Opera Browser

The Opera Browser

Opera has always been seen as a browser for users who do not trust IE and want something faster and lighter than Netscape. The Opera browser was started in 1994 as a research project in Norway’s telecom company Telenor. Two engineers from the same company developed the browser Opera for the company’s intranet. On July 14 the 1996, Opera’s co-founder Jon von Tetzchner made the first public announcement of Opera on UseNet and Opera came into being for the general public.

Opera was written from a scratch and is not based on the NCSA Mosaic code or interface methodology (as Internet Explorer or Netscape are). This gives it some unique browsing features such as page zoom, a multi-document interface browsing environment and mouse gestures. It has an extremely small footprint and boasts of an impressive feature set, with great support for HTML, XML, WML, CSS (one of the best implementations), JavaScript, DOM and Java.

Opera Series 1 was not released for the public and was called MultiTorg Opera. This version was used for the Telenor Intranet.

The first public version of Opera was the Series 2. The first version is a Norwegian demo version of Opera 2.0 that was included with a PC Magazine and loaded only local Norwegian pages.

Series 3 was the first coming in terms of acceptance for Opera worldwide. Version 3.62 was the first version of Opera in terms of features, stability and speed. CSS support was exceptional in this version of Opera.

Opera Beta 4 was released in March 2000 and had support for most of CSS2, all of CSS1, HTML4, XML., and WML. This version was based on a cross-platform core and facilitated the release of Opera for different Operating Systems. A new integrated e-mail client was also included in this version. The first versions of Opera 4 were quite stable and buggy and it was after the release of 4.02 that the browser actually became useful.

The Opera 5 release was noticed by the general public, since this time the browser was not on a 30-day trial period but was ad-supported hence people could use the browser long after the 30-day period. New features that were added to this release were mouse-gestures, Instant Messaging features hot list panels and an integrated search. In fact, many users are still using this version of the browser till date.

The long awaited Unicode support was introduced in the Opera 6 release and a new SDI/MDI interface was also introduced in the same release. The Opera 6 series was one of the most stable and it was with this release that Opera garnered its own fans and a cult following, but was still miles away from making a dent in either Netscape’s or Internet Explorer’s market shares.

Opera 7 was released in early 2003 and featured a brand new rendering engine called Presto. This engine enhanced and expanded its support for standards and included W3C DOM and the Small Screen Rendering technique for handheld devices. The interface was redone entirely with a custom cross-platform skinning system which significantly reduced resource usage, keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, menus and toolbars. Other new features that were included in this release were features such FastForward, Notes and Slideshow, which made the user experience even more enjoyable. A new news and mail client called M2 was introduced in this version as well as a RSS news reader and an IRC chat client.
Opera 8 was released in early 2005 and is currently in version 8.0.1. The major reason for Opera being accepted publicly was not because of its compliance in standards with other browsers, but because of the non-standard browsing enhancements that were absent in its competitors. It is light weight and has its own cult of fans. It has innovative features and is one of the most used browsers on mobile devices.

Currently, Opera has started making inroads in other embedded systems platforms as well. Opera’s market share is starting to make a bit of a dent with users sticking to this alternative browser rather than using Internet Explorer or Netscape. Plus many of Opera’s innovative features are finding their way into other browsers as well. One of them is FireFox, the browser that we will be talking about next.

Microsoft Internet Explore

Internet Explorer arrived at a time when Netscape was the master of the game. Internet Explorer 1.0 debuted with the second version of Microsoft Windows 95 that was called, simply enough, "Windows 95 with Internet Explorer." When Windows 95 first made its appearance in July 1995 it included inbuilt support for dial-up networking and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) plus other key technologies for connecting to the Internet. However, it still depended on third party browsers, which at that time meant Netscape. With growing acceptance of the Internet, Microsoft suddenly realized the potential of bundling in its own browser and thus Internet Explorer (IE) was born. Internet Explorer technology was originally shipped as the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95. internet Explorer replaced the need for cumbersome, manual installation steps required by many of the existing shareware browsers.

