piracy
So it’s way past my bedtime, I’ve just come back from a dinner where a cow-orker is packing up to head further northwards, I’m checking my email and notifications and I notice something.
The Frozen Throne has been patched to version 1.19. Now, a bit of background information. Warcraft 3 (and the expansion, The Frozen Throne) is several years old. By the standards of computer games, it’s practically a grand parent. Yet for some inexplicable reason, Blizzard Entertainment - the manufacturer, is still updating the game and publishing patches. Oh, and allowing people to play each other online for free provided they have a registered copy. In a day and age where profit and loss is defined by the recycleable revenues of a MMORPG juggernaut and monthly subscription fees; this is a refreshing change.
Unfortunately, the hyper efficient community of underground programmers has not yet gotten round to producing what is known as a No-CD crack for the game yet. So, I’m twiddling my thumbs and visiting all the old haunts in the vain hope that someone will have published a crack. The efficiency of the underground in publishing exploits and cracks in response to releases … well, it’s becoming a victim of its own success.
One piece of software that the underground will no longer need to worry about is Opera. No more advertising, no more registration fees required. The (quite nifty) Opera browser is now free. With premium support for people who pay (corporate customers and customizations, perhaps ?). And with the possibility of Yahoo and other odious toolbars being incorporated into the browser at some point. But free. What compelled Opera Software to make the browser free, I wonder. Were the overheads simply too much ? And if their flagship product is being driven out of the market by the free (directly or otherwise) alternatives in Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Safari; well, how long does the company have ? I don’t use the browser myself anymore - although there was a time when I used nothing other than Opera… but I’d hate to see them exit the desktop browser market.
Opera does lots of things really well. I don’t like their UI very much, I am disturbed by the lack of extensions available for the browser (yes, articles like this and this can’t possibly cover all the extensions people use)… but if I had to flee Firefox tomorrow, Opera is the browser I’d pick. And even now, assuming that the Firefox developers fritter away all their good vibes from the community (quite possible, I assure you) and things keep getting buggier and buggier (anyone remember Netscape 4.76 ?)… well, it would be nice to have a decent browser to fall back to. It would be annoying - but not overly so - to have to use the all new tabbed browsing capable IE 7 instead of the been-there-invented-MDI-browsing Opera. Or maybe I’m just a Microsoft basher at heart and I just need to use a non MS browser so I can hang out with the cool kids and sneer at evil Micro$oft. Yeah. And validate my geekish existence.
On 21-Sep-05 at 4:25 am,
Forge wrote:
I’m a fairly settled Opera user myself, and that ol’ Moz-vs.-M$ dichotomy is always funny from the vantage third-party point of view. I rather preferred the Opera UI to Firefox, so interested - what was it that you didn’t like, and what are the missing extensions?
On 21-Sep-05 at 4:33 am,
sage wrote:
uh oh you’ve got him started. quick, run! run!
On 21-Sep-05 at 5:21 am,
Forge wrote:
No, no… it was just a question. Friendly-like. I’ve got this before from Chilton (preferring the FF UI to Opera) and never managed to get him to explain what, precisely.
On 21-Sep-05 at 9:08 am,
drac wrote:
Well, the biggest UI beef for me is how Opera renders their tabs. I think this is more a problem with not being able to find a sufficiently minimalistic theme. The defaults all seem to be very KDE-ish in their rendering… slightly clunky and bevelled instead of slim
If someone ports the Qute theme over to Opera, I’d be a happy camper. I can pretty much level the same criticism of Opera that I can of the earlier KDE/Gtk variants, actually. They’re too widgety, they have too many “lines” and angles. Besides which, try as I might, I haven’t been able to hide “everything but the back and forward buttons, address and tab bar” - my default layout in a browser. The menu customization in Firefox has Opera beat.
Missing extensions: well, I would find life difficult without adblock; but I know Opera can fiddle with the css for much the same effect. It’s convenient to be able to specify regexes on an input window instead of hacking the .ini or a file. I would have said Flashblock as well; but I found a wonderful usercss hack for that yesterday so I no longer need to complain about being bombarded by Flash adverts
The extensions that are irreplaceable would be Web Developer Extensions and Venkmann. Yeah, and Greasemonkey. I tested out userscripts in Opera; and they’re quite powerful.. Perhaps more so than Greasemonkey in the Firefox 1.0x series - but the Greasemonkey in Firefox 1.x puts userscripts to shame.
I’d still switch without too much hassle though. More things with Opera are simply a matter of getting used to - and I like the browser - rather than “this sucks” sorta criticism. And you can’t beat the memory footprint. Firefox sure won’t.
On 21-Sep-05 at 9:56 am,
Forge wrote:
Ah, that explains it. I don’t use adblock on either -instead relying on old-fashioned tuning out. *grin* And shamefully, make no significant use of either Opera’s userscripts or Greasemonkey (though I vaguely remember someone saying that they’d heard an unsubstantiated rumour of someone trying to emulate Greasemonkey in Opera)… Dude, someone ported Qute to Opera ages ago. I don’t use it, having gotten used to -yeah, it is a rather widgety look, isn’t it? I suppose I stopped seeing it after a while.
Menu customization. See, this is the thing. I’ve always found Opera a lot more customizable than Firefox. I mean, I have approximately the same browser layout you do; you can right-click remove any button in Opera, and shuffle them about at will and whatnot. So not at all difficult to get down to the basics -especially now with the ad bar gone.
My own can’t-live-withouts have been proper tab management and mouse gestures. I’m always shuffling tabs back forth, because I’ve gotten used to having these eternal, never-ending browsing sessions where sometimes a tab just sits somewhere until I find time to get around to it. Always annoyed me that FF didn’t have this- of course, now they do, with 1.5. Waiting for it to come outta beta… sad to say, I’m getting too old to be an early adopter.
On 21-Sep-05 at 1:35 pm,
drac wrote:
Having spent at least an hour surfing around and clicking pretty widgets, downloading skins and what-have-you; I have now achieved Operatic nirvana.
All it took was:
The Qute skin
Some whacking with a cluebat to realize that I could drag individual buttons into the position I wanted - my wished for minimalist toolbar look.
hide objects till double click
and a single keyboard shortcut change (Ctrl - L. Pah. I want my address bar to get focus on Alt-D, dangnabbit)
Ok, so I’m not going to get the extensions from Firefox working but this will do nicely