New Blog!

I've set up a new blog using the free blogging available at the My Opera Community, which I have been a part of for around 9 years. It's evolved to the point where it is a usable blogging solution, and the servers don't have as many issues as they used to.

Unless there are too many issues, I will continue using the blog at My Opera for as long as I feel too lazy to make my own blog.

Several Critiques of Opera 10

Since I'm being lazy, and not getting a new blog going, I decided that the best thing to do with this space was to crtique something that I love. You see, when we critique something that we love, then we come to understand how it can be better. I love Opera 10, and therefore I must put forth these critiques in the hopes that they will make the browser better in the end.

Please keep in mind that none of what you will see below are reasons why you should avoid the betas of Opera 10. I use it for everyday browsing because it is faster and more stable than even the latest versions of Opera 9.

Spell Check

With Opera 10 we see a new feature. An real-time spell check that will underline our misspellings MS-Word style as we type. This is something that we have all been waiting for and dreaming about for a long time. Perhaps the amount of dreaming and anticipation is the reason why it didn't live up to our expectations.

Is it enough that misspelled words are underlined? Is it enough that you can easily right click on a misspelled word and see a list of suggestions? Is it enough that a simple click will allow you to replace the misspelled word with the correct spelling, or add a correct word to the dictionary? Is it enough that the spell check works not only in web pages, but also in e-mail? No, it is not.

But why is it not enough? What makes a spell check good?

Let me say that the only good spell check is the one that never leaves me checking Google for the correct spelling of a word.

Opera Software decided to use Hunspell as the spell check engine in Opera 10. This is the same spell check engine used in OpenOffice.org, and it was chosen over Aspell. The problem with Hunspell is that it almost always gives a bad list of suggestions for the words I misspell. This is a problem I never had with Aspell/OSpell. I do not know the reasoning behind the use of Hunspell, but it's inability to figure out what you are trying to type (even when you are only a single character off) will turn Opera Software's attempt to include a spell checker into a joke. This must be dealt with before final release.

New Skin

The new skin is beautiful. I love it. It's perfect.

There's just one small problem. This new skin is only beautiful with the default toolbar setup. Yes, I know, the new skin is a work in progress, so I'm really just beating around the bush with this one, but it does need to be mentioned.

OK, so it's not too bad looking with an IE/Firefox inspired toolbar setup:

I do find myself wondering though, why do the buttons look different? Why does the status bar look bigger? Not a big deal, but a little odd.

Now we come to a slightly modified version of my own custom toolbar setup (some of the search fields have been removed so that it would all fit on an 800x600 screen). While my toolbar setup is a little bulky, this new skin just does not look good with it:

Eventually I just got so disgusted with it that I went looking for the Opera 9.5 skin to replace it.

Toolbar Setups

Yes, there are still numerous issues with toolbar setups in Opera that need addressed, especially now that Opera 10 has been through 3 beta releases.

The first issue is that the search fields in your toolbar setup have a tendency to change when you install the toolbar setup. Take a look at my two custom toolbar setup screenshots up above. They both have the "Find In Page" search field in them. If you install those toolbar setups, that search field always changes to be something else (usually Dictionary Search). This is aggravating when you are deploying a toolbar setup on a number of computers at once, and you have to manually change the search fields in each one. This happens when the version of Opera you install a toolbar setup in has different searches set up, or has then in a different order, than the version of Opera you made the toolbar setup on. Since the searches get messed with in each new version of Opera, the search fields in the toolbar setups always get messed up.

The second issue is that, when you make a toolbar setup like my "Firefox-like" toolbar setup, the address bar needs to be turned off. This is a bit of an annoyance, because you cannot specify in a toolbar setup never to display the address bar. It will always try to at least display that little bar that you see in popups that you can click and the full address bar drops down. When you install a toolbar setup that has the address bar turned off, you have to open up the toolbar settings and turn the address bar on and off again to get it to completely go away. Just another thing that always needs to be done when I deploy I'm deploying Opera on peoples' computers.

The last, and probably the worst issue is the fact that when you install a toolbar setup like my custom "Firefox-like" setup, it turns the address bar off in the default setup. Once again showing that the display of the address bar is not completely independent for each toolbar setup.

Opera Link

Opera Link is a wonderful feature, although not exactly new. In Opera 10 they've expanded it a little bit, and one of the new things that I found (to my shock and dismay) that it synchronises is your typed in history and searches (the history of things you type in the address bar and quick find fields).

Now when I'm doing malware research, the last thing I need is for Opera to synchronise all of the links to infected sites I paste into the address bar to check out. I also never want to start typing in a search field and see previous searches pop up, so the idea of synchronising those is appalling to me.

The worst part is that there does not seem to be a way to edit these on your My Opera account. Once they've been synchronised, they're there and they're staying (at least as far as I can tell).

Now if they are going to keep these additions to Opera Link, then the least they can do is make it so that you can log into your My Opera account and set it to never allow synchronisation of these things. Especially since they made it so that I can't go back later and easily disable them in the browser.

Loading Pages

When I am on certain forums (such as Malwarebytes and MonstrMoose), sometimes when I click on a link the new address with appear in the address bar, and the page will turn white, and never attempt to load. It just sits there at a blank page until I either hit 'go' to force it to load or hit 'back' to try again. This is very annoying when trying to submit a post, because you don't know if it actually went through or not until you check.

This issue is not isolated to those two examples, but they are the forums that it happens on most frequently. Note that one is phpBB3 and the other is IPB, so there is no similarity in forum software to point to as a cause.

Conclusion

OK, that's it for now. I may think of some new things later and add them below this.

Also, if I any of the information presented above is incorrect, then please feel free to contact me and let me know. I have no problem with someone proving me wrong, just make sure that you send along a handy link to your proof.