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Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

Opera is one of those things that I have really tried to like, but that just never really caught on. It's like when you are picking a movie: that intellectual foreign movie has been in your queue for a week, but you are tired so you just grab the nearest retarded Michael Bay movie to relax.

The few times I used Opera I really liked it. I think the guys behind the browser are very innovative and it's a shame that they seem to be always running behind on standards compliance, causing all kinds of problems in daily usage. I have to admit that it has been a while since I last gave it a chance, so maybe things have changed. Right now, there are plenty open source alternatives that are simply better.

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> it's a shame that they seem to be always running behind on standards compliance, causing all kinds of problems in daily usage.

It feels a bit to me like you're reiterating a myth. I've used opera for 5 years and I've never run into this, afair. I virtually only get problems when devs use browser detection and then tell me that "this site does not work on opera". I've also had problems with sites that were just only tested on Firefox (used to be IE but the short-sighted devs all switched browser), but there it didn't work on Chrome either.

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but I think comments like yours are what keeps some people from trying out an excellent browser that does what you want and nothing else.

The only thing that I think really rocks more in Chrome is its super-smooth and entirely hidden auto-updating mechanism.

You may be right. Like I said, it has been a while since I last used Opera (several years) and then there were many instances where I had to switch to other browsers to be able to proceed. Most annoyingly, my online banking would work in Firefox (and I'm sure in IE), but not in Opera. These things made it very annoying for daily use.

Maybe it is not fair to blame Opera for quirks and deviations from standards any more than others. The difference is that Opera has such a small market share that developers don't account for Opera's quirks as much as they do for IE, Firefox and Webkit.

I have used Opera a few times, and at the time I was using it, there was no support for SOCKS proxies (something standard in other competitors, always cool to set up a poor's man VPN over SSH). By then, it was important for me to have this in my browser, so I dropped Opera and chose Chrome instead. Nevertheless, I checked the last version and it seems like they implemented SOCKS. Great news, but for now I'll stick to Chrome... BTW, is there any killer feature in Opera ?

Opera's killer features get copied sooner or later (sessions, DOM cache, speed dial, undo close tab, etc.) And what is a killer depends what you care about…

• It's very good if you prefer using keyboard navigation (spatial navigation is a killer not copied anywhere yet)

• Mouse Gestures are still best implemented in Opera IMHO, although Apple's trackpad gestures make that less of a killer feature these days.

• (Fast)Forward button finds and "clicks" on links with labels like "Next page" which makes paged navigation easy.

• Opera handles lots of tabs in a session very well. I often leave tabs open instead of bookmarking pages :)

• The built-in mail client is a killer for me – has "GMail-like" filters (predating GMail), very good threading, 1-key shortcuts and differentiates between "seen" and "read".

I always thought Opera was very standards compliant.

Potentially there are some shortcomings when it comes to new technologies which I'm going to sweepingly categorise as being HTML5 related, but that gets into a separate argument that HTML5 is still not yet a standard.

At the same time, for "everyday use" (whatever that really means) I've had no issue with standards compliance, and Opera does certainly have support some some not-yet-standardised things. Of course, there's the usual caveat that YMMV.

May I ask what issues you have with their falling behind on standards compliance?

It is most likely because Opera was almost the only lone browser that refused to have 'Mozilla' in its user agent string from the very beginning.

A lot of websites still use UA detection scripts from late 90s(!) which STILL do antiquated UA sniffing which means Opera does not get scripts, styles or markup because it does not seem to have the 'Mozilla' in its UA string leading to broken pages.

There is an easy fix if it is an irritant which is to select 'Edit Site Preferences > Network' from the context menu on a page.

Also, we would be much obliged if you could submit a bug report if you come across a site that does not render correctly in Opera: https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

If you are a web developer, please do consider using feature-detection :)

In daily use, it seems pretty much the other way around. Opera supports standards, but everyone else goes beyond them.

Also, it's about time feature detection became mainstream because whitelisting certain browsers almost always means forgetting about Opera.

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