@Sniff: Yes, Opera should “see in the future” Opera’s engine is unique and rare among users, that’s why there is problem of compatibility. Opera needs to know how developers are building sites if users are expected to see and use (top 100) sites normally without delay and through fixes in browser.js (which is working pretty good for now but i guess that’s not the ultimate solution).

Most sites that don’t work aren’t because of bugs or lacking abilities in Opera. You wanted more compatibility, but that’s assuming that it’s all something Opera can do something about.

Considering the fact that some major sites like Google’s can change weekly or monthly and they don’t test in Opera, your request is totally missing the mark. Even if Opera fixes stuff all the time, sites will change and stuff will have to be fixed all over again.

How is Opera supposed to do something about that? Hire people who can look into the future?

@Groovy_M

What i think is more important in given situation is increased compatibility in (let’s say) top hundred most popular / visited pages on the Web.

How are you going to get those 100 sites to stop blocking Opera?

Only if Opera 10 will bring flawlessly working those top sites

You are assuming that it’s Opera that isn’t working rather than some browser sniffing **** or something like that.

Anyway, I will read and respond to some more comments when I have time. Until then, have a great day.

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Maybe it’s not time for “revolution” in browsers UI yet, so Opera 10 doesn’t provide one. What i think is more important in given situation is increased compatibility in (let’s say) top hundred most popular / visited pages on the Web. Those pages became very complex lately and Opera with its unique engine followed slowly, some of those pages are partially not working as user is expecting! Only if Opera 10 will bring flawlessly working those top sites (in which complexity will increase even more rapidly in future), we will see increase of Opera marketshare IMHO. Of course this to happen we also need global agreement among web developers to build sites according to known standards… but that’s another story.

Again, I am saying that Opera is not changing radically enough given its history and environment. Every other major browser, including IE, has accomplished similar achievements to the ones you cite in the past few years, in most cases doing them faster and better (for spell-check and rendering\JS speed improvements, at least.)

For that reason, the difficulty of implementing inline spell check does not impress me. Opera should be at the head of the pack, innovating with great unique ideas and features. It’s not, it fell behind, and being an apologist for it only allows Opera to remain complacent.

http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/

But hey, who cares about facts when you choose to ignore everything but the UI you can see?

Don’t bother, some people think that rewriting the whole flawed storage system of M2 2 times in 2 years is a huge improvement for M2 despite the fact that the 2nd rewrite (9.5) was made because the first one (9) was such a train wreck that M2 was losing mails (the infamous “message body not downloaded”), filters and searching didn’t work properly, etc. Meanwhile the other “improvement” was: implementing a pseudo-decent IMAP backend (meaning that it worked as opposed to Opera 7/8). In other words, they needed 4 years to make M2 work as intended (i.e actually working).

And yes, I agree with the guy who said that Opera 9 was actually Opera 8, that’s cristal clear: for **** sake, opera8 was named 7.6 during the whole beta testing period and the main features were ERA, XmlHttpRequest for Gmail, UserJavaScript and the freaking start bar.

I find it amusing how long-time Opera users who express their perfectly legit concerns backed up with facts get bashed by the “real” Opera users.

You obviously do not understand the type of work that goes into adding a feature as simple as spell check. The multitude of changes that had to happen to the code that handled text areas in web pages, and in the user interface. All this while making Opera faster instead of turning it into bloat.

Each of these features that you consider minor caused huge changes to the code base.

Also, while Opera Software has not designed a new rendering engine from the ground up since Opera 7, they have done major changes in the rendering engine since then. They also put a new JavaScript engine into 9.5, one that had been rewritten from scratch to be more efficient, and more compatible. Just because the changes do not pop up in the user interface of the browser does not mean that they are not there.

SuitCase, do you have Opera 7.5 installed?