OpenIDSticking with Opera 9
It’s been a month and a half since I started using Opera 9, with a promise to report back later. I’m still using it, although some of the things I liked initially have faded while others have emerged.
Firstly, the ability to browse cached documents offline turned out to be a dud. The behaviour I was observing (where I could view pages from my cache while disconnected) was due to the following setting, in Preferences -> Advanced -> History:
As someone whose work involves making websites the idea of seeing stale documents for five hours is pretty horrifying, so I changed that to “check documents never” as soon as I saw it (I’m pretty confident that doesn’t affect conditional-GET, which should work regardless). As soon as I did that I lost the ability to browse offline. Browser vendors take note: you can still be the first modern browser to implement a proper offline mode!
The disadvantage of changing those setting is that they can break JavaScript image preloaders, leading to an unsettling flicker when you mouse over some links. That’s why I’ve left my image setting above to check every five minutes.
Despite losing offline browsing, other features have popped up that have kept me happy:
Opera is the only Mac browser I’ve used that includes a working full-screen mode; great for presentations.
Hitting space moves you down the height of the viewport, as with other browsers. Hitting space at the bottom of the page takes you to the next page in the ’sequence’, if there is one. My first guess was that this used
<link rel="next">, but it also works on Yahoo!, Technorati and Google search results pages which don’t have those links. I suppose it’s looking for any link on the page with ’Next’ as the link text. Whatever it’s doing, it works surprisingly well.Site compatibility really is excellent; I run in to sites that don’t work in Opera about as often as I do sites that don’t work in Firefox. Part of that might be due to Opera’s ingenious browser.js file, which includes Greasemonkey-style site-specific fixes and automatically updates itself once a week. Clever, but a bit scary at the same time.
The built-in IRC client is good as well—if it wasn’t for Colloquy it would be my first choice for IRCing on the Mac.
Finally, Opera’s low memory footprint continues to keep me from switching back to Safari or Firefox. My Mac (a two and a half year old PowerBook) is noticeably less sluggish now that those two applications have been relegated to JavaScript hacking (gotta love FireBug) and the occasional misbehaving site.
I haven’t even touched Opera Mail yet, and the gadget support is something I played with once and never used again (but then I don’t use Dashboard that much either).
Overall I’m extremely happy with Opera 9 and I’d recommend giving it a go—especially if you’ve tried and disliked an older version.
Jeff Croft - 6th August 2006 18:48 - #
OK, I couldn't resist commenting on a browser related post! Sorry!
To go over your first 2 points:
There's a lot to love about Opera, but it needs a REALLY native OS X theme before I can switch.
Jon Hicks - 6th August 2006 19:24 - #
Dave M. - 6th August 2006 20:00 - #
Michael - 6th August 2006 21:21 - #
I had a small problem with Opera because of how it rendered ems on my site. When I changed from a base font size of small to 76% (I wanted to get away from hacks that I use to tell IE x-small), Opera made all of my pre elements a third wider than in any other browser. When I went back to a base font of small, it rendered the pre elements correctly.
Of course this is nothing compared to problems I had with Safari. While Firefox, Konquerer, Camino, Opera, Netscape, even AOL and IE all worked fine, Safari had problems, especially with my comment form. I now have it all figured out but it did give me a headache for a couple of days. Then don't get me started on javascript and Safari (yell!!!). I'm finding a lot of it works on every other browser in the world but Safari. I'm starting to look at Safari as the new IE 5.x Mac, buggy.
Tanny O'Haley - 6th August 2006 21:33 - #
It's Command-J is OS X, and it's absolutely noting like DownThemAll!. It just shows all the links in a tab. OK, that might be helpful. However, when I go to download the items I selected, it doesn't download the "files". It download a web page. I attempted both types of downloads presented in the Save combobox.
As for the userjs support. Are these scripts the same as those used by Greasemonkey? Can I install them as easily as I can with Firefox and Greasemonkey?
Now, as for the Widgets, I am really not impressed with those. I am using the Google toolbar widget. The problem I have with it is that it floats outside the application window. This makes me move my app window down to make room for it above the window. I would prefer to have a section of Opera's window contain the widgets. Or have a widget fit in the main window like a toolbar can be moved around in other apps.
Sorry, it's light years ahead of Internet Explorer, but it hasn't caught up with Firefox.
Trust me thought, I keep my eyes on it all the time. I'm no loyalist. If I find a better browser than the one I am currently using, I switch.
Dave M. - 6th August 2006 23:36 - #
Opera can use Greasemonkey scripts as-is, in fact. Of course if the script uses a feature that Mozilla dn Opera don't have in common it won't work,but beyond that, it should be compatible.
To use UserJS, one need only set a directory where to look for scripts, and any user.js or .js files in that directory will be used. I'm still waiting for Opera to allow instant downloading to one's script directory with application/x-opera-script, but I guess that'd be a bad idea security-wise.
J. King - 7th August 2006 00:46 - #
Simon, nice to see you sticking with Opera.
Regarding the "Next" links. Opera has a file named 'fastforward.ini' in your profile directory which you can look at and modify if you need to add more "next" links. You can add more to the 'next' vocabulary there, plus prioritise how we treat wand, the link element and image browsing (if you browse directory listings with images in, and you open one image, you can use whichever means of going 'next' to go to the next image.
Regarding User Javascript: Opera is mostly Greasemonkey compatible. Mostly because Opera does not support cross-domain XMLHttpRequests. If needed, you can hack around this using Cross-Document messaging. Further, there is a repository of User JavaScripts at userjs.org (there is a subversion repository as well, if you want to grab all of the scripts)
Arve Bersvendsen - 7th August 2006 10:55 - #
gcardinal - 7th August 2006 14:47 - #
perrick - 8th August 2006 13:08 - #
Michael - 8th August 2006 15:24 - #
Not quite: Opera won't remember form data you entered at any point during the session. Other than that, though, it's about as close to exact as things get. :)
J. King - 9th August 2006 00:14 - #
GAllen - 10th August 2006 22:08 - #
Jan Peterka - 11th August 2006 19:45 - #
Emrah Baskaya - 12th August 2006 18:00 - #
Charlie - 14th August 2006 06:27 - #
Emrah Baskaya - 14th August 2006 23:18 - #
I use Opera almost full time now, the only time I find a need to use other browsers is either for checking Google mail (as Gmail in Opera seems to lose my Quick Contacts window) or for checking that websites I'm designing are redering correctly.
The best thing about Opera is the small memory foot print, which is much less than Firefox and hardly changes as I add more and more tabs.
Steven - 30th August 2006 12:32 - #
Raf - 31st August 2006 17:15 - #
chris - 1st September 2006 22:01 - #
Yusuf Narcin - 24th September 2006 22:10 - #
webdev - 29th October 2006 14:19 - #
Darryl - 5th November 2006 09:38 - #