefox vs Opera fodder. Corrections and disagreements are welcomed. This page may be edited if further review indicates I have gotten something wrong or have written something misleading … which is the same standard I hold MacWorld to.)

We have all heard over and over again how Firefox is free and has extensions. Those are usually its two biggest selling points when people are hyping it.

So I saw that there was a new version of Firefox (1.5 instead of 1.0 that I had installed). I downloaded and installed it. And here’s first thing I saw:

Great. So the few extensions that I have installed are now disabled because they aren’t compatible. Ok, but at least there’s a “Check Now” button to look for new ones. They are trying to minimize the inconvenience, and major kudos to them for that.

Unfortunately this was the next panel to appear:

Great. So the extensions that I had hunted down and installed no longer work.

I don’t have time for this.

I can imagine some Firefox folks saying things like:

“1.5 is still in beta, there will be new versions soon. You should expect that when installing a beta”

Well, Firefox was in “beta” for ages and of course “beta” is increasingly meaningless.

When talking about Firefox, “beta” means very little. Not as little as GMail, perhaps, but still, it has spent 90% of its life in beta. If it’s always going to be in beta, it’s going to have to do a better job of not changing so much that the extensions break. I had a hard time accepting that 0.9 extensions broke when it went to 1.0, but breaking again when it goes to 1.5 (which is really just 1.1 renamed as 1.5) is unacceptable. To me. Others may (and will) feel differently.

I don’t have time to be chasing around after all these updates and keeping track of all the different extensions. My time is more valuable than that. Others may (and will) feel differently, but for me, the small amount of money that I pay for Opera is worth it to know that:

• I can download it, install it, and use it, with all the features I have been using
• new features aren’t largely dependent on volunteers who may decide at any time to drop a project
• new significant features (email, chat, rss) are easily ignored if I don’t want to use them (and they do not add any significant size to the download
• download once, install everywhere. There are 3 of us using Opera here. I’m the only really technically minded one. So I can download and upgrade their Opera installation and know that their features will “just work”

I’m not saying that everyone will feel the same (you may have noticed I’ve made that clear above), but in answer to the question “Why would you pay for a browser when Firefox is free?” now you know.

You can save time or money. Most of the time when dealing with free software (including Operating Systems like Linux/FreeBSD), the trade-off is time. That may be the best choice for some people. Some may feel that they only want to support free software. Great. But I don’t have the free time that I used to have to be able to make that choice.

I’ve used this formula before, but consider this: $40 for Opera (less if you are a student, etc. Upgrades are $15 if there is a charge at all. At least two major versions have been free for previous users.) gives you at least a year of using the current version. That breaks down to:

• $40/52 weeks = $0.77/week.
• $40/365 days = $0.11/day.

Consider the amount of time that you spend in your browser. Is $40 a lot to spend for a program that will make it easier/faster to do the things you need to do anyway? How valuable is your time?

The day I read about Opera Mini, I wondered if my dream had finally come true.

But no… it was only for folks in Norway. Oh to be young and unattached, I would have been on a plane that very day!!!

However, yesterday I found Opera Mini for Treo 600 on MyTreo.net while I was looking for something else (I can’t even remember what, I was so excited). There’s also a version of Opera Mini for Opera 650.

And I knew this was the day.

I knew that Opera Mini was not officially supported on the Palm, and I expected some rough edges (and I got them) but rough edges are better than no edges.

The page held several clues, but not several links. I hope to remedy that for others who are looking for information about setting up Opera Mini on a Treo. For example, the page said:

You must have Java installed for this app to work.

Great, but where do I find Java for Treo?

After looking around for awhile, I finally located a link for Java for Treo from Palm.com. There are installation instructions for both Mac and Windows there.

The five (5) files I installed are:

1. J9JavaVMMidp20.prc
2. GolfScoreTracker.prc [note: this is not strictly necessary, but I wanted to test it to make sure it worked
3. PIMPrefs.prc
4. fileconnect.prc
5. pimop.prc

Oh, and of course, Opera Mini.prc.

I launched Opera Mini from my Treo and was—

—confused.

I shouldn’t have been, of course, if I had read the rest of the page at MyTreo.net:

Opera Mini runs default in Norwegian, but you can change that to English in the “verktøy” menu under “instillinger” - change “språk” to English.

Those directions were enough for me to figure it out, but they could be a bit more clear. Here are the exact menu items you need to follow:

1. ‘Meny’
2. ‘verktøy’
3. ‘Innstillinger’
4. Click ‘Norsk’ button
5. Choose ‘English’ from the box
6. Click OK
7. Click ‘Lagre’

That will set the menu to English.

Then the next step was figuring out how to put in an URL (the box which appears is a search box, not an URL one).

