Opera 9

Well, well, well it looks like Opera is getting closer to being usable. They recently added support for XSLT. Personally, I love XSLT. So much so that I keep my primary resume in XML and make it viewable via a XSLT. Soon Opera 9 users will be able to view my resume as well as other XSLT based pages I expose to the web.

As another positive, Opera 9 also comes VERY close to passing the ACID 2 test.

Opera 9 however did NOT fix some of it's major problems. Here's a list of things which must be fixed before I stop telling people to avoid it.

• Better DOM support. My test for this is my website; call it my own ACID2 test. If Opera can't move around my boxes, then their DOM is screwed. On my website all I'm doing is trapping the mouse coordinates when the mouse button is down. I know I could do all kinds of fanciness, but if an API does not have great usability, it's USELESS. Therefore, Opera fails my test.
• To be a standards compliant browser, you have to not only be W3C compliant but also ECMA compliant. They need to start to up their support for ECMAScript before I even get near it.
• The ability to programatically track a right-click needs to be on by default. I use that thing for context menus in some of my applications. I'm not sure how the Opera creators ever plan on being compatible with the new online Windows Mail application Microsoft will be releasing soon. They too rely heavily on the right-click.
• CSS Opacity!!! Why in the WORLD don't they have this?? Sure, it's a CSS3 rule, but come on!
• Most importantly, whenever I go to a website I type in the middle part of the name and hit Ctrl-Enter. This tacks on the www. and .com parts to the name so I don't have to type any of that. For YEARS IE was the only browser with this and this was the primary reason I avoided Mozilla since it's inception. When I saw that that betas of Firefox had it I started to become somewhat interested in it. This to me is like the ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS for a good browser. If you can't provide a brain dead simple user experience, you fail. Usability is what it's all about!
• Also, most people are used to Alt-F C as being the short cut for closing a window. While I abhor Firefox's ability to allow people to override keys, which makes this vital shortcut useless on various websites, Opera does't even allow for closing in this way to begin with.