Internet Explorer-2.0 arrived in November 1995 and was the first cross platform browser released by Microsoft and worked on both Macintosh and 32-bin Windows. Internet Explorer 2.0 technology introduced Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol as well as support for HTTP cookies. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and Internet newsgroups.
The next big Microsoft browser release was Internet Explorer 3.0 in August 1996, which had a completely rebuilt core and considered one of the best browsers of the time. This browser was designed for Windows 95 and included features that users immediately took to such as Internet Mail and News 1.0 and Windows Address Book. Later, Microsoft NetMeeting and Windows Media Player were also released. Internet Explorer could now display GIF and JPG files, play MIDI sound files and streaming audio files without the assistance of other applications. For Web programmers, though it was a different story altogether, since IE3 allowed for a choice of scripting languages and also Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Moving onwards, Internet Explorer 4 made its debut in 1997 and was designed for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Another major add-on to the release of IE4 was Outlook Express. Which would be installed in the default installation and was an upgrade from the previous Internet Mail and News application. This was the first offering from Microsoft to compete with Netscape Communicator in terms of a mail terms of a mail client being installed with a browser.

This was also a major release for Web programmers since the introduction of DHTML as a scripting language in IE4, Web pages could be designed more dynamically. Users could now expand menus with a click or drag images and objects around on a Web page. The Web started to look more like the applications and games that people were accustomed to and less like a static series of pages.

In September 1998, Internet Explorer 5 was released. DHTML functionality was improved with more features and with emerging Web commerce ideas.

Internet Explorer 6 was first released in 2001 with the release of Windows XP operating system. Later on, IE 6 was released for other Windows flavours. One of the major improvements in IE6 was the implementation of privacy and security functionality of the browser. Since privacy and security had become customer priorities, Microsoft implemented tools that support Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a technology under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Internet Explorer has also been available for the Macintosh for a long time. Although Netscape Navigator was the browser bundled with the Mac OS for a long time, it stopped in 1997 when Internet Explorer became the default browser for the Mac. But with the release of Safari browser for the Mac OS, development of IE for the Mac was stopped.

Today, for any Windows user logging on to the Internet for the first time, the blue "e" icon sitting on the desktop is the gateway to the Internet with the default installation of Windows. To use any other browser, you will need to download or source it from somewhere and then install it: The little "e" on the other hand is ubiquitous, and all you need to do double-click.

So where do we go from here?

IE 7 which was scheduled for release along with Longhorn will now be released prematurely. Newer browsers such as Firefox (which we will be talking about soon) will be present, but let’s face facts, Internet Explorer is here to stay, never mind the antitrust lawsuits.

The First Browser - WorldWideWeb (Nexus)

   Tim Berners-Lee invented the WOrld Wide Web or WWW as we know it today in 1989, deploying a working system by 1990. Berners-Lee was the first to invent the browser, and it was simply called WorldWideWeb since it was the only way to see the Web. Tim later rechristened this browser 'Nexus', to distinguish between the program and the abstract information space "www" which was typed in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). WorldWideWeb was written in Objectice-C and it would let users browse "http:", "news:", "ftp:" and local "file:" spaces.

   Tim wrote the program for this browser on a Next computer. THe browser was the best at the time, since it was the only one. If you look at the browser closely, you will see that buttons and features in the browser look similar in Internet Explore. Here's a brief low-down on the functionality of the browser.

   The menu bar looked like a primitive version of the Windows Desktop, and clicking on it would provide a list of options similar to the Windows of today. THe Navigate menu had things such as "Back", "Next" and "Previous", and the last two were useful when you followed a link from a list of links-they meant "go back a step and then take the next link from the same page."

  The "Link" menu had options such as "Mark all" which would remember the URL of the current page where you were. "Mark selection" would make a link target for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URL of that fragment. "Link to Marked" would make a link from the current selection to whatever URL you had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to some where interesting, hitting [Command] + [M], going to the document ou were writing and seleting some text, and then hitting [Command] + [L]. "Link to new" would create a new window and prompt for a URL, and then make a link from the selection to the new document. You never saw the URL-you could of course always find documents by following the link to them.

   Using the "Style" menu, you could load a style sheet to define how you wanted your documents (Web pages) rendered. You could also set the paragraph style to an HTML element's style such as heading1, heading 2, list element, etc., and then this implied an HTML structure in which the document was written back.

   At that time, the "X" close box was unique to Next, and according to Tim, Windows copied it. The broken X in the "Tim's home page" window means that the document was in the process of being edited and was unsaved. Now that we have talked about the first Web browser, lets move on to find more about other browsers.