Stephen Coates
30th July 2008, 11:01
Has anyone installed the latest version of Opera yet?
I had a slightly older version but decided to update to the latest version as a rater simple page was not rendering as it should have done, whereas it did in IE 5 so we wanted to find out why.
So I have the latest version and I can't say I'm that impressed by it. The browser is still good but there are other annoying things.
For starters, the back/forward buttons etc are differetn. I prefered the one from the older version. Does anyone know if it is possible to get them back?
Secondly, the buttons in the side bar thingy which I use for accessing the history and transfers are no longer labled. This is awkward as I don't know which button does which without the label.
http://emaculation.com/steve/sidebuttons.png
It also requires me to hold down the shift key to drag a link or tab into one of the toolbars (thats what all those little icons next to the tab are in the picture). Also the appearence of the tabs is different. It look like the selected tab ios deselected and that the deselected tab is selected.
But one of the most annoying things which I have found so far is that when i click on a PDF file, it tries to open Acrobat and load the PDF file within the browser. The old version just treated it as a standard non html/picture file and gave me a requester asking me whether I want to open it or save it, with open just downloading it and opening it in Acrobat seperate to the browser. This is how I want it to behave now, but I can't remember whether I had to change the settings in the old version to get it to do this, or whether this was default. Any ideas?
http://emaculation.com/steve/comparison.jpg
Edit: I forgot to moan about the new address bar. One complaint I always had about Opera is that the address bar seems to forget addresses which you have not visited for a week or so. This is annoying when I only visit a site once every one or two wekks (and sometimes more often). This means that it will be in the address bar when i try and access the link several times during the week, but if I leave it a week or so, then it won't be in. This is irritating as I got very used to just selecting it from the list last week. Internet Explorer always kept the addresses for a lot longer.
However in the new version of opera, it seems to have been turned into history search feature. This is a picture of me trying to access the South Yorkshire Transport forum:
http://emaculation.com/steve/address.png
If it had forgotten the travelsy.co.uk address, i rather than it just displaying a blank list to tell me it had forgotten, it instead displays a list of stuff containing 'tra' which is completely irrelavent. This can be a little confusing when you see a big list but cannot see the site you were expecting to see. If I want to search the history I will use the sidebar thing mentioned above.
Edit 2: It doesn't seem to refresh pages properly quite often, like on forums. e.g. When i loaded this Edit page up, it contained the original version of the post, not the post containing the first edit, so I had to refresh. Just as when I go into topic on a forum, it often loads the cached version up.
Edit 3: I'm just glad that Opera hasn't followed in the footsteps of FireFox 2 (yet) and started using what at first glance look like 16 colour icons and trying to tell you what to search for on google when you already know what you are going to type in to the search box.
I had a slightly older version but decided to update to the latest version as a rater simple page was not rendering as it should have done, whereas it did in IE 5 so we wanted to find out why.
So I have the latest version and I can't say I'm that impressed by it. The browser is still good but there are other annoying things.
For starters, the back/forward buttons etc are differetn. I prefered the one from the older version. Does anyone know if it is possible to get them back?
Secondly, the buttons in the side bar thingy which I use for accessing the history and transfers are no longer labled. This is awkward as I don't know which button does which without the label.
http://emaculation.com/steve/sidebuttons.png
It also requires me to hold down the shift key to drag a link or tab into one of the toolbars (thats what all those little icons next to the tab are in the picture). Also the appearence of the tabs is different. It look like the selected tab ios deselected and that the deselected tab is selected.
But one of the most annoying things which I have found so far is that when i click on a PDF file, it tries to open Acrobat and load the PDF file within the browser. The old version just treated it as a standard non html/picture file and gave me a requester asking me whether I want to open it or save it, with open just downloading it and opening it in Acrobat seperate to the browser. This is how I want it to behave now, but I can't remember whether I had to change the settings in the old version to get it to do this, or whether this was default. Any ideas?
http://emaculation.com/steve/comparison.jpg
Edit: I forgot to moan about the new address bar. One complaint I always had about Opera is that the address bar seems to forget addresses which you have not visited for a week or so. This is annoying when I only visit a site once every one or two wekks (and sometimes more often). This means that it will be in the address bar when i try and access the link several times during the week, but if I leave it a week or so, then it won't be in. This is irritating as I got very used to just selecting it from the list last week. Internet Explorer always kept the addresses for a lot longer.
However in the new version of opera, it seems to have been turned into history search feature. This is a picture of me trying to access the South Yorkshire Transport forum:
http://emaculation.com/steve/address.png
If it had forgotten the travelsy.co.uk address, i rather than it just displaying a blank list to tell me it had forgotten, it instead displays a list of stuff containing 'tra' which is completely irrelavent. This can be a little confusing when you see a big list but cannot see the site you were expecting to see. If I want to search the history I will use the sidebar thing mentioned above.
Edit 2: It doesn't seem to refresh pages properly quite often, like on forums. e.g. When i loaded this Edit page up, it contained the original version of the post, not the post containing the first edit, so I had to refresh. Just as when I go into topic on a forum, it often loads the cached version up.
Edit 3: I'm just glad that Opera hasn't followed in the footsteps of FireFox 2 (yet) and started using what at first glance look like 16 colour icons and trying to tell you what to search for on google when you already know what you are going to type in to the search box.