30 July 2006
After redesigning my photography website today, I noticed that Opera 9 has a fairly serious rendering bug:
I don't understand what I've done to make it do that... The CSS for H1 is here:
h1 { font: 220% Georgia, "Gill Sans MT", "Trebuchet MS"; margin: 0.5em; letter-spacing: 0.25em }
h1 a { border-radius: 0.5em; -moz-border-radius: 0.5em; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; background: #eee; opacity: 0.5 }
h1 a:hover { opacity: 0.65 }
Maybe Opera applies
h1 * { display: random }
by default?
Labels: browsers, CSS, opera, web design
07 February 2006
This is not a full review of Opera 9 (TP2). Just a little pointer to a few things I like about it, things I think Firefox should have too. :-) Alright, alright, Opera fans, it's all about copying features.
- Autoscrolling is much slower in Opera than in Firefox. That's great, since it means that you can actually set it to scroll the text slowly enough for you to be able to read it. (This may not be new to Opera 9.)
- BitTorrent support. A great and logical addition to the web browser. Non-geeky people shouldn't need to worry about separate BitTorrent software, they should just be able to click a bittorrent link and have it download the file there and then. Just like we don't (usually) use separate software to handle our normal ftp/http downloads. Azureus and other BitTorrent clients will be around for those of us who like to fiddle around with settings and/or are serious file sharers. For instance, I've got four episodes of the CommandN tech show being uploaded in Azureus right now. I like to have full control over what happens with my torrents, and having something constantly on the task bar (like I would have were I using Opera instead) is not an option. I guess what I'm trying to say is that having built-in, simple BitTorrent support is in line with the philosophy of Firefox.
- New keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure, but I think Ctrl+L for the location bar is new for Opera 9. I know Ctrl+T for new tab (not page, as in Opera 8) and Ctrl+N for new page are new for Opera 9. It must have hurt Opera to make that change, but I think it was the best thing to do in the long run, seeing that both Firefox and IE7 are using those combinations.
- The Tab Preview feature is definately nice. But I think it would be even nicer (cleaner) without the information displayed to the right of the (anti-aliased) thumbnail:
The title is visible at the top of the tab, and the other informations doesn't feel essential enough to outweigh the clutter it creates. I doubt that this is something that should be in the default Firefox install though.
The improved content blocking à la adblock initially seems to work fine. Does anyone know how it remembers what to block? If a different ad is displayed in the position where I blocked an ad a few days ago, will that also be blocked? If not, this is useless. If it is, this is useful. Adblock still has a slight edge on Opera though, with the ability to import a ready-made filter. Also, Opera doesn't seem to be able to block Google Ads, should you wish to do so.
As for the widgets, I'm not entirely convinced of their usefullness. At least the widgets available now seem to be of limited value. Maybe the possibilities go far beyond the present ones. I get a feeling this whole widget thing is a bit overrated - a fad or a craze if you like.
All in all, Opera 9 looks very promising. I almost thought Wow!
and This is something I could use permanently!
. But I just can't get used to the behaviour of Ctrl+Tab. I want it to be instant, as in Firefox. Not a big issue, but I just can't quite get used to it.
Edit: Fixed a typo in the title.
Labels: browsers, firefox, opera
21 September 2005
As I was hoping a while back, Opera (the desktop version) has now become real freeware, without ads. This is truly great news for the web.
Now, hopefully, the Firefox and Opera communities can work united (sort-of, at least) towards the main target: to bring down the marketshare of that old, stinking, vile pile of a browser known as Internet Explorer.
Now, some may think
Oh, what does it matter, now that IE7 is just around the corner? Microsoft are working towards standards compliance now.
And here's why it matters: We still don't know if Microsoft's intentions with Internet Explorer 7 really are good. In fact, they most likely aren't – simply because they have no reason to. They do seem to be caring at the moment, but they did so about five years ago as well... It's merely an overgrown PR stunt. If we ever let Internet Explorer's market share grow as high as it was a year or two ago (~95%), I think we will find out the hard way that Microsoft's aim was, once again: domination and (most importantly) lock-in. 8-|
So, if we (i.e. us Firefox and Opera fans) make sure that our favourite browsers always have a healthy market share, of at least 10% each (and hopefully a lot more), I think we can keep this Internet thing moving. If we want to be able to use any CSS3 stuff before we die we had better give it our best try.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, opera
24 August 2005
It's great to hear that Opera may becoming freeware in the near future. This is what Opera has been needing so badly to gain further market share. Market share which would give their mobile browser much better brand recognition, and hence make it an even greater source of income for Opera the company.
