User Centered

Opera does a pretty good job when it comes to respect for the user's personal settings. I can easily override a web page's layout, and show the page the way I want. Easier to read, no images, block content. Then there's skinning, and tweaking all sorts of things about the interface.

As part of an Accessibility project, I recently increased my font sizes, both in windows system settings, and Opera's own interface font settings. I was quite impressed. Buttons still flowed well, toolbars expanded correctly. Well done Opera! (I have a suspicion that this is because we're a cross-platform product. Because our UI controls are built with linux in mind, they're dynamic enough to "grow" to fit whatever font sizes they're given.)

If it weren't for two small issues...

Hmmm. I don't think my zoom is really 0%, but the width of the control must have been hard-coded. In any case, it's just too narrow. At least I know that my zoom level ends in a zero!

Change the font size for Opera menus... Right-click menus? You didn't mean to change the font size for those menus too, did you? Apparently Opera only considers the top menu bar an actual menu. That "other" right-click menu? Not our problem. To change those font sizes, you have to go to the windows OS settings.