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Topic: Competitor to Otter browser (Read 9698 times)

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #1
Oddly enough the font in the menu on that site shows up correctly in Firefox and Opera/Presto but not in Otter? It seems to have something to do with styles for not-visited.

Anyway, sounds interesting. I especially like the idea of this hack of the HTML5 video element:
No native video support. Every embedded player generally sucks. Instead,
we will offer two buttons in place of HTML5 video elements: download
(as $GOD intended) and stream (ie, launch in your favorite player such
as mplayer).

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #2
Interesting how one's pattern recognition is working :spock:
The Video Element has gone unnoticed by me, instead I was wondering (from the screenshots) about slashdot.org&steampunk computer and "Taking the Hobbits to Isengard - 10h" :cheers:

PS: As I ever liked the idea of no "native" Video support within the browser - I ever liked the concept of embedded videos which where played within the browser with the direct-show filter of my choice (in most case that would be ffdshow-tryouts)

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #3
The Video Element has gone unnoticed by me, instead I was wondering (from the screenshots) about slashdot.org&steampunk computer and "Taking the Hobbits to Isengard - 10h"

Hah, I didn't even look at the Slashdot screenshot because I recognized Slashdot from the thumbnail. :P But it's on the Hobbit video screenshot that I noticed the download/stream options.

PS: As I ever liked the idea of no "native" Video support within the browser - I ever liked the concept of embedded videos which where played within the browser with the direct-show filter of my choice (in most case that would be ffdshow-tryouts)

For short videos it's fine, but if you want to watch an actual web series (let's say TableTop, since the new season's on) it's a PITA not to have a proper media player with separate windows etc.

Incidentally, the author of Fifth says Opera peaked around 9.6x, but that particular usage scenario was last (semi-)covered by detach window in 9.2x. I'd also point out that disabling speed dial significantly improved new-tab opening speed in those days.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #4

Oddly enough the font in the menu on that site shows up correctly in Firefox and Opera/Presto but not in Otter? It seems to have something to do with styles for not-visited.

What other browser uses the exact same webkit, do you know? Have you tried?

PS: As I ever liked the idea of no "native" Video support within the browser - I ever liked the concept of embedded videos which where played within the browser with the direct-show filter of my choice (in most case that would be ffdshow-tryouts)

For me also re-directing certain things to other programs always seemed a good idea. If mailto links can be directed to another mailer and downloads to another downloader (both possible in Opera), then it should be natural to direct (1) media to proper media players and (2) textareas to text editors.

Incidentally, point #1 used to be handled rather well by browsers and websites some 15 years ago. Media was more often offered as streamable and browsers offered opportunities to direct the links into media players. Netscape cooperated with RealPlayer and IE with WMP.

As to point #2, I kept asking for it in Opera forums ever since I joined, but it was never implemented. Now it's offered as an option in at least Elinks and DWB browser, so there evidently are people who see the point of having a proper text editor.


Incidentally, the author of Fifth says Opera peaked around 9.6x, but that particular usage scenario was last (semi-)covered by detach window in 9.2x.

You mean true detach? I have mentioned this to Emdek several times, and I will more. It's quite an important thing for me. Right now I need to use separate buttonless browsers, such as DWB, for this function.

As much as I like the manifesto and other statements by the head developer of Fifth, I suspect his enthusiasm will not materialise substantially, if he cannot manage to organise a dev team and other contributors. For example cascade and tiling of tabs is another thing I am very much hoping to see and I think it's not easy to achieve. I suspect it's likelier to be implemented in Otter rather than Fifth. I wish the developers would communicate and cooperate.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #5
As to point #2, I kept asking for it in Opera forums ever since I joined, but it was never implemented. Now it's offered as an option in at least Elinks and DWB browser, so there evidently are people who see the point of having a proper text editor.

If I write longer posts I tend to compile them in Zim these days, even though textarea-backup usually has me covered. Elinks is in some ways slightly more elegant than Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, but at the same time there aren't really any other terminal-based mechanisms either so it's more of a necessity.

You mean true detach?

Yes, if memory doesn't betray me Opera 9.2x had the last working version of that feature. MDI is very useful, but sometimes it's just not good enough.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #6
Ah, ok - should have thought about my answer/comment regarding videos - what I meant for within a browser was to "not Fullscreen", within Site/Embedded Videos/Animations.
Of Course, for Media Content that is to be intended to be viewed in Full-Screen I also prefer an external Player (In my case MPC-HC (in regards to source material (Filters I want to add) either internal filter chain or with ffdshow-tryouts as external filter). And sometimes (and that was what I was also thinking about) I simply want to preview the stream within the browser before I decide to capture/download the stream/source...

