Opera Experience

I've found that the widget selection for Opera has grown a fair bit since the initial release of TP2. We're at about 51 widgets and there's some pretty cool ones. I've personally grown to like the Bash.org one as well as hangman, myopera and some others.

I'm using a widget to write this blog entry, which is definitely different... not just because I hardly blog on the site, but because I'm not even on the site to do it.

It'll be interesting to see how widgets grow and what comes in the future.

Last night I got to have fun... I recently converted a friend who used Firefox over to Opera (hey, they liked the free price tag during the party). Anyhow, he ended up freaking out when he found out it would download torrents inside the browser... like he was happy and putting emoticons all over the place. In his excitement, he ended up changing his MSN display name so something along the lines of, "BitTorrent in Opera!!! Opera rules, Firefox sucks!". I wasn't overly impressed with the name (it's not the best way to say you like something), but just ignored it.

About an hour later, he posted this conversation of a guy who absolutely flamed the hell out of Opera. I swear he must have been reading a list of "common misconceptions of opera". He was putting out lies like it had worse CSS support than any other browser, that the security was horrible and a tonne of other lies that resulted in me getting in touch with him.

First thing I asked was what rendering problems he could show me. All of them were either invalid code or just plan bad coding. It wasn't long until he was embarassed about his code (he was a "professional" web designer). Next we moved on to exploits. He said that there were just as many exploits for Opera as Firefox. That changed rather quickly when I provided the links to securnia (or whatever) and it said there was 22 expoits for Firefox 1.x and only 7 for Opera 8. I didn't even have to point out all were patched for Opera while... not all were for Firefox.

In the end he appologized and admitted he was probably wrong about "opera sucking". Being who I am, I didn't care and we talked on. He's since installed Opera and giving it a test run. I said to him, "I don't care if you end up not liking it, just don't like it for the right reasons."

So what's with all this misconception of Opera being a lowsy renderer and having all these problems? Yeah, sure, it sucks in quirks mode and there's a few rendering bugs here and there, but it's not like a lot of people make it out to be. And yes, the stability of the current 8.1 beta isn't so great, I get a crash a day... normally when I'm closing a tab. Everything has some flaws and are cut short in their own areas.

When I created my site http://hauglanddesigns.com/ at the beginning of this year, I was very excited. Everything worked great. Then when I learned of a way to do rollovers with CSS instead of Javascript, I was more excited. Quickly I replaced to code and had everything in place for the CSS rollovers (after doing some modding to the code to make it more efficient.)

I opened it in Opera and was suddenly faced with a problem. At random times it doesn't fully render the images of the menu. Sometimes it will render all but one button (fixes when you put the mouse over it) and other times it will only render a portion of a button. It's very odd and random. Sometimes it works perfect.

I wasn't sure whether it was an Opera related problem or something that all browsers were affected by so I opened up the site in IE and Firefox and to my displeasure, it worked fine in both browsers. I tested it dozens of times just to confirm the situation. It appears to be an Opera-only problem that I've yet to figure out.

Sort of annoying, but I've learned to live with it.