Sticking with Opera 9

2006-08-06T18:32:57+00:00

It's been a month and a half since I started using Opera 9, with a promise to report back later. I'm still using it, although some of the things I liked initially have faded while others have emerged.

Firstly, the ability to browse cached documents offline turned out to be a dud. The behaviour I was observing (where I could view pages from my cache while disconnected) was due to the following setting, in Preferences -> Advanced -> History:

As someone whose work involves making websites the idea of seeing stale documents for five hours is pretty horrifying, so I changed that to "check documents never" as soon as I saw it (I'm pretty confident that doesn't affect conditional-GET, which should work regardless). As soon as I did that I lost the ability to browse offline. Browser vendors take note: you can still be the first modern browser to implement a proper offline mode!

The disadvantage of changing those setting is that they can break JavaScript image preloaders, leading to an unsettling flicker when you mouse over some links. That's why I've left my image setting above to check every five minutes.

Despite losing offline browsing, other features have popped up that have kept me happy:

Opera is the only Mac browser I've used that includes a working full-screen mode; great for presentations.
Hitting space moves you down the height of the viewport, as with other browsers. Hitting space at the bottom of the page takes you to the next page in the 'sequence', if there is one. My first guess was that this used <link rel="next">, but it also works on Yahoo!, Technorati and Google search results pages which don't have those links. I suppose it's looking for any link on the page with 'Next' as the link text. Whatever it's doing, it works surprisingly well.
Site compatibility really is excellent; I run in to sites that don't work in Opera about as often as I do sites that don't work in Firefox. Part of that might be due to Opera's ingenious browser.js file, which includes Greasemonkey-style site-specific fixes and automatically updates itself once a week. Clever, but a bit scary at the same time.
The built-in IRC client is good as well - if it wasn't for Colloquy it would be my first choice for IRCing on the Mac.
Finally, Opera's low memory footprint continues to keep me from switching back to Safari or Firefox. My Mac (a two and a half year old PowerBook) is noticeably less sluggish now that those two applications have been relegated to JavaScript hacking (gotta love FireBug) and the occasional misbehaving site.

I haven't even touched Opera Mail yet, and the gadget support is something I played with once and never used again (but then I don't use Dashboard that much either).

Overall I'm extremely happy with Opera 9 and I'd recommend giving it a go - especially if you've tried and disliked an older version.

Tags: browsers, opera, opera9

Two revolutionary features in Opera 9

2006-06-20T23:42:18+00:00

Wow, if I'm not careful this is going to turn in to a promotional blog for Opera.

So, I've been playing with Opera 9 which came out earlier today (in a dual release for Windows and Mac, which is refreshing). It's an impressive package - it's fast, it renders every page I've throw at it so far, it passes Acid 2, supports Canvas and SVG and has a neat widgets implementation. Performance on Google Maps is a bit sluggish but other than that it's been extremely snappy. The tab screenshot thumbnails are a nice touch.

There are two features however that set it head and shoulders above its competitors in terms of raw utility:

You can browse cached documents offline! I'm not sure when other browsers forgot how to do this but it's been years since I've been able to unplug from the network and still view pages that have been saved in my cache.

In fact, this feature is almost too effective: I had to keep double-checking to make sure my WiFi was definitely turned off. A visual indicator that you are viewing an offline document would be a very useful addition.
You can quit your browser and reopen it to the same state. Other browsers have been slow to cotton on to the fact that my browser state is important data - I frequently leave interesting pages open for days at a time and a browser crash causes me real pain. Safari and Firefox both have extensions that enable this but it's great to see it built in to the core product.

Sadly, Opera doesn't persist partially completed form data (so you'll still lose that half-written blog entry if you weren't smart enough to write it in a text editor and paste it in at the last moment) but it's still a huge improvement over the rest.

As far as I can tell those two features have been in Opera since before the current release, but I'd never noticed them before. Here's hoping other browser manufacturers follow suit.

While the interface is leaps and bounds ahead of Opera 6/7, it still has a few crufty edges: the preferences are hard to navigate, the text in the tab screenshot window comes across as an afterthought, there's a randomly placed recycle bin in the upper right hand corner and it took me a while to find a skin I liked (tango cl). The default behaviour for command-clicking a link is to open a new tab and switch to it; my preference is for opening in the background but I can't work out how to change that option (though shift-command-click does what I want). Overall though it rates extremely well.

As usual, it's worth looking over the detailed changelogs (windows, mac). There are some real gems for scripters; Here's the list in full:

Added support for XSLT 1.0 and the XSLTProcessor constructor.

Added support for XPath 1.0.

Added support for DOM level 2 Style Sheets and associated parts of DOM level 2 CSS.

Implemented designMode for rich text editing.

Added support for the CONTENTEDITABLE attribute and contentEditable property.

Implemented support for canvas, as described in the Web Applications 1.0 draft, as well as the opera-2dgame context.

Added support for Audio, as described in the Web Applications 1.0 draft.

Multiple improvements to XMLHttpRequest support.

Added support for onmousewheel events.

Added support for document.load and document.adoptNode.

Added window.getSelection and associated methods.

Improved handling of offsetTop, offsetLeft, and offsetParent.

Removed support for "javascript:" URLs in CSS.

Pages using certain JavaScript events will reload when visited in history. A knowledge base article is available.

I'm going to use Opera 9 as my default browser for the next week or so to see how well it holds up. I'll report back on the experience later.

Tags: browsers, opera, opera9, contenteditable

Simon Willison's Weblog: opera9

Sticking with Opera 9

Two revolutionary features in Opera 9