Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Beta 3 release (01-11-2014)

Third beta has been released!

Apart delays we got some new features.

Most important changes since beta 2:

    initial version of sidebar;
    added possibility to set Otter Browser as default under Windows;
    added initial versions of Website Preferences and Quick Preferences (F12);
    added Trash to Bookmarks Manager;
    added Ctrl+Tab tabs switching;
    added option to set user style sheet;
    added tray icon;
    allow to customize menu bar (JSON file);
    various minor fixes and improvements.

I would like to thank all contributors (again especially bajasoft and Chocimier), bug reporters, translators and all users.

Follow the news @ http://otter-browser.org

For about two months I hardly opened Otter, because it was inconvenient and clunky for me to use it. Now with the new release I decided to write a thorough critique, and to know properly what I am criticising, I did some testing on the new release.

Now I must say I am impressed with the progress. Specifically, there were keyboard shortcuts built into Otter that drastically conflicted with my usage. I had to delete the default shortcuts completely. There was no other way. And the empty setup file that was left, it didn't work for me two months ago. Now I went through the setup file again and I saw many more actions. I found what I needed, I assigned keyboard shortcuts and got much working. This process has its glitches, but the browser became usable again keyboard-wise and I am thankful for the good work

Other things that impress me in this release:

Adblock (content blocking) under right-click menu. It brings up a dialogue where to manage tick adblock lists on and off. In the profile folder I also found the adblock.ini and the lists as plain text files. This was quite likely the ideal way to build the adblock. Very Opera-like. Absolutely genius.

Opera bookmarks import. Tried it. Smooth, fast, and flawless. Trash gets duplicated as a real folder, but this is actually how it should be, because if there's something in Trash, then it is another folder with bookmark items in it. The process works far better than in Qupzilla. Even the bookmark keywords get transferred and work immediately. Pure brilliance.

Quick Bookmarks Access under Shift+F2. This opens a small dialogue where you type the bookmark keyword and you will fly to the destination. Works precisely like it originally used to in Opera. This will be certainly worth a mention when advocating Otter to others.

Menu items display corresponding keyboard shortcuts. When keyboard shortcuts are changed under Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Keyboard, the changes are immediately reflected in the menus. A very nice Opera-like touch.

about:config has grown a lot. Keep growing!

My critique will have to wait

Looks like the AUR package maintainer retired or something. Arch user repository reports containing 0.9.03 which is really weekly #43, while the complete beta 3, i.e. actual 0.9.03 was released some days later and contains some updates after weekly #43.

And the git version in AUR has been left behind at 0.9.01.

@DogMatix, this bar will be customizable, related discussion:
https://github.com/Emdek/otter/issues/356

@DogMatix, yeah, such button is planned too, the remaining issue is how to do it properly and in generic way.
I would like to avoid hardcoded position for it, allow to move it elsewhere if needed, the same applies to other widgets:

• window controls for fullscreen, I would like to add them in similar way to what Firefox offers;


• window controls for MDI.

So far best solution for menu button and window controls seems to have them defined in default locations and show them only when needed (in case of menu button only when menu bar is hidden) and while customizing (possibly using special tab, in similar way to how Firefox does it currently - while they ten to break some stuff they also have some interesting ideas too ;-)).
Later we could introduce options, so user could force them to be shown all the time etc.