Opera Usability Improvements

A while ago an Opera 9.5 alpha release was made available for download. Many people were instantly impressed by its speed. I am currently using Opera 9.2 and it is indeed a pretty fast and stable browser. However, many people won’t notice or even care for a speed increase. Flock is slower than Opera and I still think it is a damn fine browser (except 0.9.0.2, it is horribly unstable, don’t even bother getting it). The reason why people would switch from Firefox or IE to Opera will probably not be a speed increase but usability improvements. Inspired by a post Des Traynor made a few weeks ago (9 things Firefox should steal from Safari) I set out to identify some annoyances in Opera.

Search
Right now, the search sucks. Pressing ctrl+f spawns an obtrusive dialogue box. Why not copy Firefox (or better still Safari)?

UI Customizability
The UI (any, in fact) needs some getting used to, nothing wrong with that. I’d like my browsers to look more or less the same though and I’d like to decide where, for instance my bookmarks toolbar resides. In Opera I can’t seem to be able to drag this bar down to above the tabs. Same goes for all the other elements. There are options for putting them at the top or at the bottom but that is not exactly what I was looking for.

Middle Click Home Page
This breaks the consistency of the toolbar buttons behavior but I still think that middle clicking my home page button should be able to result in a new tab containing my home page.
Detachable Tabs
This is a big annoyance. When, for instance, I am using Meebo, I like to have a separate little window with my chat box. Instead I get a little window, movable only within the Opera window. Why doesn’t Opera allow this?

In line Spell Checking
Spell-checking isn’t even an official feature in Opera. You need to download and install GNU Aspell and required dictionaries. This is a pity because in-line spell checking in Firefox is great. To top it off, the current dialogue box is pretty useless. It doesn’t allow me to ignore further occurrence of a (known) spelling error, in this case href. Result? I am forced to click through loads of “spelling errors”, plus the context of the error is not shown.

Picture Dragging
Dragging a picture in Opera (initially) looks pretty cool but useless. You get to see a translucent copy of the image you are dragging but there is no good reason to drag the image anywhere. You can’t do a thing with it. It doesn’t leave the window so you can’t simply drag images onto your desktop, a real annoyance.

However, having said all that, Opera is a really nice browser and I’d recommend it to anyone. In fact, I think it is a better alternative to Firefox for people who are not interested in getting extensions or playing around too much with the browser. It works great “out of the box” and the installer is pretty small.