PS: I never noticed/had the need for such a feature you are currently talking about in my O9 times - but since a few dozen moons I would really appreciate it :sigh: (together with a proper text-select tool (like in good editors ALT+mark is for a rectangular selection))

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #7
Ah, ok - should have thought about my answer/comment regarding videos - what I meant for within a browser was to "not Fullscreen", within Site/Embedded Videos/Animations.

It doesn't need to be fullscreen. MDI (or embedded) can't do anything like this:



There are two separate things here you just can't do in a so-called modern browser.

1. A window on top tucked away in a corner so you can keep an eye on it while you do some stuff that doesn't require your full attention.
2. Another window displaying the same video fullscreen on another output.

The first can be achieved in Opera 9.2x, where I actually used to do just that with some quick creative zooming of Flash videos. Things like the second will only ever be possible with a real media player. Which is why Silverlight/Flash-based stuff like Netflix is utterly worthless. I want to display my stuff on an arbitrary number of monitors in an arbitrary number of windows in arbitrary window sizes. What used to be called theater mode was a reasonably approximation for most use cases, but thanks to some DRM idiocy that went the way of the dodo around '06/'07ish.

PS Don't pay attention to the tabs. I prefer the windows panel and Ctrl + Tab, but thanks to that @#$# button Opera 10.50+ can't display just the titlebar or just the title- and menubar so I've been forced to use the default tab contraption lest I just have that @#$# button taking up an entire line of vertical space all by itself. You just cannot turn it off. Even moving it to a different toolbar is a no-go.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #8
MDI is very useful, but sometimes it's just not good enough.

Let's suppose that MDI means the kind of tabbed interface known from Eudora, Pegasus, and Opera. Opera is a step ahead compared to Eudora and Pegasus.

In Eudora and Pegasus you could not resize the open tabs as you wished. As far as I remember, Pegasus never revealed the application background, and neither Eudora or Pegasus did something like cascade in Opera.

In Opera, cascade was a natural thing. All tabs could be minimised and resized. When resized (floating), each tab had their own corner thingy as if they were windows and Opera were the desktop. When maximised, the tab's corner thingy appeared just below Opera window corner thingy. Here's what I mean by corner thingy:


Since this corner thingy was a natural part of the tab border when the tab was floating inside Opera, it made totally absolute natural perfect sense to keep the tab the same also when the tab was moved outside Opera window (detached!). The detached tab could be operated from its borders the same way outside Opera as inside.

This is true detach. Eudora and Pegasus did not have it. Opera was perfect this way. I want the same thing in Otter.

By the way, I have made my first comment to Emdek citing Fifth. I hope he's not too annoyed. I really want Otter to become perfect.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #9
I have no experience with either of those others, but the "Opera" way is the MDI definition as I've known it since MS-DOS (illustration). I'm sure you'd be able to find official Microsoft HID documents from the late '80s up to the early 2000s describing what it means.[1] The Windows 3.x Program Manager was also an MDI application (illustration), and it was the default mode of operation in programs like Microsoft Office as well. Opera didn't do anything special other than not stripping out the MDI functionality when other programs did. Opera in fact improved the basic MDI functionality through its windows panel.

[1] Insofar as they aren't merely internal or suffering of link rot.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #10
I'm happy to have remembered wrong :) Pegasus actually did cascade and showed its program background.


See how tabs inside the app window cascade nicely. They have their corner buttons too, just like the main app window has them.

Just below the tabs, i.e. just below the app background there's what we call the tabbar these days.

(Opera looked the same way up to version 6. When it hit version 7, I modified the interface to resemble 6 as close as possible, until it occurred to me to get rid of buttons and toolbars as far as possible and to combine the search bar with the address bar. This resulted in something that looked like Chrome before Chrome was invented, with the difference that I had a menubar, longer menus, tons of settings I could change, and a highly operative and configurable keyboard.)

When I said that Opera took it a step further from Eudora and Pegasus, I meant that I know no other program with true detach. See how in Pegasus the tabs look as if windows on a desktop, except that the desktop is the main app window. In Opera up to v. 9.2* you could have those tabs inside or outside the main app window, it would not change the appearance of the tab frame.

Nowadays when you do detach, it creates another main window. Vastly inferior.

