Two months ago I stopped using Opera — the smallest, once the fastest and often the best browser built to date. Opera had all the good ideas years before everyone else. It had tabbed browsing in 1997, and proper CSS support in the same year, long before there was any proper CSS to decode.
Early this century it had a tiny chat client built in that would work across all the main networks. The Opera email client worked the same magic as Gmail, sorting and searching the mail without you needing to do so yourself, but more quickly, and it worked offline as well; its junk filter is very nearly as good as Gmail’s, and much better than Thunderbird’s.
Opera had a searchable history, tagged favourites and instant searchable clipping to disk built in years before these things were available anywhere else. It has prettier, more professional skins than Firefox, a really well-thought-out user interface, doesn’t crash much, and is entirely free.
Giving it up, then, was a wrench, but also a lesson in what standards really mean. I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird not because they are intrinsically better. They are not. In some ways each program is inferior to its Opera counterpart. The trouble is that they work better with the rest of the web and even with the rest of my computer.
The list of sites that don’t work quite right with Opera includes almost all of the showpieces of Ajax: Flickr, Gmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo!’s fancy sites … all of these are built to work with Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. They work the way those browsers do, with all their unofficial quirks. Opera, with its tiny user base, is largely ignored.
If more web designers tested their work in Opera — and it is a lovely browser for design work — the problem might be eliminated. But since they don’t, more and more of the interesting sites don’t work with it, which means there is less incentive to test — and so it goes.
It was Flickr that pushed me over the edge. For some reason, Opera will not show the annotation features there, and is also extremely slow to render the Flash-based parts of the site. Once I was using Firefox for one site, I discovered that there are now a couple of Firefox add-ons better than their Opera counterparts.
Again, this is new, and a consequence of a small user base. For years, Opera would have built in much better-thought-out versions of most Firefox extensions for such things as tabbed browsing. But it has nothing that is as good as Scrapbook for filing pages offline for future reference; and its ad-blocking facilities, while good, are not as good as Firefox’s Adblock Plus. I will tolerate advertisements so long as they are not animated. The moment something squirms or flickers, I squash it like a bug.
Then there is communication with the world my side of the router: all the files spread across my own computer. In some ways, Opera is unsurpassable here. Its email program is blindingly fast at finding something in a pile of 20 000 saved messages. But a couple of times last autumn messages went missing, and that is intolerable. Nor do desktop search programs make a good job of rummaging through Opera’s emails, while something about its interactions with the clipboard means that it doesn’t function well with external note-clipping programs such as OneNote and Evernote.
Most importantly, it won’t do MAPI, the standard way for Windows programs to tell an email program that they want a message sent. This is a typical example of Opera’s stiff-necked Norwegian rectitude. The developers think MAPI is unsafe, or improper. But I don’t care. I want to be able quickly and easily to attach files to a mail program. Once more, vulgar democracy trumps severe academic authority.
In software, as in politics, it is not enough to be right, and sometimes it is a disadvantage. What really matters is that you should get on with everyone else, especially the powerful. The story of Opera shows that the real standards bodies on the web are no longer the W3 consortium but Google and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo!. Their flavours of Ajax are what Windows used to be: the platform that everyone must write to. — Guardian Unlimited Â