Vakkotaur

Way back, in the days of Windows 3.x and Windows 95 when Netscape ruled the web and there was an upstart called Internet Explorer that was dubious at best (and has been dubious ever since....), I saw someone somewhere recommend a small, new web browser called Opera. It was so small the installer fit on a (3.5 inch) floppy and it had a great feature: You could tell it to NOT play those annoying animated GIFs. That was enough that I installed it, and since it wasn't free[1] and I liked it that much, I paid for it so I could keep using beyond the trial period. I kept up with updates and paid for them, too, as more features (offering ever greater user control) were added. Eventually Opera changed its scheme to allow the browser to be free. Opera also had a neat community setup and actually listened to its users. There were a couple times I submitted bug reports and got email in reply beyond the "submitted successfully" notice. At least once it even offered a fix or at least a tolerable work-around.

And then it seemed it all fell apart. The original team, or enough of it, left or were pushed out and it felt like the marketing department took over and drove the engineering types out. This a Bad Thing.[2] A complete rebuild was decided upon - but not just the core, the user interface as well, and away went the features that made Opera so great and, well, Opera. Support for Linux vaporized as well, but this was no big deal as the new versions weren't worth running anyway. So I've been running an older version as it's the newest thing available. Yes, I tried other browsers. Despite being newer (and often copying the good Opera's features, right Firefox?) or having a similar look but not the stability (SlimBoat...) they all seemed terrible clunky and didn't offer the fine control I'd become used to having.

But there is now hope. It's not a new version of Opera. I have that on my phone, and I can see while it's not as bad as it had been, it's not the real inheritor of the Opera experience. No, it's that the group that for whatever reason left Opera has come out with a new browser, Vivaldi. It also isn't "ready for prime time" but they are admitting it isn't and calling the first big announcement a Technical Preview (which is NOT a stable release) and offering weekly snapshot builds - with warnings that those snapshots are apt to have regressions ("We thought we fixed that..."). This is the blatant honesty of the old, original, good, Opera.

Vivaldi currently lacks many features. One is that I have no control to disable animations, or plugins, or allow them to run on some pages but not on others so the web looks weirdly spammy to me with Vivaldi - for now. The truly fine user-control isn't there... yet. There is no mail client (something many have come to expect). Of course there also isn't nonsense like an IRC client (what the heck is that doing in any browser?) The 'Speed Dial' size (screen layout, not number of links) isn't adjustable - I find it too big and nesting things in folders, while a neat idea, defeats the point of having a Speed Dial setup - speed!

I am still using the old version of Opera, but I am keeping Vivaldi around and keeping an eye on it. One thing the Vivaldi team is getting right is that much of the user interface acts as I expect it should (e.g. middle-clicking a link opens it in a new tab - in the background). Another is that they are starting out making Vivaldi multi-platform. I'm not on Linux waiting them to get around to making a Linux version. There's no Windows-only BS from these guys.

I suspect the marketroids that took over Opera are in for one HELL of nasty - and damned well deserved - surprise when Vivaldi approaches the old Opera's abilities and the new Opera's market share and mindshare vaporizes faster than a criticality event. I suspect I'll be wishing for Vivaldi for Android within a year's time.

A while ago I wandered across a site with bookmarklets (snippets of allegedly useful javascript) for Opera. To my astonishment, one of them seemed to actually be useful. It could become a button on the "personal bar" and that button would append ?style=mine to the page URL and reload the page. This makes LJ much more readable as I can read pages in a color scheme that isn't deranged. This was so useful that I enabled javascript - though only for LJ.

The "personal bar" thing was a problem as I kept it off due to its taking up screen space for not much gain. Fortunately I could drag a copy of the useful button from that bar to the address bar. Unfortunately, that newly placed button only lasted a session. If I closed Opera and re-opened it, the nice new button was gone and I had to put it back. This got tiresome.

Last night I decided to Do Something About It and read up what I could about making proper Opera "power buttons" and managed to get a bit further, but still had the disappearing button problem. I asked on the Opera forums and after a false start got a surprising answer: the only thing I was doing wrong was having an equals sign in the button title. Evidently that prevents the new button from being permanently stored. A bug report has been filed.

If you use Opera and want this button, which someone else fixed, it's the LJ style:mine link on this page.

While I was looking up what I could, I found another staggeringly useful button. It toggles the "fit to width" option (which Opera has a strange name for: "medium screen rendering"). Horizontal scrolling is banished with a click. No more am I at the mercy of someone thoughtlessly posting a screen-widener of some sort. For that "Fit" button, look here.

( Entry and addenda... )

Microsoft, for some time, has been playing dirty games with users of non-IE browsers. The most recent manifestation was (and still is) the sending of an intentionally misdesigned style sheet to Opera users. Opera has documented that this style sheet also breaks the IE display, and that the good style sheet sent to IE would work fine on Opera. This was noted a while ago. Microsoft took a half step in fixing this, so that a correct sheet is now sent to some versions of Opera, but not all.

Today Opera responded. They didn't merely make things public, for they already did that. They didn't kindly ask Microsoft to fix things, as they tried that and it didn't work. As if anyone was expecting it would work. No, they released a special version of Opera 7.xx. The "Bork edition" of Opera. This is just like the regular Opera 7 with one exception - MSN.com is translated into 'Swedish Chef' and displayed as if it had been made by the chef from the Muppet Show.

Some excerpts from the official press release:

"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software. "This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point. The MSN site is sending Opera users what appear to be intentionally distorted pages. The Bork edition illustrates how browsers could also distort content, as the Bork edition does.

and later...

"But it becomes impossible when we are targeted and fed distorted pages that don't work in any browser. It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster! Microsoft should clean up their act on MSN and their other Web sites."

I had been putting off downloading (and registering) Opera 7, as Opera 6.05 work fine for me. But this reminds me of why I like the Opera folks. Guess what I'm downloading this noon? And registering? Yep, the Bork edition. If Microsoft wants to send Opera users a "borken" site, then they deserve to have their site borked but good.

(I find it amusing, also, that TextPad's spellcheck suggests 'MSN.com' should be replaced with 'misnomer'. How very apt.)