Opera users (All 6 of them) are more fanatical and delusional than Apple Zealots (with frankly less justification) and they annoy the crap out of me with the way they hijack every browser discussion on the internet. Try to discuss the various merits of TraceMonkey and V8 (they’re fast right?) and some muppet will throw in some totally irrelevant observation about Opera. Try and compare and contrast IE7′s and IE8′s rendering engines and some Opera user will appear to talk about how standard compliant Opera is. New version of a Browser with a new feature or a new Firefox extension? Then expect to see hundreds of comments of how Opera does the same thing already. Though they will forget to mention it doesn’t do it (whatever it is) anywhere near as well.

They are a bunch of entitled whiners, the Newcastle supporters of computing. Opera deserves to win everything and have praise heaped upon it. I tried to think of some non-UK centric equivalents but I couldn’t come up with anything. My sport knowledge is somewhat limited because, you know, I’m a geek. Feel free to post international equivalents to Newcastle football supporters in the comments.

Opera users please can you answer me this damned question. If Opera is so brilliant why isn’t everyone using it? Or at least have more people using it than are using Chrome, which came out like yesterday. Let me guess an evil Firefox/Google/Microsoft conspiracy? Stupid users? Or are you going for the Opera user change their Browser identity string to get around lazy/corrupt Web Developer’s who try and block them from viewing websites? How can a browser that has been around longer than most others have such a small user base? How shit must the Opera marketing people be? The problem is that Opera scratches no particular itch. It isn’t just there, familiar and convenient like IE or Safari, it isn’t extendible to the same extent as Firefox and it isn’t as lean and as technically excellent as Chrome. Any Web Developer worth his salt will have Firefox and a host of Web Developer centric extensions installed so they can’t even count on the tech crowd any more. Though it might help if Opera spent more time working on the basic Web Browser features and stopped adding useless crap like bittorrent clients and web servers. They can’t find a niche so are desperate to create one, and failing miserably.

By the way Unite in Opera 10 is rubbish. Virtually useless (doubly so because nobody else uses it) and clumsy to use.

For the record I used to pay for Opera back in the day, you know when it was still a good browser. Before they got Fisher Price to re-design the interface (twice) and started adding every trendy gimmick they could get their hands on in a desperate attempt to make their product matter. I’ve also installed every major release version of Opera since version 3 because as a professional Web Developer I do my testing properly. I’ve not seen a single reason to use any release of Opera as my main browser since version 6.

Right lets start off by saying this is an alpha level release and it works pretty much well as you expect one too. It slow, buggy as hell, half the things don’t work properly or at all and it can crash your browser if you look at it wrong. As it stands at the moment their is simply no way you can use it for anything other than trying it out and messing around. For some reason the popular and successful labels feature from Gmail has been abandoned and replaced with a traditional folder metaphor. Ewww. Not that it matters because putting Waves in folders is a bit hit and miss. Sometimes they move immediately, other times after a few minutes, other times they don’t move and sometimes they just vanish. You can add tags to Waves and do searches (that are you can save) but neither work as well as labels. It is pretty clear that Google have gone the ‘get the flashy stuff running first’ route and leave the ‘fundamentals’ till later. But even the really serious error message that you occasionally get is endearing to fans of a certain TV show.

The flashy stuff? Wow it is flashy! But it is flashy with a purpose. Ever wanted to embed a google map in an email? Ever wanted to have an IM discussion that you can continue in a more email like manner without changing apps? Ever wanted everyone to see you dreadful typing as it happens? Want to play soduko against friends? All things you can do with Wave. It takes a while to get used to and you are tempted to use it just like email but eventually you start using it differently. It is so flexible even with what you get out the box but when you start adding in extensions you start to realise this isn’t just a replacement for email or instant messaging but an entirely new communication platform. Even little things like posting in a youtube link will give you a little icon to click that converts into an embedded youtube video and the way you can view all images in a Wave as a slide-show are just brilliant. Now the 4rd party extensions that are currently available are even more ropey than Wave itself but they do give you an incite into the world Wave will open up. Some of the stuff people are working on getting Wave to do is just crazy. Be able to make a Wave into a page on your blog and have the replies as comments. A Twitter client. Methods for importing and exporting email. Nothing seems impossible.

What you have to remember though is that this preview of Google Wave is just the beginning. Google are opening this up to everyone. You will be able to run your own Wave servers and it will interact with other Wave servers just like email does now. It won’t be confined to the web browser either as people will be free to develop stand alone clients just like they do with email.

It is a considerable way off prime time and general use but if Google can keep it going they will have developed an internet technology just as revolutionary as the web browser and email. Give it a few years and we will be saying “Wave Me” rather than “Email Me’ or ‘IM Me’. Remember you can’t stop the signal!

Google have announced that they are working on their very own Linux distribution. Google Chrome OS (yeah lets confuse the mundanes by naming the OS the same thing as the browser)  will be a light and fast operating system targeted at netbooks. Naturally it will be tied in closely to their online applications just like Android is. Other than that details are pretty thin on the ground at the moment. Will it use QT or GTK or will Google create their own widgets? Will they roll their own desktop system?  No doubt this will spur on the development of Linux versions of the Chrome browser as well as being an eager platform for Wave. This announcement could well have very beneficial knock on effects for Linux and Open Source in general. With such a prominent and well known backer as Google Linux could help hardware manufacturers see Linux based systems as worthy of having well supported drivers. No doubt Microsoft will not be pleased with Google’s latest plan and are already working on one of their “get the facts” FUD campaigns.

Developers will get their hands on the OS towards the end of the year and netbooks with Chrome OS pre-installed should start showing up in 2010.

This PC has to be amongst the most gorgeous computer creations of all time. It is a water-cooled PC par excellence. Hell check it out for yourself:

Quite why they called it Edelweiss I have no idea.

Since Asus released the 7″ screened Eeepc a while a go industry giants (Sony, Apple, Microsoft et al) and IT journalists alike have been prophesying the doom of the netbook. Why is this? Well for Microsoft and Apple it was simply because the netbook was going to cannibalise their own budding ultra-portable project the UMPC and Air. They were playing it down to big up their own products. Hence initially Linux was the preferred OS for netbooks. Sadly Microsoft got wise and now most netbooks, including my own, run some version of Windows. Apple still has its head in the sand but Sony jumped on the bandwagon. Sony being Sony however refuse to call the Vaio P a netbook and priced it way out of the league of people looking at the usual £150-400 netbook price bracket. Why nobody knows as that strategy worked so well for the UMPCs that nobody purchased. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet Explorer 8 is now available to download. Chances are your computer updated to automatically without asking so probably have it already, if you use Windows that is. As a Windows 7 user (look I play PC games, can’t stand rebooting all the time and I don’t like Vista) I have known for a while that IE8 is no great shakes. Its greatest new feature is that it breaks all the IE specific development we Web  Developers have to incorporate into out sites. Sure it is supposedly more standards compliant but now we have to disable all the old IE fixes for IE8 users, not to mention add the new specific IE8 fixes because ‘standards compliant’ means a different thing to Microsoft developers. For those who want to know it means ‘still broken but in a different way’.

Anyway the Microsoft FUD spreader is on full speed. Microsoft’s new ‘Get the Facts‘ campaign for IE8 is on-line. Anyone who uses the browsers they compare against will know it is bullshit as soon as they start. Like all Microsoft ad campaigns it is about spreading lies about the competitors not telling people the benefits of their software. Which makes sense because there aren’t many beyond ‘I play computer games’.