Although Firefox is my preferred browser, it is wise to have another available. Sometimes items stop displaying correctly and switching to a different browser clarifies whether a problem is due to the browser or to the coding of the web page. Also, as a blogger, I want to see how my page appears in different browsers. It does appear differently. Up until the final release of Opera 10 I had little problem with the “later” betas and the first release candidates. In fact, I thought my page actually looked better in Opera than in Firefox. Unfortunately there was a “regression” in the final release.

Like many other bloggers I have some advertising on the page in the hope (yes it’s mostly hope) of collecting a little revenue to pay for the hosting cost of the site. I switched to Opera and visited my page. For a second or two everything looked fine. Then the in-line text advertising went into action and to my horror, text that should have taken on an underline, began disappearing before my eyes! My articles were unreadable. Some browsing to other blogs showed other display problems as well. Pages with scrolling boxes would not scroll. Most of these details are controlled with javascript so it is my conclusion that Opera 10 is not interpreting the javascript code correctly. Simply put Opera 10 has a big BUG!

To their credit, the Opera team has included an excellent bug reporting system in the browser. There is a menu item to “Report a problem.” Clicking on the item brings up a dialog with the page you are looking at. All of your operating system information is automatically included. You simply type in a comment and hit a ‘Submit’ button. The real test will be to see how long for this bug to be fixed. Meanwhile, bloggers are not likely to be happy with this browser.