My Opera
Help Opera Open the Web
Have you had problems displaying a site in Opera or received a message saying that you are using an unsupported browser? In most cases, these problems occur on sites that use non-standard code or that fail to correctly recognize Opera, either accidently or maliciously.
What can you do to help?
- Contact the site
- Contact the site and inform them about the problem. Let them know you would like to see the site work with all browsers, including Opera. Feel free to refer them to this page: Why open the Web?
- Change your browser's ID
-
On sites that "sniff" for browsers, it will sometimes help to change Opera's identification. This is the piece of information that Web developers can use or abuse to detect the browser you are using. Sometimes it is used to block Opera completely, or to send Opera different code than other browsers even though the original code works correctly. Opera identifies as Opera by default, but you can change that by editing the site preferences. This can be done by right clicking on the page, selecting
Edit site preferences...
, clicking on theNetwork
tab, and selecting another option from theBrowser identification
drop down.Identifying as another browser keeps
Opera
in the user agent string, while masking removes all traces of Opera. It is preferable to keep Opera in the user agent string if at all possible. Otherwise, your browser will not be included in Web site statistics as Opera, and site owners will less likely care enough to fix such issues. We would greatly appreciate it if you contact the site in question if you are blocked when using Opera. The site owners will be much more likely to fix any issues with their site if they hear that their users or customers are affected. - Report the issue to the Open the Web team
- Opera has a dedicated Open the Web team for contacting sites and working with them to resolve issues, and enable them to support Opera and other standards compliant browsers. This is a global team who work with some of the biggest web properties to improve Opera's Web compatibility. You can report bugs to Opera using the Bug Tracking System Wizard. After a bug is analysed by Opera QA, Opera bugs will be filed for Opera developers to fix and web site bugs will be assigned to the Open the Web team.
- Join the "Open the Web" forum
- See what other Opera users are doing to open the Web and share your own experiences in our forum.
Resources
Do you want to convince a site about the importance of Opera? The following pages might be of help:
Open the Web
Develop in Opera
If you write your pages in standards-compliant code, and test it in Opera, your site will be more likely to work in all major browsers.
Browser JavaScript
Browser JavaScript is a feature that allows Opera to automatically fix incompatible Web pages, out of date scripts, and pages that inadvertently block Opera.