[thelist] Re: search for CSS-compliant, simple browser [OT]

Nathan Wright ominous at rmh-d.com
Fri Jul 5 17:22:01 CDT 2002


Carol,

I don't claim to be an Opera expert (by any standard!), but as
it's quickly becoming my favorite browser (and I'm quickly
becoming an Opera evangelist), I'd like to try to help you with
your frustrations.

>Perhaps they have -- but then, my even older browser (the
I.E. 2.0) also manages to display the Gist pages
>better than Opera's tiny little column that seems infinitely
long! Surely the new standards are not that badly backwards-
compatible???
>
>If I even try to use Neomail with Opera, which is a simple
Web-based e-mail system, again, I get a very long, very not-
wide (thin) column
>wrapping messages, headers, dates, etc. in such a way I
can't even tell who has sent what! It seems to wrap
absolutely everything. I tried
>a couple other sites, but none was recognizable. (Well, it
doesn't help that Yahoo has decided to pretty itself up. Pretty
poor timing, I'd
>say.)

Can you send me a screen shot of what it looks like in your
monitor, along with your screen size and resolution? I took a
look at Gist on my system (17" monitor, 1024x768 resolution,
Win ME) running Opera 6 and everything seemed fine (although
I've never visited the page before ...). I see a table of 514px,
and as far as I can tell from their convoluted code all of the
table cells are fixed width.

>With a browser, one tries first (or *I* try first!) to set
security levels and so on. As I did. Also, the browser started in
a display mode that
>had about 1/3 of my screen taken up with its silly toolbars
and such, none of which I wanted -- and I couldn't even find
where to turn off
>that aspect of the display. Searching, and then its Help
menu, didn't turn up a solution. Finally, I gave up and just
started trying to search,
>but then I ran into the bad displays of e-mail, the bad
displays of tv listings, etc. Grrrr.

Opera, it seems, has a ways to go before it is truly "user
friendly". I share your frustrations with the 3 or 4 silly toolbars
... to turn all of these off, go to "View" in the main menu. The
first options you should see are "Hotlist, Main Bar, Personal
Bar, Status Bar, Window Bar, Address Bar". Simply go through
these and turn them off (or relocate them) until you find a
setup that you like. Also, I have to agree that the help menu
is a joke. For the best and most comprehensive source on
*How to Make Opera Work*, check out
http://www.searchengineworld.com/opera/faq.cgi

>My suggestion, which was serious, was that companies
should present an inoffensively FAMILIAR interface on initial
(not even default!)
>presentation. Then follow-up with an e-mail, linking to a
tutorial, allowing us to explore, on OUR schedule, all the great
new features. I
>would have liked that option.

This is actually a really interesting thought. Since all browsers
share roughly the same set of basic features, it would make
sense for them to look roughly the same (much the same as
the steering wheel in a car would never be mistaken for
something else). Practically speaking, since individual
quirks/features are one of the things that set companies and
products apart, I don't know if you'll ever see this happening
... but it's still an interesting idea.

>I don't WANT to stick with Netscape 4.0!!! And I don't intend
to design future pages for those who use it (for sites for most
audiences),
>either.  I'm trying to learn to design pages with CSS, instead
of the table technique I mastered back in '97 or so. That's
really much harder
>when you can't see the result of your own code. (-8

One neat Opera shortcut you may come to love is that when
viewing a page you can hit CTRL+ALT+V and send that page
straight to the w3c code validator.

If you have any other problems with Opera I can *attempt* to
help you with them.

Nathan








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