Is it just me, or are Browser Wars II really starting to heat up?
Labels: browsers, opera
04 August 2005
The other day I was reading up on things like PHP and XML at W3schools. I was sortof hunting for a way to make my web gallery database driven. I got to the part about XSL, and was amazed at how useful and powerful, yet simple, it seemed. (Have a look at their samples.) The good feelings soon wore off though, when I realized Opera doesn't support XSL at all.
My first thought was that if even IE6 from 2001 can do this (which it can), why on earth can't Opera (v. 8)? After searching the Opera forums for answers, it turns out Opera (the company) doesn't think XSL is a good idea. (Remember, this is a W3C standard...) Opera doesn't think XML should be transformed on the users computer – instead they insist that this transformation should (always!) be done on the server. (Read more about XML transformations [XSLT] here.)
Well, that's very easy for them to say. But for all the rest of us, who aren't PHP 1337, XSLT seems like a very usable standard. Of course, as with any language, there are right and wrong ways to use it. For instance, if I were to be the developer of some huge website, I wouldn't send the user 4 MB of raw XML data, and then make the XSLT document pick out a few hundred kBs to display in the browser. Since I'm a thinking human being, I realize that wouldn't be a good idea. The Opera developers don't seem to think webmasters are capable of that kind of brain activity.
Labels: browsers, opera
22 June 2005
Just found a rather nice JavaScript application, so I thought, since everyone else is hyping JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML/whatever right now - why can't I?
The website in question is a Swedish website where you can find phone numbers to basically anything (in Sweden). It seems to be specifically the private phone numbers part which has a slick JavaScript hack: After searching for a name (try Pettersson
, that should give you a few hits to play with) you can click any entry, and you will immediately get a map showing where the person in question lives:
Click again to minimize the entry again. Well, I guess it's not all that advanced, but it's definately handy. And, believe it or not, it actually works in IE, Firefox and Opera. I think I'll have to send them a short thank-you-letter. :-)
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, opera
01 June 2005
It looks like the Opera devs are pretty close to passing the Acid2 test. Just a few more bugfixes and they will be done! Hopefully they will release a version with all the fixes too, in a not too distant future.
Firefox has got left in the backwater of Safari and Opera here. The current nightlies of v1.1 still display the face like this:
Hopefully we will see the Acid2 fixes for Firefox after v1.1 is released this autumn. (Don't expect that release any sooner...)
I also sincerely hope the IE Trident developers (Chris Wilson & co) are working towards passing the Acid2 test. If there isn't time before shipping v7.0, then maybe at least for a version such as 7.1 or 7.5.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, opera
19 April 2005
Opera have now officially released version 8 of their browser. I welcome the simplified default toolbar setup, which in version 7 could be pretty dauting even for a nerd like me.
Still, I find that Opera are a little inconsistent when they choose to always show the tab bar as default. The statusbar has long been set to auto-hide as default to maximize page space - why not hide the tab bar when only one tab is open? (I know there is a "show only when needed" option, I'm just wondering why it isn't ticked as default.)
Also, the popup blocker in Opera 8 doesn't seem as efficient as Firefox's. When checking my website stats at my.statcounter.com I get a popup which I never get when using Firefox.
Update: Opera.com seems a little under the weather rigth now.
Labels: browsers, firefox, opera
20 March 2005
I have downloaded and tried both betas of Opera 8 (and I now see they have put out a thrid one), and I must say they have improved the user experience considerably since version 7.
