Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

More on Opera

It has a lot to recommend it, but there are a number of niggling annoyances:

• Saved pages are poorly named. (Safari gives the page a name based on its title; Opera uses the filename, often “index.html.”) Since I save a lot of web pages, this is an issue.
• Cookie management doesn’t seem as good as Safari with PithHelmet
• The way it chooses what tab to display after you close a tab feels wrong.
• View Source opens the source in TextEdit.app…which interprets HTML, meaning you just get the page, rendered again. It turns out that that’s one of a lot of ways that Opera feels like what it is, a port of a Windows program, rather than a Mac app.
• Another of those is that the Mac’s built-in spell checker is not available as you type in, say, a blog comment form; nor are the Mac typing shortcuts (the emacs ones, like control-a, control-n, control-k) available. Opera is the second app where they don’t seem to work, the other being MS Office.
• Selecting text is PC like in Opera: A single click on a URL would often select a word. So I’d find myself fighting to move the insertion point. And oddly, editing in the URL bar was always slow.

There are a lot of nice things to recommend Opera as well, and I’m glad for the opportunity to try it, before heading back to Safari. One tip to the Opera folks: Offer a 30 day, ad-free trial. The ads were too distracting and annoying for me to even trial your browser before this.

Switching back is also hard. Some of the keyboard shortcuts (splat-N in particular) are, after the switch, more natural in Opera, where it gives you a new tab, not a new window.

Originally published by adam on 8 Sep 2005
Last modified on 8 Sep 2005
Categories:   Macintosh   Uncategorized   Usability