To enter an URL, press the Menu button and select “Enter Address”.

It was here that I found my first flaw: Opera automatically fills in “www.” which is good, but it sets the cursor before the “www” so when you start typing, it goes in front of the www prefix. So if you aren’t careful, you can end up with apple.comwww rather than www.apple.com.

There is also a “clear” button which doesn’t really clear, it resets to “www.” and removes the insertion point (focus is no longer set on the form to input an URL). These are minor bugs in a 1.0 release which I hope will be fixed in 1.1.

I finally entered the URL I wanted (the DDOE of course :-) and was asked:

Can Opera Mini use airtime to send or receive an http connection until Opera Mini terminates? [yes/no]

Clearly Opera wants to avoid anyone being surprised by any airtime charges that they might accrue while using Opera Mini, but there’s no box to say “Yes, always and forever” so you have to agree to this every time Opera Mini starts.

Opera does seem to disconnect as soon as possible, to minimize charges, which is great… in theory. For me, I have an unlimited data plan with Sprint, so the constant reconnecting is rather annoying. But again, given that it is currently not supported for Sprint and/or the Treo, I’ll “suck it up” as the kids say.

The Bad

Opera Mini also does not seem to do several of the things that I want to do:

1. Cannot register Opera Mini as the default browser (perhaps this is a limitation of the Palm OS?)
2. Opera Mini cannot be set as the browser to use with SnapperMail, even using the B-U-G option to access hidden features. SnapperMail tech support said that Opera Mini “must support the PalmOS Exchange Manager” for this to work. I assume it doesn’t because it is not a Palm-specific app.
3. Could not find a way to assign a hard button to launch Opera (went to Prefs > Buttons, but Opera does not appear in the listing).
4. Does not work with pages which require HTTP login
5. Cannot download files such as .exe or .dmg. This is a real bummer, because one of the things I want to be able to do is download files onto my Treo and transfer them to my Mac using MissingSync. Apparently Blazer4 can do this, but I’m not ready to buy a Treo650 yet :-/
6. Also cannot download .prc or .zip files, which even Blazer3 can do :-/
7. Navigation with the Treo 5-way is jumpy… it often will move two links when I push the button once. Have to use the stylus.

Making an https connection gave me a warning:

WARNING: the connection between your phone and this page is not secure.

So don’t try that either if you are concerned about https security (again, Blazer3 seemed to be able to do that).

The Good

1. Opera Mini can use Internet Sharing via MissingSync (which Blazer3 cannot). Unfortunately until it can download files etc, this will be of limited use, but it’s nice to know it is there.
2. Jump directly to main text part (under Menu > Tools… > Settings) skips images at the top of a page, such as tntluoma.com. Nice little timesaver.
3. Rendering of pages (which, after all, is the most important part, right???) works really, really well. Opera’s small screen rendering is amazing.
4. Image controls: Menu > Tools…> Settings lets you control if images load at all, and gives you the option for “higher image quality” which noties that it will double the amount of transfered data. Honestly, on the Treo600 I couldn’t tell the difference, but users with a high-resolution screen like the Treo650 might be able to.
5. Start page has a whole host of search engines built-in (no way to add/edit them however)
6. There was recently a thread on the Treo YahooGroup about http://www.seidioonline.com/ not working with Blazer. Opera showed it easily, and fast.
7. Scroll to the bottom of the start page and you will see recent items from your history, and a link to more. Nice touch.
8. Amazon.com works. Given that even Amazon.com’s own wireless page is useless and their “PDA” version is a link to a nonexistent site this is quite handy.

The Ugly

Opera Mini is still rough around some GUI edges. Here are some observations (in no particular order):

1. No way to paste in an URL from another program
2. Navigation difficult. Needs an easier way to input an URL
3. No way to set home page
4. Menu button leads to a menu item labeled “Menu” which does approximately nothing. So why is it there?
5. “Navigate” menu item offers only “Back”… What happened for “Forward” and “Home” and “Go to…” which seem like obvious additions?
6. No way to add current page to bookmark
7. No way to view current URL (and there’s no “copy” feature even if you could)

Again, it should be noted that I was reviewing Opera Mini on unsupported hardware using a file that I might not even have been allowed to use (I later realized that there was nothing at mytreo.net that seemed to indicate they had permission to offer Opera Mini for download.)

Conclusion

If I am browsing on my Treo, I’ll be using Opera (with the exceptions noted above).

Why?

Simple: the speed alone is astounding, and the resultant page is very useful. Sites which formerly were not even accessible (page loading timeout) now load quickly.

I trust that Opera will rectify the various issues and improve the GUI in future releases. I look forward to using Opera on my Treo as often as I have my Windows and Mac machines before it.