[11.60-12.00] Why Google disables some functions

Okay, I think most people should know that. There is a way to change your User-Agent string and make Google think you are using Chrome, which lets you get full functionality from Google servers, not some "special" incomplete code...
Google's browser policy annoys me, but today, after some experimentation, I changed my mind and started to support Google's decision to block Opera users from some functions (i.e. +1 toolbar and MapsGL)

Here's what you can do by yourself:
1. Open the website you like (e.g. Google+)
2. Open Opera Dragonfly (Right click - Inspect element)
3. Go to "Network" tab
4. There you'll see "Network options" sub-tab
5. "Enable global Header Overrides" there
6. Set "Chrome 12" preset
7. Change User-Agent slightly to mimic Chrome 16 on Windows7 x64, for example:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.36 Safari/535.7"
8. Click Save.
9. Reload the page.

This way you'll get the code intended for Chrome... First thing you'll notice – Immense LAG when loading +1 notifications, when scrolling and when clicking buttons on the right side of the Google toolbar...

I have Core i5 @ 3.5GHz, 4 cores and 8GB of RAM... It's pretty powerful machine... I restricted opera.exe to core3 and all chrome.exe instances to core2 and did some comparisons.

On ANY Google page with the toolbar, when it is loading notifications, until the actual number of notifications appear, opera.exe uses 100% CPU, but chrome.exe uses ~10%, slightly above the baseline usage...
When you click buttons on the toolbar and get popup menus, opera.exe make spikes to 100% CPU, but chrome.exe does not show any CPU usage increase...
The most interesting effects you get in GMail: if you just move your cursor above the list of e-mails very fast, even chrome.exe starts using 50-60% CPU (3.5GHz)... Needless to say, opera.exe reaches 100% very fast and starts to lag badly...

The CONCLUSION: there is some serious problem somewhere in the Opera's JS engine... Something that Chrome does fast, Opera does very slow, maybe even 10-20 times slower, and Opera developers have to find it and fix it... Until that Google will not enable the +1 toolbar for you, because it will definitely make all Opera users suffer from lag and blame Google for that...

And a note for Opera 12 testers eager to test MapsGL: using this trick with User-Agent, you will get MapsGL popup and can try it, but currently it crashes VIDEO DRIVER... If you are using Windows Vista/7/8, you are safe, but on WindowsXP you'll get BSOD... That's why Google does not enable MapsGL for you: they probably tested it on Opera 12, it failed, they disabled it... They don't need you to test the feature which they know does not work...

PS: Sorry for my English, I tried my best...

I couldn't agree more. I don't use Opera with Gmail anymore.

interesting post, thanks for the info!

GMail + Opera = fail

Originally posted by eliotcougar:

there is some serious problem somewhere in the Opera's JS engine... Something that Chrome does fast, Opera does very slow, maybe even 10-20 times slower, and Opera developers have to find it and fix it

One serious problem is that Opera's JavaScript engine is updated quite rarely. But definitely, Carakan should not perform so worse - even if we consider Chrome's frequent JavaScript engine enhancements, for MAXIMUM it would make V8 3x faster than Carakan. According to your testcase, Carakan's performance really seems to be very very bad - there got to be a bug in Carakan somewhere. I am eagerly waiting for a new JavaScript engine - atleast 5x faster than Carakan.

It doesn't solve my problem, I can't see the body of my messages in Gmail:

@eliotcougar
thx to you amazon cloud reader is finally working, and after loading book covers dragonfly can be turned off

BTW, Google stopped blocking Opera from displaying fully functional Google+ Navigation bar recently... ...but only on Google+ pages... Other services still display basic Navigation bar...

The whole Google+ thingie work much more smoothly in Opera 11.60 now, even "Hangouts Extra", but Image Viewer still impossible to close due to JS errors...