Here's Eudora's interface for comparison. I'm not quite sure, but I guess it did not do cascade, even though I remember they did minimise. At any rate neither Eudora or Pegasus did true detach. Or maybe I simply did not discover it in those programs. I discovered it in Opera, because by default Opera 5 and 6 opened the downloads tab outside the main app window, demonstrating the functionality of true detach.


Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #11
(Opera looked the same way up to version 6. When it hit version 7, I modified the interface to resemble 6 as close as possible, until it occurred to me to get rid of buttons and toolbars as far as possible and to combine the search bar with the address bar. This resulted in something that looked like Chrome before Chrome was invented, with the difference that I had a menubar, longer menus, tons of settings I could change, and a highly operative and configurable keyboard.)

Same here. At first glance I thought Chrome looked really neat.

When I said that Opera took it a step further from Eudora and Pegasus, I meant that I know no other program with true detach. See how in Pegasus the tabs look as if windows on a desktop, except that the desktop is the main app window. In Opera up to v. 9.2* you could have those tabs inside or outside the main app window, it would not change the appearance of the tab frame.

Oh, yes. That was really useful. The windows panel and keeping the window size and position when detaching were beautiful things.

Nowadays when you do detach, it creates another main window. Vastly inferior.

Quite true.

I discovered it in Opera, because by default Opera 5 and 6 opened the downloads tab outside the main app window, demonstrating the functionality of true detach.

I think it might've been in MS Office in the late '90s, but I'm not completely sure.

 

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #12
Just a short Note:
Frenzie: Theater Mode (ATI) gone? Damned - I know that this computer under XP x64 with the old drivers had it still - just noticed now that under Win7 with current drivers it is truly gone - Damned! Would be Interesting if Matrox Cards still support to send the Overlay Image to an analog/digital output. And DRM shouldn't really be a problem, as the specs as far as I remember just demand a downscale to SD Resolution for a broken DRM chain... Bloody Fools - I really liked it to watch a Video on my TV (minimized MPC/MPC-HC) whilst working on the PC.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #13
Theater Mode (ATI) gone? Damned - I know that this computer under XP x64 with the old drivers had it still - just noticed now that under Win7 with current drivers it is truly gone - Damned!

nVidia used to have something similar, although iirc they managed to mess up scaling.

the specs as far as I remember just demand a downscale to SD Resolution for a broken DRM chain

Still sounds annoying, but as long as it only affects Blu-Rays (I don't even own a player; as if I'd pay a premium for stupid region-lock) I guess that doesn't sound too bad. :P

Bloody Fools - I really liked it to watch a Video on my TV (minimized MPC/MPC-HC) whilst working on the PC.

The drivers are hundreds of megabytes now, but as far as I can tell they somehow have less functionality than when they managed to be only a few dozen at most.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #14

The drivers are hundreds of megabytes now, but as far as I can tell they somehow have less functionality than when they managed to be only a few dozen at most.


Yup... and I am still missing (ok, there are third party solutions (from whom I prefer nor use one)) the ability to save and restore Desktop Icon positions (which was  basic functionality of Matrox Drivers since I bought my first Millennium Card, well - Matrox also included with each card (At least up to the G450 - aeh no wait, mh - could well be that the G200 was the last card with it) a small overlay-foil for the screen  and colour calibration utility, something I've never got with ATI or NVidiot Cards)

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #15
After much trying, I managed to get Fifth installed. It took nearly two days to build webkitfltk.

Edit: Does anyone else have Fifth installed? It has a decently visible spatial navigation, even though it suffers from that the navigation always begins from the beginning of the page, not from the beginning of the visible area.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #16
I didn't get around to it yet.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #17
Is Otter the only browser that can constrain Youtube's fullscreen?

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #18
It can still do that? Interesting. (I don't typically watch YouTube in Otter, let alone "fullscreen.")

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #19
(I don't typically watch YouTube in Otter, let alone "fullscreen.")
Neither do I, typically. But I like that it's there. I would like it even more if it were in more browsers. Still, mpv (+youtube-dl) makes for the most flexible video frame, any size. This is not likely to change for some time.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #20
Also using just about any video player on your computer uses about a fraction as much CPU time as YouTube in a browser. Which on your PC is probably only saving you a few Euros a year, maybe even a couple dozen, but on your laptop it literally means two to three times the battery life.

Re: Competitor to Otter browser

Reply #21
Also using just about any video player on your computer uses about a fraction as much CPU time as YouTube in a browser. Which on your PC is probably only saving you a few Euros a year, maybe even a couple dozen, but on your laptop it literally means two to three times the battery life.
Great to know. Additionally, it gets rid of advertising, a rather notable pleasant side-effect.