bunnyblog

Crossposted here because I really want to actually start using this bloody thing for something.

New Opera’s out.

1. The installer doesn’t use XP-styled widgets. This is trivial to fix.
2. The installer asks whether to use profiles, rather than just using them. This is extremely useful if you want to read your brother’s passwords, but not really otherwise.
3. The UI defaults to a non-native theme. Widgets in this theme have different hover effects. The scrollbar, for instance, turns blazing yellow the instant you hover over it. Buttons, on the other hand, have a fade-in grey highlight which takes about 500ms to animate.
4. The default UI, on the other hand, is sane. For the first time ever. It’s ready to start using without looking for a way to turn off half of the UI. Thanks.

5. New “pages” default to being blank, with some nifty toolbar hanging under the location bar whose purpose appears to be to bring up your home page. I don’t understand why this is more efficient than choosing the home page automatically. This toolbar also includes two additional search bars for Amazon and “price comparison”.

   I assume it’s a bug, but clicking “home” didn’t actually go to the page the first time I did it. it just filled in the URL. This leads to another problem, which is that there’s no “go” button and therefore no way to visit a URL that’s already in the URL bar without using the keyboard.

6. Search bars include text by default to make their purpose clear. This makes selection of the box slower because the user must remember that the text disappears on focus, rather than having to be deleted.
7. There’s a little button on the right-hand side of the default search bar which I had assumed was a “go” button for the search field. It is not. It is a toolbar toggle. It brings up a Find Toolbar with no glaringly obvious inspiration. This toolbar includes some other random prefs which have presumably been orphaned here for zooming the page or turning on “user mode”, which is presumably documented somewhere.
8. The “voice” button on this toolbar prompts the user to download a 10MB setup file. This is three times the size of the browser setup file. Once this file has been downloaded, the progress bar disappears. Clicking the “voice” button again, to find out what happened, leads to Microsoft Sam explaining that “Sorry, I did not understand”.
9. It is heroic that we’re at point nine before I go to look for a way to turn the theme off. Cheers boys. It isn’t under “View”, where it used to be (but I’d quite happily sacrifice backwards compatibility in the case of Opera’s UI). It’s under Tools -> Appearance. Windows Native is the only other “skin” to choose - it doesn’t have different buttons, but it makes Opera use normal Windows XP widgets. Unticking the box for “use special effects” removes the 500ms fade-in from the toolbar buttons.
10. Context menus under the “Windows default” theme use a fade-in which is not controlled by one’s Windows menu preferences. The toolbars themselves, like Firefox’s, are spaced for Windows 95 and not Windows XP, which makes individual items harder to hit and makes the menus look more cluttered than they are with icons present. Back when Opera’s menus contained 175 items each this was an advantage, but now it is not.
11. The “trash” button at the end of the tab bar allows one to retrieve pages they’ve visited recently. I’ve already used it more times than I’ve ever used Mozilla’s Go menu. I want this.
12. Opera’s “portal” page, which is the default home page in Opera, appears to have been designed to fit exactly into Opera’s viewport on a 1024×768 screen without scrolling. That is, if you disable the tab bar. This page has an interesting radio button named “news” which, when toggled, eradicated half of the page content. I marvel at Opera’s ability to include crazy new widgets which do unexpected things, even on their web pages.
13. I accidentally forgot not to use a mouse gesture to go back, and Opera alerted me to this. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised, but I’m a CS graduate who spends his whole day in a web browser. I’m not sure popping up a modal dialogue box is the best idea for a gesture which is quite easy to do accidentally.
14. New Page and New Window have a menu item each. New Page brings up a new tab, and although I mentioned it earlier, I should really note here that in the “desktop” metaphor, it is windows which are meant to be pages. Pages should be renamed. “Resizable tabs” is better than breaking “pages”.
15. When I hit New Window, I wasn’t sure what had happened. It appeared that the current tab had gone blank. This is because when Opera creates a new window in maximised mode, it does so instantaneously (I mean, faster than Notepad). Mozilla has the same bug, but because window creation is so slow it’s pretty clear what has happened. This bug exists because web browsers are the only document viewers with a “new” function. In editing applications, “new” closes the current document and opens a blank one in its place.
16. Opera’s back-forward time is truly instant. I’m crossing my fingers for the DOM caching work to get into Gecko 1.9.
17. File -> Import and Export is cruft from O7. I am never, ever going to import bookmarks from Konqueror on Windows. Neither is a living soul on Earth.
18. The Customise Toolbar dialogue is still extremely complicated. If Opera has a rich customisation file which can be used to do all of this, it should be left in there. All I want to do is have small icons with text on. I have to learn a whole panel to do this thing. Icon size is still global, which makes no sense when all other options are toolbar-specific (as I’d like to have large nav buttons and small non-nav buttons).
19. View -> Encoding is better than Firefox’s. There’s some way-overdue lovin’ needed there.
20. Manage Bookmarks opens in a tab rather than a dialogue. This is just a bad idea, basically. So do several items on Tools, but not Appearance or Preferences, or Advanced -> Cookies. Cookies opens a modal dialogue whose buttons are not “OK” and “Cancel”, but “Cancel” and “Help”. Help opens a new window, which I could swear I have been told by several million Opera users should never happen without explicit instruction.Advanced -> Plugins (and Cache) is even better. it overwrites the current tab.
21. One must click at least twice in the URL bar to select part of a URL if it not already focussed. Firefox allows partial selection of an unfocussed URL.

22. Random compatibility: My installed Flash works out of the box. Java is iffy: Opera has an “Opera Java Console” which I can only assume is the same as the Sun one. Viewing my webcam crashes Opera. Attempting to view my styled RSS feed results in Opers popping up an error box with a silly message in it (”the address type is unknown or unsupported”) because it’s a feed: link. I’d expected Opera to ask if it could be my RSS reader, not to error on me.

    Viewing the actual feed resulted in two things; firstly, rather than the nifty styled feed you the viewer just got in Mozilla, I get three pages of raw ASCII in Times New Roman because Opera doesn’t do XLST. I also get a (modal) dialogue box asking if I want to subscribe to the feed, which opens a new window. Again.

23. Having just restarted from a crash, Opera lost all my prefs. This is possibly because I chose “no” on the session saver panel, because I didn’t know what that meant. It also asked me if I want it to be the default browser this time, which it didn’t the first.
24. Help and About also overwrite the current tab. Dataloss is fun!
25. No UK English. Bah.

Prefs can wait.

So, I’ve been working on this blog without actually, y’know, using it. Silly. Added some stupid stuff like a CSS cursor; Feeds (at least rss2) are styled (hackishly. Very hackishly). Eventually going to fix the bastard stylesheet to be proper PHP.

Comments on pages, had to hack the theme for that. Idiocy.

Wysiwyg working. Sort of. Looks ugly, but it can improve.