Thursday 21 January 2010

No Opera 3!

I have often wondered why Opera 3 and 4 never appear on counters. Even Extreme tracking which records all visits since the counter was set up does not have early Opera versions listed; even tough you feel that for long established sites someone must have arrived on Opera 3 or 4.

Recently, I have been playing with Haiku OS, an OS inspired by BeOS, and although only released as a first alpha it is excellent, and shows the potential to become an established operating system.

In 2000 Opera released Opera 3.62 for BeOS, which I installed onto Haiku to see how counters reported Opera 3. Unfortunately, not one counter managed to count a visit by Opera 3, and only one recored Opera, without a version:

* Most counters failed to load with Opera 3, and if counter does not load theres no counting:

ShinyStat
BraveNet
BelStat
SiteMeter
StatCounter
GoStats

* Four counters appeared using Opera 3.62, but two failed to record as a result:

Extreme Tracking
Motigo

* Leaving just two who registered something:

Onestat - Internet Explorer 5
24Log - Identified Opera, but no version number.

I retried with the settings as "Spoof Entirely as Mozilla" but this site failed to load.

Saturday 16 January 2010

Opera Private Tab, Not So Private

Added 03/08/2010: I have tested the latest versions of Opera (10.60) on FreeBSD and Linux, Opera have now resolved this issue and Private Tab is not leaving a cookie record anymore.

Opera 10.5 pre-alpha is available, and I have enjoyed playing with it on a Linux machine. It works very well, but there is one thing which I find odd, the introduction of "private tab" and "private window". When Internet Explorer 8 introduced this concept I was sceptical - how can this be better than a Linux live CD? With Firefox also including this feature, it became inevitable that Opera would have to have it.

What I find strange is that when you close your "private tab" the cookies still remain! Hardly private.

I still believe the Linux live CD to be a better option, even with the drawback that most which include Opera are still on version 9.