So John Bell and I were talking about the Opera web browser (did you know version 7 was released today?). John said it seemed to hande more websites much better. I’ve since downloaded the new version and am declaring that the site still looks pretty cheesy.
What’s weird, though, is that my knee-jerk reaction is to declare that O7 just doesn’t support web standards–and that would even seem to be confirmed by the fact that Mark Pilgrim posted a CSS workaround hack today. But then it occurs to me that it doesn’t make sense for a brand-spankin’ new production browser (as opposed to a brand-spankin’ new beta browser) doesn’t support standards that have been around for two years. Then it occurs to me to wonder what the rest of the standards-based sites I can think of off the top of my head look like. Dive Into Mark? Fine. Dooce? Copasetic. A List Apart? Spiffy. Wired? Well, er, not so great (at least I’m not alone).
Now the kicker: I go to Opera’s own site to see what their markup is. To my surprise, it’s XHTML 1.0 Strict. And it even validates.
So what am I doing wrong?
By the way: Opera may have mouse gestures, but Phoenix has mouse gestures and type-ahead-find. I’m sticking with Phoenix.
Actually, on my way to work today, I was thinking about my frustration that I couldn’t get MT bookmarklets to work with Opera at ALL (since JS never seems to be launchable from buttons), and I thought about giving Phoenix a shot. I’ll be trying it tonight probably.
SPREAD THE LOVE.
Just know that the 0.5 build of Phoenix breaks when you click on javascript: URLs. These little rogue of a URL is thankfully going the way of the dodo, but you may find it on the occasional website. As a workaround, I grabbed the 12.26.2002 build, which displays js URLs just fine, but the right-click menu isn’t always where you expect it. That, in my mind, was a much more managable bug.
Make sure that if you want mouse gestures that you click on the link to install it from this post (it’s a plug-in).
We love Phoenix.
This is definitely an interesting browser so far. I just wish that clicking on links that open in a new window (because of target _blank) would automatically launch in a new tab, instead. It’s got me clicking everything with the middle mouse button, even when I want to keep it in the same tab! This isn’t quite intuitive to me, but I’m going to give it a few days.
It’s definitely a pretty interface, though.