Opera 9 Stole My Brain
Posted on 2006-04-01 (Updated on 2019-01-21)
First of all, let me disappoint you by starting off with a disclaimer: This probably won't be as funny as it could be. If you're looking for ha has, check out PinkDot [slashdot.org]; a new, softer, pinker, more unicorn-laden side of the News for Nerds.
Alright, back on topic. I downloaded the latest Opera [opera.com] browser, Opera 9.0 Preview 2. After it was all installed and I was presented with the familiar Opera browser window (not too many UI changes on the surface), I loaded up one of my pages. I was absolutely astounded.
I have always been an Opera browser fan, due to it's excellent code rendering and devotion to web standards. But this new edition seems to have climbed into my brain to borrow my view on how pages should be rendered. I loaded up the Warren County site, and found it perfectly rendered to my intents. Opera 8.X had goofed my accessibility bar on the top by adding a margin out of nowhere, but Opera 9 rendered it snug to the edges of the browser window. In fact, everything looked just as I invisioned when I was designing it. Opera even agreed with me on a CSS issue I had dealt with; there's a CSS fudge I had to add in there to make a page element show up correctly in all major browsers. Opera 9 took that, and rendered the fudge just as I imagine it should have been rendered. It offset the element to reflect the CSS I added, and rendered it correctly when I took it out. On a rainy Saturday, that really makes me smile.
I've been using the IE 7 Beta as well, and it astounds me how far it has to go and how little has changed. Shiny tabs and a few band-aids on glaring rendering issues do not a new browser make. Opera has always been ahead of the pack in my opinion, and I've noticed that the other [mozilla.com] browsers [microsoft.com/ie] tend to take note of Opera's innovations, even if it takes a while. Opera's new rendering changes give me hope that web design as a whole will, someday, become less of an exercise in patience.