Opera Road Test

Previously I wrote about Opera 9.5.  Since then, I’ve been using it for almost all of my browsing at home (at work we still have to use IE6 *rolls eyes*).  So far I’ve only encountered two real problems with it.

Of course, every now and then, you still run across some sites that refuse to work with anything but Internet Explorer or Firefox.  Most of the time it’s a bank or some other kind of financial institution.  (I find it somewhat ironic that banks usually have the worst, most incompatible, most insecure web sites around.)  It’s not really a problem, but it is sort of annoying to have to load up another browser.  It’d be nice if Opera had an “Open Link in Internet Explorer” option.  Oh, hey, a quick Google reveals there is a way to do just that.  Sweet.

More annoying is the way that Opera handles RSS feeds and XML.  As a programmer, I look at XML all the time.  And as a programmer who has written software to read RSS feeds, I look at RSS feeds all the time, too.  Opera does an admirable job of recognizing RSS and offering to add feeds to its internal RSS reader like other browsers, but that’s not what I want it to do.  When I click on an RSS feed link, I almost always want to look at formatted content or at the underlying XML.  Unfortunately Opera does a miserable job of displaying XML in the browser.  It crams everything together into a big page of unreadable mush.  So for this I’ll also have to use the aforementioned Open in Internet Explorer menu.