Opera is a terrific Web browser and they continue to develop it to be very feature rich. I don’t use Opera as my primary browser because of the lack of compatibility with many Google services, but I do use it from time to time. The best thing about it is that I never have a memory leak!
Opera has stepped up the game even more by offering a new AJAX feature which sounds really great. Here is how the new system works:
With the traditional AJAX implementation, the browser continually polls the server, sending requests to the server, asking to get data back, making new HTTP requests for every single poll, putting more strain on the server than needed.
In Opera 9 you can instead open a persistent connection to the server, sending data to the client when new information is available, eliminating the need for continuous polling.
Since continuous polling is no longer needed it relieves some of the strain from the servers. If you want to see how smooth it runs you can try out this example that Opera setup for a RealTime Web Chat (view a screenshot). Sure this is only a chat system but if Google implemented this AJAX system into their services then they would reduce the load on their servers which could make it easier for them to add even more features.
I give credit to the Opera Team for developing such a secure, stable, and advanced browser. Hopefully other browsers will soon see the benefits this could have.
News Source: Opera Watch [via Digg]
Sure, its nice to have cool features like this, but when your in-built rss reader on your Google homepage and other Google ajax services still don’t work it makes you switch back to ie or ff. I still prefer Opera for viewing static pages because of the programs loading speed and the general page loading speed.
Unfortunately, for many people the reason for not using Opera more is a lack of Google compatibility. What’s really bad is that I don’t think it is Opera’s fault, instead I think it is Google designing their services to only work properly with certain browsers.
Sure they cover a large portion of the market share with the Firefox and IE compatibility but I still don’t think they should forget about the other browsers.
The Idea of persistent HTTP-Connections is not new and as far as I know Firefox also supports this. The problem with persistent connections is that the server must hold data for each session resulting in a resource problem at the server side.
Traditionly the server forgets everything when a request is finished and frees up its memory. With persistens connections memory can’t be freed so you need realy “big server”.
It is better for the server to get many requests, check for data and return with no data in milliseconds the to hold thousands of persistent connections.
That is the one persistent problem with most Google services – as great as they are it’s totally different from everything else on the web. They don’t conform to any web standards, because most pages are generated using a mish-mash of AJAX, PHP and JavaScript. For these reasons any difference in the way a browser handles this kind of code can mess their services up. I would be interested to know if the similar Windows Live and Yahoo services work on Opera. If they do, Google truly needs to think about how they’re making the services.
I actually wonder how much of their code looks something like:
if (browser = Firefox){
//do this
}
elseif (browser = IE){
//do this
}
I wonder if most of their code is really browser specific or if it is just small sections. I imagine that they have to do more of that then you think which makes it difficult to support all browsers, unless of course they used standards.
The best part is that the [code.google.com] which helps developers create AJAX sites, will “support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection.”
It appears the Ajax works, just the javascript layout is the problem, Google should try and make it cross browser compatible, well until somebody designs web 2.0 standards that include Ajax and javascript.