Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all Show Posts made by this member. Note that you can only see Show Posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - The Solutor

1
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter advantages over Vivaldi
I double checked, you are right.

I was tricked by your mention to the 16/9 resolution, something we discussed together.

But was actually discussed in a different thread.

So, sorry for the misunderstanding.
4
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter advantages over Vivaldi
Quote
Yes, it would be nice to add all the rich features of later versions of Opera (including skins and integrated e-mail/newsreader/...), but try to keep the stability and speed above all.


Lightness, stability and security are surely important things, but are the mission of dozens of browsers, to stand out of the crowd Otter must be feature rich, starting from the ones that made Opera so great.

Otherwise it will be a "yet another nice open source project" and nothing more.
5
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Feature Requests
Quote from: Frenzie on


I hate that term "Retina"


I hate it too given my Sonyericsson X1 (300dpi circa) was in my pocket almost three year before the Iphone 4 was released and the term Retina was advertised.

Quote
you'd need twice the resolution for that in my not at all humble opinion


Surely isn't needed on notebooks, it's even an annoyance, especially in windows, because compatibility reasons.

Is more than welcome on cellphones and tablet especially for people who use them as ebook reader.

BTW Is something of concrete even non notebooks, visually can't be a bed thing and even if the human eye can't spot the difference consciously, maybe the combination eye/brain, can.

After all is what happens with CDs, that can play sounds from 20 to  20Khz, covering the audible spectrum, but DATs (and even the old vinyls) sounds way better.
6
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Feature Requests
Quote from: Frenzie on

My whole story is that 1024x768 is the lowest user-friendly resolution (down mostly to modern programs' GUI assumptions than to anything inherent in 600 vertical px).


Yes. On win 8+ even the boot logo is 1024x768

Quote
1366x768 is annoying, but it's a usable resolution with a little extra on the side.


You said. "Usable". My 1280x800 notebooks are "confortable" it means that I can use the same screen area with an extra space rougly measurable in "one taskbar".

No matter if the windows taskbar, an additional browser bar, or the media control bar of a media player, is something that was stolen on 16/9 display.

Quote
I was thinking about acquiring a new monitor around '09, but then suddenly 1920x1200 went out of fashion


Well thanks god someone realized it and now here (in Italy) a decent  24'' 1920x1200 monitor can find a new home with just 160€ or even less.

Even android 16/10 tablets are now easier to find than their 16/9 counterparts.

Frankly I believe that a relevant part of the Apple success is due to the better display formats they offered. 4/3 for tablets and a lot of 16/10 display for notebooks, when the rest of the world moved blindly to the 16/9 idiocy.
7
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Feature Requests
Quote from: denes on


You and other users shared understandably the unique methods to use bookmarks.



Who said unique ?

I explained my way, and I' explained that isn't any slower than other methods (your and avespy's points). Thats all.

Quote
Now in my case, I could never remember 81 numbers to know WHICH speed dial to call up.


Come on. That's why SD has thumbnails. If there is something that is the antimatter of remembering something,  is visually and spatially spotting a colored big block.
It's something that resembles the very first educational games aimed to the 3 years old babies, eimple by definition.

Add to it a rational organization, add to it the fact that when you use the SD for awhile you can use it blindly (because, like it or not you start to remember), and your objection becomes completely emptied of any means.

Quote
"Different people, different use-cases, different needs.


That's true but is just part of the truth.

The real thing is that any mammal, humans included (including me, you and avespy ) forms itself mainly when is young. And Is really hard to change a crystallized habit, for a person who's not a teenager anymore, even when another one is definitely better.
9
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Feature Requests
Quote from: Frenzie on


16:9 is annoying, but that's a bit overdramatic. 1920x1080 is still slightly more vertical pixels than my 1280x1024


Sure A full HD monitor is not that bad. But on monitors for desktop PCs I would compare 1920x1080 with a good 1920x1200 monitor. Meant for IT not for TV.

Quote
I think your argument is really only somewhat applicable to 1024x600


That's not the whole story. The world is not split just between netbooks and full HD devices.

Most of the latest 16/10 notebooks, say Thinkpads X200/X201, Dell E4200/4300, A lot of Vaios and so on, are 1280x800, most of their direct successors are just 1366x768.

There are also some 1440x900 variants but are way less common or expensive.

Only lately full HD displays are commonly available on notebooks too.

But the 16/9 madness started four or five years ago, so there is a whole generation of (often expensive) notebooks equipped with a poor size/resolution combination.
10
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Feature Requests
Quote from: denes on

About bookmark panel I thought that it would be an eligible, easily turn on/off feature.

This is pretty obvious for any Opera (and children) user I believe. Options, options, options... ;)

Quote
I think that you have a 4:3 monitor. So this feature is not useful for you, I understand.


I was not clear enough, I believe. So you understood exactly the opposite of what I meant.

I'm on a 16/10 monitor(s) (a good compromise). But that's not the point.

The point is that on a 4/3 monitor one can  happily trade some vertical space for an additional toolbar or whatever.

On a 16/9 monitor the vertical space is precious so, the less horizontal bar are present, the more pleasurable is the browser use.

12
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Vivaldi is suspect software
Quote from: rincewind on

This morning I wanted to visit a project's homepage from within synaptic package manager, so I clicked the homepage link and what happened? Vivaldi came up sluggish and presented me his redunant initial page (and not the project page I wanted to visit)! I did NOT set vivaldi my default browser, I even still have qupzilla set my default browser in the LXQT system settings, and Vivaldi has made himself more important than this LXQT setting - without asking me. My conclusion: Delete vivaldi immediately - so I did.


