It seems that a few people missed the main point I was trying to make. I know that Opera is highly customizable. I know that I can turn off various toolbars. I know that Opera has some nice advantages like small download size and high-quality and performant content rendering. The main complaint I had was that the UI is painful. It starts off way too cluttered. But even it's default cluttered configuration was not my main point. Go back and read the first and second paragraphs of my post below. The main point was that un-cluttering the UI was itself made extremely difficult by further bad UI. I was able to make it look pretty darned good but not without a lot of guessing (wrong guesses, much of the time) about how to do that.
I'm not an Opera basher. I'm pointing out what I consider to be a big failure in usability and I'm looking for input from Opera fans that will help me stick with the app long enough to find additional gems buried in the mountain.
I'm also not a complete computer newbie. Posting my bona fides here would be silly; just take my word for it. I am the kind of computer user that Opera is probably targeting. I use the computer and the internet to perform 95% of my job responsibilities and I spend at least 10 hours a day in my browser and e-mail client. I'm not incapable of using complex software but I do recognize obvious usability failures when I encounter them, and Opera 7.5 has no shortage in this department.
Yes, it can be made better with some preferences customization. But what does that tell me? It tells me that there's a better product that Opera could be shipping with very little effort. Without a single change to the basic application code, Opera could be shipping something that was much more appealing, out of the box, to most people. I'm not saying that solves all of their UI problems. It doesn't -- not even close. It would, however, put the burden of cluttering the app on the (probable minority of) people who want 20 or 30 buttons on 4 or 5 different toolbars.
The menubar is still crazy. Keep in mind that menus are the most difficult GUI widgets for users (maybe mpt or andyed can back me up with the data on this one.) Most usability critics complained about Mozilla's 130+ menu items (and 8 toplevel menus with 12 sub-menus!!) not counting character encodings. Opera has 10 toplevel menus, 28 sub-menus, and over 250 menu items (not including character encodings). Like I said below, Opera makes SeaMonkey look lean. (For comparison, IE has about 75 menu items and Firefox has about 50 -- both excluding the encodings).
But back to my original and central point. Opera has an overloaded UI and I contend that most Opera users don't use most of the front-facing UI. That would be sad, in and of itself, but Opera users are further aggravated with confusing and difficult to discover customization UI which makes improving the situation that much more painful.
Again, I'm not bashing Opera, and just to demonstrate my good will, I'm going to try really hard to make it 50% of my browser usage for the rest of this week. I've got the main window toolbars looking much better and I've got my bookmarks all imported. I suspect that by next week, my complaints will be roughly the same, but I'm willing to give it a go.
And to further distance myself from what might look like bashing, I'm transforming my complaints into suggestions. Here are three simple steps I believe Opera should take to make this browser more palatable to users out of the box
I'm in no position to determine if #3 is even possible, given existing financial agreements and Opera's overall financial situation but I include it because it really is a usability negative for users. If you're an Opera user and you disagree with #1 and #2, I'd like to hear your reasons -- especially if you can support them with usability data.
In the mean time, I'm giving Opera a run and thanks to the few of you who offered good tips or pointed out useful Opera features.
