Saturday, July 21, 2007

Five things that would improve Opera

Here's the deal: there's this tag game going on right now in the blogosphere. If you've been tagged, you have to write about five things you would like to see improved in Opera. Not only that, but you also have to tag five other people in order not to break the chain. So I've been tagged by Ryan over at CyberNet, the blog that I write articles for on occasion. Here's my list:


1. Better cookie management - Have a look at these screenshots:

See the difference? While Firefox shows a window with three simple buttons (Allow, Allow this session, Deny) and a "Remember my answer" checkmark, Opera shows a dropdown menu. Maybe this is a personal thing, but I prefer the Firefox way of handling single cookies.


2. Better ad blocking - Opera has a content filter, but it's not that great for blocking ads. A screenshot says more than a thousand words, so I'll let them do the talking:


Opera just hides the images but doesn't remove the white space left by the ad. Adblock however also removes the white space.


3. Updater - Now, I haven't actually been able to test this, but Ryan said you have to upgrade Opera manually when there's a new version available. This is very annoying. What I'd like to see is a full-blown updater system like the one in Firefox. I know that this could be more difficult to achieve on Linux systems (because you might need the root password), but it should be possible. Or why not put Opera in the Ubuntu repositories so that I automatically receive Opera updates?


4. Firefox extensions - I have no idea if this is even possible (because Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine and Opera developed an engine of their own), but it would be really cool. I don't know if I would be able to give up all my Firefox extensions when switching to Opera. Or maybe the Opera community needs to start developing their own extensions.


5. Rendering engine - Opera still fails to render some websites correctly. Here's an example:

I'm sure that Opera does what they can about this and this could be due to Blue Dot not properly supporting the Opera browser, but still: it's annoying and it will keep people from switching.


So now I have to tag five other people. Unfortunately, I only know one blogger who visits my blog on occasion (except for the people that Ryan already tagged). So Alex Killby, if you're reading this: you've been tagged.

Labels: , , ,

Posted by Pieter De Decker @ 10:31 AM 3 comments