Opera on Mac OS X problems & wishes
Charles Dyer
<http://www.hirezfox.com/km/indexco.htm>, a webcomic site. In the line
"Welcome to Magpie House Design", the last three words ('Magpie House
Design') are supposed to display in Vivaldi, if you have that font, or at
least in some script font. That line _does_ display properly in Safari,
Firefox, and even an ancient copy of MSIE 5.2.whatever on OS X, and it
displays properly in MSIE 7 and 8, Firefox, Safari, and Opera on Windows...
but not in Opera on Macs. Including Opera 10.53. Instead it shows in the
default serif font. Many other sites exhibit similar behavior.
2 Page elements move around. On various subpages of that site, the 'donate'
button on the main window is supposed to be centered and placed under the
navigation block. It's that way in every browser _except_ Opera. In Opera,
it's moved to the upper left, above the comic strip. (Yes, there are _two_
'donate' buttons, one in the scrolling bar on the extreme left which allows
visitors to chose comics, and one on the main part of the page. The one on
the main part of the page is the one that moves.) Again, other sites exhibit
similar behavior. It should be noted that this time this behavior is observed
in Opera in both OS X and Windows. The proper behavior is observed in every
other browser I've used in both OS X and Windows. Either Opera is wrong or
everyone else is.
3 Bookmark features are problematical. Example: In Safari I have a list of
webcomics I regularly visit. If I click that list, all of them load into
separate tabs, and I can move down the list, reading each comic in turn, in
the order I want to read them, and can close the tab once I've read that
particular comic. This also works in FireFox, and in MISE 7 and 8 on Windows.
If there's a way to put the tabs in anything other than alphabetical order in
Opera I haven't found it. Worse, certain sites crash and burn on
loading--when, and only when loaded as part of the general group of
webcomics. These sites include
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/artsandliving/comics/king.html?name=Zits> and some, but not all, other
comics at the Washington Post site. Note that if you just go directly to that
page without loading the entire group, it loads. Load it as part of the
group, and it crashes, and takes Opera with it. But only on OS X. No problems
in Windows. (At last count my standard webcomic list was 53 items long. At
least four pages on that list refuse to load properly in Opera. And, yes, the
entire list loads correctly in Safari and Firefox and MSIE 8. I don't know if
more than four pages fail to load properly, because I stopped trying to find
pages which crashed Opera on loading as part of the list after I got to four.
There could easily be considerably more.)
4 Bookmark imports can have problems. Opera on Macs has a feature for
importing Safari bookmarks. Safari exports bookmarks as plain HTML. Opera
will import the Safari bookmarks on initial setup, but has problems doing a
manual import, in that it won't touch the Safari HTML file. Opera will _open_
the HTML page as a standard HTML page
5 Some pages take a long, long, LONG time to load in Opera... sometimes.
About 10% of the time when I try to open <http://td501.comicgenesis.com/> it
can take up to 5 minutes to load. I don't think it's the server, as if I fire
up Safari or Firefox while I'm waiting for Opera to load, I can get the same
page immediately. Other sites exhibit the same behavior.
And, oh, yeah, one more thing: starting with Opera 10.53, the Opera icon
vanished. Opera now shows up as a generic app, without the big red O.
I'd like to be able to update bookmarks from other browsers without having to
go to a lot of trouble.
I'd like to be able to load _all_ my stuff, the way I want it, when I want
it.
And getting a reply to bug reports would be nice, too.
Machines used to test various aspects of Opera:
iMac G5, running 10.5.x
iMac Intel, running 10.6.x
iMac Intel, running Vista SP2
iMac Intel, running XP Pro 64 SP3 in a VMWare VM
Toshiba Satellite laptop, running Win 7
hand-built WinBox, running Win 7
Mac Pro, running 10.6.x
Other browsers tested on Mac:
Firefox
Safari
OmniWeb
MSIE 5.2.something
Other browsers tested on Windows:
Firefox
Safari
MSIE 7 & 8.
Screenshots of the relevant problems are available if desired.
Nisse Engström
> 1 Certain sites simply don't display properly. Example:
> <http://www.hirezfox.com/km/indexco.htm>, a webcomic site. In the line
> 2 Page elements move around. On various subpages of that site, the 'donate'
> button on the main window is supposed to be centered and placed under the
> navigation block. It's that way in every browser _except_ Opera. In Opera,
> it's moved to the upper left, above the comic strip. (Yes, there are _two_
> 'donate' buttons, one in the scrolling bar on the extreme left which allows
> visitors to chose comics, and one on the main part of the page. The one on
> the main part of the page is the one that moves.) Again, other sites exhibit
> similar behavior. It should be noted that this time this behavior is observed
> in Opera in both OS X and Windows. The proper behavior is observed in every
> other browser I've used in both OS X and Windows. Either Opera is wrong or
> everyone else is.
There's a third alternative: Nobody's wrong.
The HTML is incorrect which forces browsers to guess what
the author intended. Different browsers make different
guesses. In this case the problem is a missing ">" character
in the following line:
<tr align="center"<td>
Why Opera places this at the top, I don't know.
/Nisse