However, it still took me something like four tries, and endless amounts of time, to get the toolbars the way I wanted them: menus, Google ads, basic navigation buttons and location bar, and then the tabs. Now, I would consider myself fairly computer-litterate, having made two themes for Firefox among other things, so it shouldn't be because of my level of general computer knowledge. I suppose it could just have been bad luck. It could also be due to the fact that I'm very used to Firefox. My feeling, though, is that the toolbar customization in Opera 8 is still fairly unintuitive. What do you think? If you haven't tried Opera 8 yet - give it a spin. It's the best browser around. Sadly, it's also (to my knowledge) the most expensive.
Labels: browsers, firefox, opera
08 March 2005
Over the last few days, having had nothing better to do, I've investigated how well the main (free) website statistics services cope with browser recognition. The results of my testing are presented in this table.
The first step was to create a webpage containing all the counters to be studied. I started off with Nedstat Basic 3.0, Statcounter, OneStat Basic 3.0, eXTReMe Tracker, CQ Counter, S-Tracking, Site Meter, NextGenStats, WebCounter and PowerPhlogger. However, the last three turned out to be excruciatingly slow in updating the stats reports and I didn't have the patience to sit and wait for them. They were excluded from the study, and I don't feel it was a great loss since the quality in general of those services felt rather low. (WebCounter, for instance, was constantly trying to get you to pay for stuff even though this was supposedly a totally FREE sevice.) After publishing some preliminary results in the user forum at statcounter.com I was asked by David Smith to check out Site Meter too. (I later realized he is the creator of Site Meter.)
The results were collected by loading the counter page in one browser at a time and subsequently checking the browser reported by each stats service. Some services (NedStat, OneStat and CQ Counter) don't show detailed information about each pageload, which means that I had to track the changes on the browser stats pages available.
For pageloads with non-Windows browsers (Safari, Camino and Konqueror) I received help from Jeff Pony, David Smith and Johann Petrak.
Interesting Findings
There weren't any really big surprises. However, the myth that "many Opera users are detected as IE users" is at least killed, once and for all. (Opera's default setting is to identify as IE, so as to prevent the user from unecessarily being locked-out by clueless webmasters.) The only statistics provider to be fooled by the Explorer spoofing is S-Tracking, who seldom (if ever?) drop browser figures on the world OneStat-&-WebSideStory-style.
One noteworthy fact is that OneStat's free stats service doesn't discriminate between Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (or any other Moz browser for that matter). Yet they publish press releases which do (or look like they do). There are three possibilities here: Either (1) they exclude statistics from the free accounts in their press releases, (2) the browser stats in their press releases are seriously flawed, or (3) they actually count Firefox and Mozilla Suite seperately for the free counters too, but to make a paid upgrade seem worth-wile they don't report them separately.
Netscape 8 beta had an interesting habit of importing the Firefox user agent string when importing other settings from said browser. The original string includes the information Firefox/0.9.6, which was exchanged for Firefox/1.0.1 after importing Firefox settings. As well as fixing this bug, Netscape need to produce a unique user agent string for the final release if they want to be visible in website stats at all.
Another slightly odd thing was that Site Meter sometimes claimed to be able to see more information in the user agent string than was actually there. One example was Netscape 8 beta in Internet Explorer rendering mode: the user agent string presented when calling navigator.userAgent using JavaScript was Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1), while Site Meter claimed it was Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) NS8/0.9.6. I can only presume I am missing something here, so if you know - please contact me.
Conclusions
Statcounter is quite clearly king of browser recognition - it accurately reports even the minor versions of almost all browsers. The only thing holding it back from total perfection is that it doesn't understand Mozilla Suite version numbers. Judging from this test and previous experience it seems like all Mozilla Suite 1.x versions are reported as version 5.0. (The user agent string of Mozilla Suite always begins with Mozilla/5.0.)
Worst of the pack is S-Tracking. For starters it's the only service fooled by Opera's user agent spoofing. It also puts all Mozilla-related browsers as well as Safari (!) into one category and simply calls them Netscape. However - because of this - it's the only service that correctly identifies Netscape 8 beta. Impressive! :-)
OneStat, which is a fairly popular website tracker, can probably be considered second last. Even if it seldom actually gets it wrong, it's a pretty blunt tool. It groups all browsers into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape Navigator (including Konqueror!), Opera and Apple (better known to us earthlings as Safari).
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, mozilla, opera
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