VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[Charlie Channel]

Has anyone else used the Opera browser?

I've finally gotten around to giving it a go. I'd heard about it for years, but never tried it. I understood it was fairly quick, quicker that IE, etc. But, that was years ago. Anyway, I had an issue with Firefox. Netscape was a cool tool with tabs and IE didn't have the tab feature that lets me instantly flip between v123, Yahoo, vo-bb, IV, and who knows what else. Opera does.

Here's the feature that really blew me away. It's got a voice recognition. But, wait! There's more. You can highlight the text on a web page and the thing will read it back to you. A virtual voice talent! It's actually pretty accurate in locution of text.

You might want to give it a test drive, just for fun.
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Charlie

[nick reed]

Charlie,

What was your issue with Firefox? I saw everyone posting about Firefox, so I got and loved it, except that Norton Password Manager did not recognize it so that put me off. I had Firefox set as my default browser but Norton would not fill in forms and such. I couldn't figure it out so I dumped it after a week but I loved it otherwise.

Maybe I will give Opera a try.

[Charlie Channel]

I really enjoyed Firefox, too. The Tab feature is really good. That's what sold me on it. But, I use Yahoo as my E-mail portal. My reasons are for control. First, I know Yahoo is filtering mail to eliminate as many viruses and worms as possible. Their Spam catcher is nice, too. So, it's my first line of defense. Secondly, I really come from the Webtop-Portal tradition, having worked for and with the folks who brought you Java. You know, computing anywhere, anytime.

Eeither Yahoo or FireFox changed something. Maybe both. I could no longer cut and paste text or a URL into the browser while doing Yahoo E-mail. That's especially aggravating when you're working with tabs.

As best I understand the issue, there is a script that actually enables the client's mouse subroutine that gives a user the right click option. When I'd right click to cut and paste a URL into an E-mail, it wouldn't work. Text copying and pasting was affected, too. More specifically, the choice of right-click was actually disabled in Firefox. The script was disabled. So, the fact is it was impossible to cut and paste.

Yahoo said it was a Firefox problem, since all the other browsers worked fine. Firefox said it was a Yahoo problem, because they had changed something. As an end-user, I said I'm going to use what works!!!

When I researched the matter on the Firefox website, it was documented and noted that the script was disabled for security reasons. I believe someone had found that there MIGHT be a security issue and, for that reason, the feature was disabled. Also, there was a patch published on the Firefox website that was supposed to let a user enable that function, if you wanted to take the risk. I did, becuase of the way I work. Alas, the patch didn't work and nobody could or would explain how to make it work.

Rather than mess around (and some user gave me a ration of crap about nagging), I just went back to using I.E. and Netscape. They work fine. But, then, I decided to try Opera.

If you like Firefox, you'll dig Opera. It's really cool. Firefox has released 1.5 I believe. I don't know if it addresses the issue. But, obviously, some Firefox users, including me, were disappointed or annoyed.

I got distracted with Opera. I haven't even thought of using Firefox again. You not only get tabs, but the feature that lets you login to multiple sites with a ctrl-enter is just what I needed. The UI is well thought out. The browser has a memory. It'll open all the last tabs used automatically when you fire up the browser. It's really sweet. And, then, the voice recognition and speech-text feature just floored me.

I think there's a lesson. First, choice is good. Secondly, you may blame the other guy at the risk of loosing market share, no matter whose fault it is!

CC