Opera welcomes its OS overlord’s new trackpad commands.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m a fan of Opera and have been for years. Back when Opera cost $40 or so, I thought that was a reasonable price for such a brilliant browser—especially considering the alternatives. (Firefox was not around, and then not so great, and IE took around a minute to load a blank page.) And though Opera continues to crow about its speed, speed is no longer such a big deal. Even the slowest browser, with a decent Internet connection and on a reasonably fast computer, is perfectly sufficient to load a busy site or stream a high-def movie.
What is a big deal, then? Customization (it’s true Opera doesn’t have extensions, but for actual browser functions, it doesn’t need ’em), stability, and update-friendliness.. Version 10.5 is a significant update, at least for Mac users. This new version has a mix of improvements and, well, “improvements” that have me changing my mind hourly about whether to roll back to a previous version.
Swipe and pinch
Ideal for larger monitors, expandable tabs.
Since I’m not what you’d call a Mac “fan,” I rolled my eyes when I heard my new MacBook supported Multi-Touch and that I would instantly fall in love with using one to four fingers on the trackpad for mousing, scrolling, browsing back and forward, clearing the screen, and so forth. In the end, it took a good day to get hooked. This Multi-Touch thing hasn’t turned me into a total mouser, but I use the trackpad over the keyboard at least twice as much as I used to. Waiting a few weeks for Opera to catch up with my new mouse was actually rough.
With Opera 10.5—take note, it may not download and install automatically, as recent releases have—Mac users can swipe left and right with three fingers to navigate backward and forward. It sounds small, but once you’re used to Multi-Touch, it really is annoying when an application can’t understand it. The update, as always, is seamless, maintaining all your preferences and other customizations, and even your previous session, if you’re set up that way.
The zoom level display is sloppy.
I was pleased to see that the two-finger pinch to zoom the page view works in this new version as well; there have been some issues with the one-key zoom commands I’d grown used to in previous versions. I wonder whether it was a last-minute code add, though, for this release. The zoom field is now missing its drop-down arrow, so you have to either click where the arrow used to be, or click in the field and then type a number or press the down arrow to select a zoom value. Weird. Also, the text doesn’t quite fit in that field.
I’ve also noticed some choppiness in this latest release, another thing I hope Opera can smooth for the next update. Scrolling down is just a little bumpy, and pinch-to-zoom lands at odd numbers very quickly. Again, choppy is the word. I find pages zoom in and out too quickly, making it difficult to get to the right level. I sometimes revert to the 0 and 9 keys (which luckily seem to be working reliably again) to zoom by 10 percent.
Finding text
Of course, the .5 release includes a bit more to write home about: Private browsing, to stay in step with the others, a new JavaScript engine, because with 2 percent market share, you can’t stomp your foot and make everyone else comply with standards, Growl notifications (sweet!), and an inexplicable change to the Find function.
In previous versions, there were two ways to find text within a page. Press Ctrl-F and you got a standard dialog box with standard controls. To find the next instance of a text string you pressed Enter or clicked “Find Next,” and to lose the box you pressed Esc or clicked to close. Press “/” and you got an inconspicuous little pop-up that found text as you typed, found the next instance if you pressed down, and disappeared automatically after use. Opera 10.5 has a horrible new hybrid seemingly modeled after Firefox’s annoying in-page search. It’s at the top of the screen, which is totally wrong, and now the spacebar moves you to the next instance—but only if you tab out of the Find field. My hands are already on the keyboard; why should I have to click arrows to navigate my Find results? I hate this change.
Bottom Line
All in all, Opera has never disappointed me for long, and the frustration of using another browser always brings me back. Opera is my go-to browser and I don’t see that changing—but I will be nosing around to see if I can get the old-style Find function back.
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