One Week of Opera
It’s been about a week since I set my default web browser to Opera. I can certainly see why some people prefer this browser over others, but for me it’s been a somewhat frustrating experience. Is that due to “growing painsâ€, or is it something else?
As I mentioned in the original post, my primary interest in Opera is its speed and the fact that it uses considerably fewer system resources than Firefox. Indeed, if you’re the type that wants to get things done quickly then this is the browser for you. After a week’s use I have come to appreciate its time saving nature, and its “zippieness” isn’t limited only to the rendering of pages.
By default, Opera remembers the collection of tabs that you had open during your previous session and those tabs are reloaded the next time that you start the browser. You may think that this would be a slow process, especially if you had several tabs opened, but speed concerns are dramatically reduced because the documents are loaded completely from cache. No network calls are made until you refresh a page or click on a link, unless a page is dynamically served.
What’s more, the vertical scroll bar also remembers your location on the page. So not only does Opera load the pages almost instantly from the cache, but you’re also ‘instantly’ presented with your previous location within those documents. This is a considerable time saving feature that I’ve used extensively this past week. It not only saves time, it prevents the headache of finding your previous location.
Additionally, the browser has crash recovery built in. We all know how unstable my computer can be, and unfortunately I have had to use this feature a number of times these last seven days. I have a habit of quickly opening several web sites for reading and I can’t always remember where I found those interesting articles. I can lose those articles when the computer crashes, so this has been a welcome feature.
With its time saving features I can see Opera being a fine browser for an office computer.
In my original post I mentioned that I had some issues with the user interface. Before I get into the negative, however, there are some things that I like about the UI that I would like to point out.
First, the way that they handle the address bar is simple yet innovative. We’re all familiar with the drop-down box that appears as you type, but Opera has expanded on this. When a blank, new tab is loaded this drop down box plays host to a second tool bar. On that tool bar you can access the “Home” button, a list of the top 10 web pages that you visit, your bookmarks, and a couple of search boxes. This is good design in my opinion, and I’ve come to appreciate it. See a screenshot of it here.
It would seem that the designers of Opera have focused a good deal of their attention on creating a user interface that is friendly and time saving. When it comes to actually browsing the web I think that they’ve succeeded.
Where I think they failed (considerably) is the the Tools -> Preferences window. It appears that they tried to cram as many options as possible into the smallest possible space. In this user’s view, it didn’t work. You have only General, Wand (password saver & the like), Web Pages (style sheet options), and everything else is tucked under Advanced. The Opera team should not be afraid to expand the options menu. More options are not daunting, yet not finding what you’re after is very frustrating. Please, expand the options menu.
This leads me into the features that I don’t like about Opera.
In regards to the user interface, other than the options menu, it bugs me that there is no throbber. A “throbber” is a small animation that sits in the top-right corner of the web browser. This animation plays when a web page is loading, thus informing you of network activity. Opera does not have this, and many times I have found myself wondering if the browser has stalled. As bad as it sounds, I need my throbber; I’ve come to rely on its feedback.
Another aspect of the interface that I have issues with is the default behavior of tabs. Specifically, I dislike how their order of focus is handled. I am used to a logical order: You close one and the next immediate tab from the right takes its place. Unfortunately Opera does not do this. Instead, it will give focus to the tab that was previously selected. The result is that the order of focus can bounce around, and this has caused me to close tabs that I didn’t intend to close. Unfortunately I have yet to find an option to change this behavior. I thought the “cycle pages” option would address this, but apparently not. In fact I have no idea what that setting does.
Also in regards to the user interface, it bothers me considerably that I can not add search engines to the browser. This is so easy to do in Firefox that I have created my own search plugins, as have many others. With Opera you’re stuck with what comes with the browser’s installation. There’s Google, whom I have been shying away from as of late, Amazon.com, EBay, some price comparison service that I haven’t used, Download.com, and a few select others. I like choice, and preventing users from adding their own search engines feels very restrictive to me.
Then there is the hot key combination that is a standard to web browsers in general: CTRL-D. Obviously this bookmarks the page that you’re currently viewing. Inexplicably, that is not the case in Opera. Instead it treats any text that you have copied to the system clipboard as a web site address and attempts to load it. The result is that Opera loads either a seemingly random web site (if you have a single word copied) or an error page saying that the address is unavailable from your machine. Since this is not the expected result from presing CTRL-D in a browser, this error message (or web site) seems to come out of no where, and if this seems confusing to you then let me assure you that it certainly is! I have tossed some harsh words at Opera because of this unorthodox behavior.
Oddly, Opera does not allow two instances to exist. There can be only one Opera, apparently. So if you like to organize different types of tabs in separate instances of your browser then you’ll have to look for a different browser solution.
Also, there are web sites that don’t display correctly. Forms seem to be the most common annoyance with the Submit button routinely being placed partially inside of the comment box. Other sites, such as GMail for example, have very noticeable rendering issues.
Lastly, we have my biggest concern of all. Opera seems to hook into the video card in a way that no other 2D application that I have used does. Upon closing Opera the screen often flickers in a manner that is identical to what occasionally occurs when I start or close a 3D game. Worse, video play back is basically disabled on my system until I close the Opera browser. Attempting to play video with the browser running, minimized or otherwise, results in a blank video (audio only) at best or a corrupted display (parts of programs sticking to or smearing on the screen) at worse. It is this video issue which may very well cause me to uninstall Opera despite its respectable use of system resources and its decent speed.
This wraps up my rather long one week update. I can’t imagine that someone actually read all of that, but good night if you did! 
~Steph
Topics: Waste Basket |
March 10th, 2006 at Mar 10, 06 | 7:56 pm
dude, your computer is a mess
FYI :
- adding search engines is feasible, not that easy but feasible, by editing “C:\Program Files\Opera9\search.ini”
I still haven’t understand why they haven’t added a little editor for this…
- concerning the tabs order, I personnally like it that way but Opera 9 will support cycling in order of appearance (I hope this will be an option)
- for the instances, doesn’t the ctrl-alt-N work ? the cool thing is the ‘Windows’ panel in the ‘hotlist’, it will show all the tabs of all the opened instances, allowing to organize and move tabs from one instance to the other. and you can save tabs lists as ‘Sessions’, nice.
- for the ‘throbber’ thing, the tab icon is half-cut until the page is fully loaded, plus the pop-up statusbar is showing the loading progress…
- the html glitches like the ‘add you comment’ button wrong position don’t happen often, and most of the time are caused by some bad html/css
- and I personnally found that the ‘advanced’ options panel is much more complete and organized than the firefox options…
bye
April 12th, 2006 at Apr 12, 06 | 7:12 pm
‘Lastly, we have my biggest concern of all. Opera seems to hook into the video card in a way that no other 2D application that I have used does. Upon closing Opera the screen often flickers’ by ~Steph
- ive noticed that extremely annoying bug. any workarounds?
I often keep multimedia windows in background.
regards
April 12th, 2006 at Apr 12, 06 | 10:12 pm
Hello Adam,
No, sorry I haven’t noticed a work around for the flicker issue.
However, this problem did eventually go away “on its own”. With any luck it’ll get its act together on your system.
My apologies that I don’t have a more helpful response for you.
April 19th, 2006 at Apr 19, 06 | 2:27 pm
i believe it has something todo with the way it draws to the screen.
being java based. azureus does the same thing.
doesnt really help, though.