[Macworld]

Post your comments for Mac & Windows users asked for Opera feedback here

[griffman]

Jon Hicks is an excellent designer -- he's done a lot of the icons you see every day (Firefox), as well as working on Camino's UI. With his help, perhaps Opera on the Mac will become more competitive -- I've always liked Opera's feature set, but the UI is just .... horrid.
-rob.

[kirkmc]

I'm just thinking that Opera simply doesn't matter anymore... Maybe they can save time and just develop their mobile app, and perhaps their Windows version. Nothing personal, but they've been irrelevant on the Mac for ages.
Kirk

[jpmhughes]

griffman said:

Jon Hicks is an excellent designer -- he's done a lot of the icons you see every day (Firefox), as well as working on Camino's UI. With his help, perhaps Opera on the Mac will become more competitive -- I've always liked Opera's feature set, but the UI is just .... horrid.

-rob.

Rob, I Absolutely agree.
The UI is the main reason I decided not to use Opera, which is unusual for me.
Typically I can deal with a bad UI if the app functions well.
But Opera, we'll when you think "ewww", it's a little tough to get around it.
Hopefully Jon Hicks will remedy that and bring yet another viable browser to the stage.
Many people seem to think that there are enough already but I disagree.
As we go along more and more will be done with browsers and the more competition the more ideas.
Jim

[dreyfus]

I even bought Opera once (a few years ago) when it was still commercial software. But at that time there was no usable OS X browser (and not one with an OS X look and feel).
Since Firefox 3 is out - which is still a far cry from Safari in terms of OS integration (look and feel, Keychain integration, etc.), Opera is even more off the map. It is a foreign object on any platform. This does not hurt them too much on the Windows side - as there has not been any UI consistency in Windows for many years (if you look at e.g. Office 2007, Media Player, IE7, Visual Studio - you have colors, interface elements and concepts being all over the map; even seemingly identical elements like the ribbon work and look differently in different apps) - but with 10.5 Apple has made major progress in bringing UI consistency back. Even better, literally all third party developers (except MS and Adobe) have picked the 10.5 UI concept up, so users really can have a consistent experience.
I use the Safari 4 developer preview for my casual browsing and it beats any other browser on the platform handily. For research I stick with OmniWeb because of its great bookmarking/snapshot features and site-specific preferences - once they update to newer nightly builds of WebKit it should be even better. I only use Firefox for testing my Intranet sites (all our Windows users use FF) and to manage SQLite databases - the SQLite Manager plug-in for FF is the only usable SQLite UI available under OS X. Other than that FF still consumes far too many CPU cycles and the UI is drawing far too much attention to itself for a browser. Not being able to share bookmarks and keychain items across multiple Macs and the iPhone kills it.
But Opera, well Opera has a long way to go to even be on par with Firefox under OS X. The Netscape approach of delivering a "full suite" (including email client etc) is dead. Skins are for kids. CSS markup of form elements is still not handled correctly. CSS inheritance is not handled correctly at all (our Intranet calendar is almost upside down in Opera, while Safari and FF display it 100% OK and 99,9% identical). It still forces that useless Wand password manager down out throats - OS X does have Keychain, and it syncs to MobileMe - nobody needs Wand. The different view modes are confusing for end users. And these are all functionality and rendering issues that must be solved... investigating about the "look & feel" should only be the second step.

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

To say that Opera is irrelevant is totally wrong! I use Opera and Camino routinely in addition to Firefox, and occasionally Safari. Each browser seems to work better on different websites, and Safari is at the bottom of the pile in my user experience--probably because Apple isn't updating it anymore for Panther. But sometimes Opera is the only browser that will display a site correctly/legibly. or Camino. Or Firefox. They all have a place, and I'm grateful to those who provide these tools. Admittedly, my use of Panther (10.3.9) on a G3 laptop also puts me at the bottom of the pile in the eyes of most developers, but aside from the increasingly complex demands of over-fancy websites, my 8-year old laptop continues to work perfectly well, thank you. I cannot afford to shell out $1,000 for a new laptop (and another $1,000 to buy updates to all the software that the new OS will break, such as MS Office and CS4, to name a couple) just so I can view your website's advertisements.



Allow me to rant further... Since it really IS the ever-increasingly-more-complex advertisements, animations, etc., and other design aspects of YOUR website (Mr/Ms Developer) that is causing my computer to lag, mis-display, and sometimes freeze-up when I happen to navigate to it, I think it is YOUR responsibility (Mr/Ms Developer) to partially, if not completely, force your advertisers to subsidize the aquisition of a new Mac for me. It is YOUR site that is causing the problem, Mr/Ms Developer, and your egotistical drive to have the fanciest, busiest, most garish and difficult-to-read site out there. Hence my refusal to visit ANY myspace.com pages. Period.

[Peter Cohen]

Plus Jon's a Mac guy, so we should all instantly like him (Charisma +2)!

[Jarmo]

I used Opera a while ago when it got the torrent download feature.
A download hung midway, crashed Opera and Opera in turn broke the whole filesystem of my mac.
The browser is not coming back, no matter the sugarcoating.

[Rhywun]

Opera is a bit out-of-place on the Mac, as others have stated, and includes many features that duplicate features already on the Mac (and which Windows lacks). Much of the out-of-place feeling is because of the cross-platform widget framework they use; just like Firefox, there's no way to go completely native with a 3rd party framework. And much of it is because of a truly bizarre and unique configuration system that takes some getting used to.
That said, in my Windows days, I really liked Opera. Especially the mail client. It was (is?) just faster and superior to anything Microsoft offered. However, on the Mac, Opera is a non-starter for me because it doesn't allow support for 1Password. Also its ad-blocking is inferior to something like Firefox's AdBlock.

[dam5s]

I use Opera 9 daily on Leopard. And it works much better than Mail Safari Address Book for me.

There are still some integration issues that I would like to see fixed, but it works great so far.

[Pondus]

I don’t use Opera because it lacks some basic functions, like support for drag and drop on the Mac. You can not select some text and drag it to the desktop or in to another application. You have to copy and paste.
It should be easy for Opera to implement this, but they don’t/won’t.