Opera, my computer history and the latest news
Hello! How are you? I've got a couple of sort of big things i want to cover here. I want to get a discussion going on opera, if possible, and I hope to outline my history of computer experience and where my (limited, compared to some of my best friends) knowledge comes from. So I'll delve into my recent [bad] opera experiences.
I started using opera in my first year in College when I first used it to discover tabbed browsing. That's always been its major upside. The reason I choose it over firefox (even going to a lot of hassle in linux to install opera and make it the default webbrowser) is because firefox opens new pages in a new firefox window on my taskbar, which I hate. Also, there are no mouse guestures or an ability to configure keyboard shortcuts the way I want them (I use f4 to close tabs, instead of the awkward ctrl-f4). Other perks of opera at the time included:
- no automatically going to MSN search if I typed an url wrong (Ie would force me to re-typre the entire url if I got a letter wrong)
- google search integrated
- pages actually immediately stopped loading if I pressed the stop button or escape
But opera has changed recently. Now it doesn't stop loading a page completely if I press escape. It'll continue to show me an egg-timer and load some images, so I have to press escape again and/or switch out of the tab into another tab. This is annoying, and harks back to the way IE used to do it.
It ALWAYS lets gmail steal focus as gmail loads up. When it says "loading", it steals focus, even if I was typing something elsewhere. Now, opera doesn't steal focus - just the gmail tab from which ever tab I was using at the time. Then, after it's done loading, it steals focus again to display my inbox, and I end up typing things uselessly in the wrong tab. This too, is annoying.
I usually type "g" in the address bar then the search terms I want google to search for. However, sometimes I forget to enter the g, and I'm redirected to an opera page saying the url is illegal. Not so bad you'd think - but it replaces what I typed in the address bar (my search terms) with "opera: illegal url" - and I'm forced to retype the whole search terms including the g this time - and sometimes I forget the g twice in my anger.
I also use opera for my RSS feeds, cos I like a program that can multitask. The default interval for checking feeds is 3 hours. That's too long, as I have all the feeds saved on the laptop and it's rarely connected to the web for more than an hour or two at a time - so I change it to 5 minutes. Then I get home to dial up and it wastes my bandwidth downloading feeds I'd rather wait for broadband to collect. There is no updating of feeds manually, and there is no cancelling of feed updating either. Theoretically you can go to manage feeds and take the tick away from whichever feeds you don't want to update, but if you do this to all the feeds on the list it removes the feed menu. Then, if you go to manage feeds you'll find that ALL YOUR FEEDS ARE GONE! Thankfully I had them all saved on del.icio.us, but it was still annoying to have to enter them in again.
The wand sometimes forgets passwords and will submit a blank password field in certain sites. Then, when I enter a password manually in the box it doesn't ask me if I want to save it, so I'm stuck with the blank one the wand has. I have to go in and fix this manually.
So there you have it. Opera, once brilliant software with no annoyances at all reduced to something about as annoying as IE ever was. In fact, sometimes I choose to use IE just because it opens faster. It's still a nightmare though. Is anyone else having these problems and being just as annoyed as I am?
You know, I'll leave my computer history for a later date. Please tell me what you think of opera and if it's become more ghey recently. And please don't suggest that I use firefox - I need to configure keys so that f4 closes a tab and f3 opens one, and I need to use numbers one and two to cycle through pages, and I need mouse gestures. So don't suggest any other browser unless it can do all these things.
I started using opera in my first year in College when I first used it to discover tabbed browsing. That's always been its major upside. The reason I choose it over firefox (even going to a lot of hassle in linux to install opera and make it the default webbrowser) is because firefox opens new pages in a new firefox window on my taskbar, which I hate. Also, there are no mouse guestures or an ability to configure keyboard shortcuts the way I want them (I use f4 to close tabs, instead of the awkward ctrl-f4). Other perks of opera at the time included:
- no automatically going to MSN search if I typed an url wrong (Ie would force me to re-typre the entire url if I got a letter wrong)
- google search integrated
- pages actually immediately stopped loading if I pressed the stop button or escape
But opera has changed recently. Now it doesn't stop loading a page completely if I press escape. It'll continue to show me an egg-timer and load some images, so I have to press escape again and/or switch out of the tab into another tab. This is annoying, and harks back to the way IE used to do it.
It ALWAYS lets gmail steal focus as gmail loads up. When it says "loading", it steals focus, even if I was typing something elsewhere. Now, opera doesn't steal focus - just the gmail tab from which ever tab I was using at the time. Then, after it's done loading, it steals focus again to display my inbox, and I end up typing things uselessly in the wrong tab. This too, is annoying.
I usually type "g" in the address bar then the search terms I want google to search for. However, sometimes I forget to enter the g, and I'm redirected to an opera page saying the url is illegal. Not so bad you'd think - but it replaces what I typed in the address bar (my search terms) with "opera: illegal url" - and I'm forced to retype the whole search terms including the g this time - and sometimes I forget the g twice in my anger.
I also use opera for my RSS feeds, cos I like a program that can multitask. The default interval for checking feeds is 3 hours. That's too long, as I have all the feeds saved on the laptop and it's rarely connected to the web for more than an hour or two at a time - so I change it to 5 minutes. Then I get home to dial up and it wastes my bandwidth downloading feeds I'd rather wait for broadband to collect. There is no updating of feeds manually, and there is no cancelling of feed updating either. Theoretically you can go to manage feeds and take the tick away from whichever feeds you don't want to update, but if you do this to all the feeds on the list it removes the feed menu. Then, if you go to manage feeds you'll find that ALL YOUR FEEDS ARE GONE! Thankfully I had them all saved on del.icio.us, but it was still annoying to have to enter them in again.
The wand sometimes forgets passwords and will submit a blank password field in certain sites. Then, when I enter a password manually in the box it doesn't ask me if I want to save it, so I'm stuck with the blank one the wand has. I have to go in and fix this manually.
So there you have it. Opera, once brilliant software with no annoyances at all reduced to something about as annoying as IE ever was. In fact, sometimes I choose to use IE just because it opens faster. It's still a nightmare though. Is anyone else having these problems and being just as annoyed as I am?
You know, I'll leave my computer history for a later date. Please tell me what you think of opera and if it's become more ghey recently. And please don't suggest that I use firefox - I need to configure keys so that f4 closes a tab and f3 opens one, and I need to use numbers one and two to cycle through pages, and I need mouse gestures. So don't suggest any other browser unless it can do all these things.