2009-04-09

Reasons why Opera sucks

First of all, I would like to state that a term "sucks" sometimes can be applied to almost any program or system, so if you like Opera, don't feel abused. In this small article I will describe problems I have faced personaly.

Lots of people say that Opera is able to generate the view of a website almost in the same way as IE does. My experience tells me that this is far from the truth. I don't have much time to dig deep into the issue, but I will give you some interesting examples...

As you might already know from my blog, I am developing my CMS system (framework). To give my arguments a bit more weight, I must state that I write a valid (I use validators) XHTML 1.0 strict code. Firefox 3.0.8, IE7, IE8 display everything perfectly. Output in these browsers is nearly identical, but OP 9.64 has failed for many times already.

1) Floating right and DOM:

I was trying to float a div element right. It seemed to work fine until I tried to change the image of img tag, that lied inside that container. I could not change anything until I removed the floating style.

2) Bottom and right styles:

In order to create a fullscreen container with scrollbars (overflow: auto;), I defined the positions of container edges without using the height parameter. This worked fine in all browsers until I tried to resize the window of OP. Those containers did not resize at all until a page was refreshed...

3) Fixed position:

There was a need to create a context menu in my CMS, so I used a fixed position div container for that purpose. Once again everything seemed fine until I changed block display value to none. Opera didn't refresh the page and the result was rather shocking... I could actualy reach elements under the virtually invisible block, I could even select text with a mouse underneath, but all untouched parts of the div container remained unactive but visible... Even more, text selection has gone crazy after this experiment. I could select text in multiple places of the document at the same time. That would have been fun, but the sad part is that it was not that easy to deselect it afterwards...

I used to face many more bugs in Opera, mostly with JS, DOM and mostly related to refresh problems. I really hope that those bugs will be actualy fixed in the near future. At the moment I do not see Opera as a serious browser as it needs lots of work...