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Opera Sucks

Why opera is the worst browser for web development

Posts tagged with "nightmare"

Rendering Nightmare

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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.

Ajax 2.0 and Back Button Functionality

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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.