Browser Testing in Progress: Opera 9.5 BETA

January 22, 2008

I’ve completed my first week of using Opera 9.5 BETA exclusively (well, almost exclusively). Let me share what I like first:

• Speed Dial – Everytime you open a new tab in Opera, you get a page that allows you to add up to 9 websites that you can access just by clicking on the thumbnail that Opera generates on the Speed Dial page for the links you add. I use it for websites that I visit frequently.
• Startup – I can choose to start Opera from the last time I was using it if I have the startup dialog enabled in my preferences. That works great for times when I accidentally close the browser instead of a tab, or if for some reason, the browser itself crashes (it does happen, no matter what browser you use).
• Arrange tabs – If I want to see all of the websites I have open in one window, I just right-click one of the tabs and choose arrange to view the pages tiled vertically or horizontally. I really like this when I’m operating the Blog Talk Radio switchboard and monitoring the chat room at the same time.
• Adding a search engine – I always like to use Clusty along with Google to do searches. In Firefox and IE, I can add the Clusty toolbar, but in Opera I can’t. What I can do, however, is go to http://clusty.com, right-click the search box and click “customize” to add Clusty to the list of search engines available on the taskbar. I can even add a shortcut key or use a specific search engine on my Speed Dial page.
• Transfers (Downloads) page – Opera opens a Transfer page everytime you download something from the ‘net. It’s a lot like the Downloads page you can access with Firefox except that it allows you to not just open a file you’ve already downloaded but re-transfer it until you’ve cleared the page. It also tells you the website where you downloaded each file and where you saved it on your computer. That’s a GREAT feature for me because I download files to different places all the time and forget where I put them. (Note about the current stable version 9.25: When I first started using Opera, this is what I used. I had problems opening Excel spreadsheets from within GMail but when I upgraded to the BETA, the problem went away)

Those are really cool features and I used every one of them the first week. I did have a few problems using Opera exclusively, though:

• Like Safari, Opera didn’t always like the Flash based interface I use to maintain one of my website accounts. If I wanted to edit a page, the only choice I had was to edit the HTML. That works fine for simple changes, but for more complex changes, I really need to be able to visually edit the page.
• Incompatibility with Gmail – I practically live in Gmail and it doesn’t support Opera. What that means is that I can use the basic HTML view in Gmail but I don’t get to use the enhanced features. I was happy to see, though, that unlike Safari, the autocomplete worked fine. I must admit, I’ve been able to do everything I need to do in basic HTML view.

So far, the cool features outweigh the problems. I’ll wait to make my recommendation after week 2, though. I haven’t worked much in Wordpress this past week so don’t know if there are going to be problems there. So far, there haven’t been, and Opera has Allison’s cool feature that allows me to increase the size of a text window where I’m typing by draggin the bottom right corner.

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