Be nice to Opera, or else.

January 17, 2007 · Filed under Articles, Blog

I have had a bit of a traffic hit lately largely due to my last post being picked up by a couple of larger blogs and them kindly directing some traffic my way. It’s a great thing to watch unfold, going from 4 loyal readers that I can actually see sitting across from me at my workplace to actually noticing a couple of IP addresses dotted across Europe, North America and India, courtesy of Google Analytics.

The emails have really picked up as well. One thing I like about the Web Standards crowd is their pedantic enthusiasm for which each of us pride ourselves on, each having heated opinions on silly, trivial items such as definition list semantics or on the best way to comment your html code. So it was not too much of a surprise to me when some of these new visitors to Standardzilla would start to call me on a few unfinished items on my site. I kind of expected this sooner or later despite me not so publicised ‘to-do’ list that is slowly being chipped away at week by week.

One reader emailed:

" As a site promoting the concepts of ‘documenting the current state of usability, web standards, accessibility …’ it would be a good idea to ensure that the site itself is standards compliant. "

I did do a check on this one and he was right, I had ONE error. The WordPress includes were somehow leaving a <div> off at the end of a couple of components which resulted in an unclosed <div> causing the non-validation. Hmmm, bit picky, but very spot on. Good eye.

Requests like this kept pouring in and it soon it seemed I had my own personal user testing happening for Standardzilla. Great! I am fine with that but here is the other funny thing, they were all Opera users.

All of them you say? How can I be so sure? Well, the emails all end to this tune:

" … and your website does not work in Opera 9.10 "

It was a large error in Opera 9.10 I must admit, but I thought it was the Mac users who held the title of loud minority users who got to be the squeaky wheel? Since when was this handed over to the Opera crowd?

Now I must admit I don’t get Opera. I do test and develop my sites in all browsers (including Opera) but I am by no means one of those guys that knows all the “be nice to Opera” hacks without an online resource, but the last large problem that I was being called on was in fact because in the newest release of Opera 9.10 there seemed to be a problem with clearing floats. This caused huge problems with the faux columns which creates the background of my site. How could that happen in a new release when it worked just fine in the last version of Opera? Sheeesh.

But it’s all fine now, tweaks have been made and it’s all cruisy once again in all versions of Opera. The replies have come back and Opera users have found their happy place when it comes to Standardzilla and floats are clearing as they should do.

So I would love to hear from some more Opera users (currently sitting at almost 7% for Standardzilla, or maybe it’s just Ben logging in at home *and* at work :-P) and tell me why you love and use Opera so much and what features draw you to it? I am clearly not an Opera user as I do love my Firefox, but I do make an effort to make my websites work in Opera and all other browsers feasibly possible. I have also used some of the great features such as ’small screen view’ when coding a few sites for consoles.

But nothing works in it! Why do you endure the pain? What does Opera have that Firefox doesn’t? Why do you have such passion? Am I missing something?

Enlighten me :-)

Comments

Andrew K. says: January 17, 2007 @ 8:20 pm

Whoah, now you’ve reaaally got problems — the markup examples you’ve stuck in your post aren’t encoded and have botched your sidebar (and validity).

As for the Opera complaints, blame Ben. It’s worked or me for years.

Standardzilla says: January 17, 2007 @ 8:29 pm

man you are fast Andrew :-) Yeah, I just noticed it’s all blown up! Ah well, gonna crack a beer and figure this out once and for all.

Salman says: January 18, 2007 @ 6:12 pm

hmm Opera. I could really go on for hours you know.
First off, nearly all the things Firefox does are in opera. For example
- Session restore when Browser crashes.
- Zoom in when the sick web designer has used absolute measurements.
- google at your finger tips.

Wht Firefox / IE lacks is
- Notepad or notes in Opera. (yeah yeah, you can download plugins for IE and Firefox to have the same functionality, but opera comes bundled with it.
- Built in Email Cleint (You cannot send emails in HTML, altough you can read one)
- Built in RSS Reader
- Built in Chat software (Altough I haven’t tried it yet)
Notes has a cool functionality. you can use it as a notepad thing, or you can select the content, right click in opera, choose Copy to NOTE.
Later when you neeed the URL, just double click that note entry.

- Keybaord Shortcuts - Loads of them for almost everything. You don’t need a mouse to surf the web
- Widgets
- Standard based Testing.
- Web Site testing tool.