So that is what you call a problem ? :lol:

frankly this kind of sentences (no matter if in favor or aganist something) sounds like childish excuses rather than technical evaluations made by an adult.
13
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter advantages over Vivaldi
Quote from: Emdek on

And now, thanks to Vivaldi, I'm kinda forced to start harvesting our APIs to expose more user visible changes. ;-)


Competition is always the pepper of life  ;), so for me Vivaldi is a welcome entry as it was Otter, as it should be Fifth browser (I haven't tried it yet, but looks like it has the same aim as Otter).

Quote
It's better to have two similar browsers than none (especially if they aren't similar to Chrome / IE / soon Firefox ;-)), lets make software, not war. :-)


100% agreed.
14
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter advantages over Vivaldi
Quote
You're comparing a browser made from the ground up by a single developer with occasional help from limited people


I'm perfectly aware of that, Indeed I'm not questioning the programming choices, the sw robustness or whatever.

I'm talking of "marketing" choices.

A fact (call it sad but true if you want) is that almost always look pays more than substance.

Now in the specific case "look" coincides with usability, is not just matter of eye candyness.

I believe that people orphaned from opera are already used to some inconsistencies on the page rendering and some incompatibility with some web sites, but the same people Is used to a bunch of functions that are missing elsewhere.

That's my point.

IMO a poor implementation of the speed dial (and the one from vivaldi IS poor atm) is better than no speed dial, an incomplete side panel is better than no side panel at all, and so on.


That said, given I'm not a coder and I can't help on that way, In the past year I tried to help advertising Emdek's work, in any occasion, and I will do the same in the future, and I consider the above suggestion a different form of help, not a complain.

I hope my point is clear.
15
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter advantages over Vivaldi
Frankly I care very little about the multiprocess/single process thing (single process is more or less buggy on Vivaldi, Opium, Chromium and so on).

For the end user what counts, after all, is the final result.

What Vivaldi people did right (IMO, obviously) is the priority order.

Vivaldi is still plenty of bugs, but has already a speed dial working, it has a user recognizable will to implement the email function, it has a function to import settings from Opera and so on.

Emdek, on the other hand, focused the development more to fix anything under the hood before starting to add more features.

While I respect his arguments I believe that was a not productive approach (and I told him in less "suspect" times).

I was really enthusiast when I read about the Otter project (an still I'm) but the fact is that with Vivaldi I felt @home since the day one, I felt somewhat @home using Qupzilla and Opium, but I still feel "naked" using Otter.

That's not a suggestion to give up (absolutely not) , but a renewed suggestion to rethink the development path.

My two cents.  ;)
17
Otter Browser Forum / Re: Otter browser and Qupzilla.
Quote from: Frenzie on

If I recall correctly, Emdek said that most of the things that could be taken from e.g. Qupzilla are now already standard Qt 5.2 features. But yeah, it sounds to me like e.g. its speed dial might be worth investigating.


Quote from: Emdek on

The Solutor, it's not always possible to simply borrow some code (licenses are compatible, so it's not a problem), but for sure it could be source of inspiration how some stuff could be done, kind of reference implementation. ;-)


Surely I'm aware that is not a simple cut and paste matter but, as you said, could be worth to look in to it, to see if some time can be saved.

Quote
The biggest difference is that QupZilla is focused on single rendering engine (currently QtWebKit, most probably moving to QtWebEngine in future) while Otter aims to support multiple backends (basic support for Gecko should be fairly easy to do using Qt bindings for mozembed).


It's just my personal opinion, but I'm afraid that putting a lot of effort trying to make the browser engine agnostic, can be limiting on the UI side and can "waste" a lot of time on development on something that most of the user doesn't really need/appreciate, even the power users used to Opera.

What I mean is that the average Opera user is already prone to accept some little glitches on the rendering side, while it miss every single UI feature.
After all we have already dozen of browsers, some of them are already multi engine (think to lunascape), but we currently have zero browsers fully resembling Opera.

Otter has already a subset of  the opera features, Qupzilla has ha different subset, Opium has another subset, Firefox (with a ton of extensions) can be somewhat "Operized", but none of them is a real replacement.

So my hope is that the focus will not be lost during Otter's development.

I don't know how it sounds in English or in Polish languages, but in Italy we have a said: "better is the enemy of good", in my personal experience that said is right. ;)
18
Otter Browser Forum / Otter browser and Qupzilla.
Hi

First message here, even if I was one of the first people who noticed the news about the newborn browser.

As I already said  elsewhere I consider it a great hope for the people orphaned by the death of the true Opera development, and given I'm not a programmer I'm trying to help with some suggestions.

I suggested a couple of specific details on github, but the one I have in  mind now is more matter than a forum discussion than a bug filing on github, so I subscribed the forum.

Back to the subject, before the born of Otter i used Qupzilla for awhile, and I consider it also a great piece of code.

Now while the goals of both project are not exactly the same, Qupzilla reminds Opera in a lot of details: personalization menu, speeddial, basic theming, a lot of settings are the same and so on...

Unfortunately for the Opera lovers, Qupzilla doesn't aim to replicate opera but "just" to create a multiplatform, lightweight, independent browser.
So we will never see on Qupsilla's todo an email client, an operalink hook, a sidepanel[ s] and so on...

On the other hand, Otter aims to be a viable Opera alternative, but its development was started way later, so is obvious that is less mature.

Now what I'm going to ask:
why not reuse part of the Qupzilla code in Otter (say menus, speeddial and so on) and focus the development efforts on the areas where Qupzilla will never progress (because its different goals), say email/irc/notes integration, operalink emulation, compression support and so on?

I'm not a programmer, but given Qupzilla is opensource, and based on QT like Otter, I guess it's feasible, and I guess that a little cooperation between both the project should lead in better efficiency and in faster development, avoiding to reinvent the wheel, where the features overlaps.

What do you think ?

Thanks in advance for your attention