Dave2002 convinced me to try Opera 7 the other day, with his positive review of the program. I’ve used Opera before, back in the days of ‘it fits on one floppy’. I’ve been running 7 for a couple days now and although I’m largely impressed, I’ve already noticed several silly bugs that I can’t believe they left in.
For example, my cursor never changes appropriately to indicate when I’m hovering over a link. I presume it should, because without that indication it can be difficult to find links in, say, image maps.
There also appears to be a rendering bug when you go back one step in the history – some pages re-render really oddly.
I also noticed that Opera seems to default to pretending that it’s Internet Explorer 6 (unless it was reset from the last Beta). I know they do this because some webmaster types get iffy about non-IE browsers and start writing IE-specific code but this is really unnecessary. The ability should be there to change it for those websites that are just ignorant of non-IE browsers (to be followed up by a cross email from the user!) but surely such a standards-compliant browser shouldn’t default to disguise itself? We should be getting people out of the habit of writing IE-centric code and then instantly barring all other browsers or providing inferior code, not quietly running along with it.
I also think that the opposite is true, that it’s necessary to be honest about which browser you are because there are IE-specific options (channels I think, HTA, some more will come to mind) that are perfectly legitimate to use in IE and useful! but cause errors to the poor unseasoned user in Opera, and in those cases it’s not the webmaster’s fault at all!
I’m still getting used to Opera and overall I’m impressed with the amount you can customise, could do with a few bug fixes though! Roll on 7.01