For another load, visit
http://Opera.com
http://www.opera.com/support/service/
http://www.opera.com/support/search/supsearch.dml?index=642

John says: January 19, 2007 @ 8:06 am

Why Opera? Just to be an awkward.
Truthfully …
- fast
- smooth scrolling (yes, I have tried numerous firefox plugins, but for scanning though large amounts of text opera is great. Just middle click and scroll away)
- security
- built in RSS reader
- useful defaults, eg Ctrl+z re-opens the last closed tab
- full page zoom (just like IE7 now has)

I have used it for years on windows/linux/mac and used to run it on my old Psion, but it is true that firefox has caught up and in many areas surpassed opera (eg AdBlock, Tabmix plus, WebDeveloper, form auto-completion).
I guess speed is the killer feature if you use the web day in day out.

John says: January 19, 2007 @ 8:39 am

References re Opera speed
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php

Nick Cowie says: January 19, 2007 @ 11:06 am

Opera real page zooming (great on laptop screens with 150+ pixels per inch) IE7 page zoom is tied to page width and fails sometimes (+ IE7 does not run on *nix)

FF still my browser of choice due to Firebug

Ben Buchanan says: January 19, 2007 @ 11:46 pm

I consider Opera to be the best, fastest and most secure browser. I compared the Secunia advisories back in July 05 and found Opera had the only 100% patch rate of IE, FF and Opera. I periodically check back in on that and have found the stats haven’t really changed.

Actually most pages/sites work in Opera. Gmail tends to be a little twitchy, largely since Google aggressively don’t give a toss. These days Opera fights back with browser javascript to fix busted sites… Gmail is one of them.

More often pages work, they’re just not quite right. A few things move around a bit, some things break. I’ve found that when stuff really goes pear shaped (hi, ticketmaster!), they’re frequently stuffed in FF too.

You probably got a lot of email because 1) the main page was totally unreadable; 2) the nature of the blog; and 3) Opera users are encouraged to be proactive. They are also encouraged to be polite, but that’s frequently lost in transmission… (*cringe*)

Other things about Opera… they’re very open. Anyone can get into the forums and end up chatting with the people who really work on the product. You can also get into flame wars like any other forum. Some feature requests do get ignored, usually with good reason and some exasperation when people won’t accept no for an answer ;) But seriously, Opera is just a good company - they build trust with their users.

To answer your question directly… what features do I really like:
- tabs before everyone else had them (couldn’t resist)
- session restore
- good keyboard shortcuts (i know familiarity plays a big part, but ask a keyboard user sometime)
- mouse gestures
- built in rss reader and bittorrent client
- search shortcuts (eg. “g search term” for google, i have mine set up for “d blah” for dictionary.com)
- preset items for form population rather than “autofill everything you’ve ever typed and mis-typed”
- excellent form recovery. if something happens and you click “back”, you usually get everything back how it was
- very simple method to get your browser chrome back in crippled windows
- Reload From Cache. Awesome. I can view source straight to Textpad, edit, then reload the changes on the fly. Beats FF’s “edit html” which doesn’t work very well for me.

…that’s off the top of my head anyway.

Now I know people will chime in with vast lists of FF extensions; but the list above is entirely composed of native features. They won’t stop working in a dot point upgrade because some guy got sick of updating his extension. Many people aren’t at all worried about this; but personally I like native features.

To be fair, the developer tools aren’t quite as polished right now; so I tend to use FF heavily at work when bugfixing. You can actually extend Opera too - user js is basically the same as extensions, just not as slick.

Also to be fair - my experience in various comment threads, forums, etc is that there are plenty of vicious Firefox groupies out there. It’s ridiculous, really. I like this quote:

Awz: What do you think about the conflict (among users) between Opera and Firefox? And what should be done, if anything, about it?

Blake Ross: I think it’s ridiculous. Millions of people out there rely on us to make the Web better, not have pissing contests. Let’s just agree that…
- Firefox stole features from Opera.
- Opera stole features from Firefox.
- Opera is a better embedded browser (congratulations on Wii).
- Both are fantastic browsers.
- Asa is a troll.

…and get back to serving the people.

So anyway, maybe there’s something in that ramble which explains why I like Opera ;)

Ben Buchanan says: January 19, 2007 @ 11:46 pm

Oops, forgot the link for that quote: http://operawatch.com/news/2007/01/interview-with-firefox-founder-and-creator-blake-ross.html

Marcus says: April 6, 2007 @ 2:47 pm

Firefox has closed the gap considerably. But the singular reason I don’t change from Opera to Firefox is that my favorites are stored as one flat file text file in Opera which is too good to give up. I can move that file around with considerable ease. Put it on a usb thumb drive or email it around, and I’ll always have my favorites.

Turk Hit Box says: May 26, 2007 @ 9:48 pm

I always use firefox with Grease Monkey scripts, I like to personlize thats all. Firefox never let me down; crashed a few times, but everything was restored each time.