Sticky post
Saturday, June 10, 2006 10:44:48 AM
psychological warfare, opera, browsers, incompatibilities
...
This blog is dedicated to identifying and (perhaps if god willing) finding resolution to the varitable amount of problems that Opera has with the latest web technologies.
As a web developer currently working with creating websites that are cross-browser compatible, I am convinced that through Opera's inability to properly render code reliably, to properly parse javascript or other Web 2.0 technologies, that the makers are playing a sick demented form of Psychological Warfare on us developers.
Truth be told, it's just a way to vent about the ulcer's I get when my client, who loves opera, says "it doesn't work in opera."
Thursday, July 20, 2006 10:39:10 AM
opera, font, Rendering, incompatiblity
So, as we were working with em based fonts and relative percentages, we came across the interesting little fact that Opera does not render fonts the same way IE or FF does.
In the end just one more thing to drive developers up the wall with cross browser inconsistencies.
Example:
<style>
body { font-size: 1em; font-family: arial; }
</style>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 110%;">testing</span>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 120%;">testing</span>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 130%;">testing</span>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 140%;">testing</span>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 150%;">testing</span>
<span style="background: #eee; font-size: 160%;">testing</span>
will return the following:
(View at:
http://dev.phoenixnetworks.net/explorer/homes/guest/browser-fonts.png)
Update for clarification: These were taken from three browsers on the same system, on the same resolution, at standard/default font settings in the browser.
Monday, June 26, 2006 10:22:33 AM
I was looking to implement moo.fx's smooth scrolling script (
http://moofx.mad4milk.net/documentation/ - try clicking links at the top of the page)
However it seems that it does not work, nor does it degrade gracefully (in fact the anchors are broken period.)
for some detailed code breakdown:
http://www.mad4milk.net/entry/scroll-your-internal-links-smoothly
Friday, June 16, 2006 10:54:19 AM
opera, browser, fails at life, table-cell
...
Apparently, Opera does not like to play nice. If you attempt to hide a
row, and then show it by setting the display to either 'block' or 'table-cell''table-row' (which are the two methods of implementation between IE and FF/Safari/Netscape) Opera will render the row incorrectly!
Chalk one up to the opera devs for screwing that up too 
Update: So we checked it out in Opera 9. 'table-cell''table-row' works for displaying hidden content, however if you attempt to display:none; it is completely screwed up.
So what this means is that the opera dev's realized that in Opera 8, they screwed up their implementation of css2.1 and the 'table-cell''table-row' property, fixed it in opera 9, but in doing so, destroyed a css1.0 display: none; property. Hurrah.
For conclusion and upon further investigation, it seems that opera has a bug with tables that arent defined a width, and as a result will shrink the table, (and not hide the row).
Saturday, June 10, 2006 10:56:38 AM
opera, Rendering, nightmare, CurveyCorners
It seems that developers cannot escape the nightmare that Opera engulfs them in when it comes to CSS rendering.
My latest escapades brought me to a clever and effective js utility which will allow developers to create dynamically generated rounded corners -- with backgrounds, borders, aliasing, and alpha transparency! CurveyCorners (www.curveycorners.net) is compatible with Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari.
Today, testing it with opera drove me literally insane. It seems thats whimsically and based on the alignment of the stars and spacial time anomolies, that it would render it properly. Opera would, at times render it properly, and then upon refresh render it half way.
If opera could make up it's damn mind whether or not it was going to be compatible would be nice. If it could make up it's damn mind whether or not it'd work or exhibit the same issues, would be nice for debugging.
On a side note, this is exhibited on a page that has 8 identical other boxes. 7/8 of these boxes are properly rendered, however Opera decides that just one of them must not work.
Saturday, June 10, 2006 10:51:08 AM
ajax, web 2.0, back button, nightmare
To begin the list of issues, the most recent spotlight in the web development community is Ajax, or Asynchronous Java and XML. This is basically an RPC-JSON model using the DOM framework.
Unfortunately some of the shortcomings of this technology is that while you are able to dynamically request and load content without a page shift -- it essentially breaks bookmarking and back/forward button functionality.
Luckily our friends at www.google.com, www.mozilla.org, www.dojotoolkit.org, and other ajax 2.0 framework pioneers, have found ways to work around this issue.
Unfortunately, Opera remains the sole browser that no developer is able to work with. Why? It is beyond my reasoning as to why Opera cannot handle javascript or event handlers properly like Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, or Safari can.
It seems that, unlike all other browsers, when a user hits the back button, no event is generated by opera. When in an AJAX-enabled website, using hash marks as history (ie domain.com#section) going back does not even trigger any events that are detectable by javascript. This inherently makes it pretty damn impossible for developers to find a solution to the back button script.
As a testament, even google's gmail functionality is broken by opera's lack of event handling.
My Opera
