opera set-ups

Opera's look and feel can be changed with one-click setups. These setup files bundle popular browser settings so you can select a style that suits you best.

I, having had a less than pleasant experience with Opera 7.5 when I last tried it, decided that these "one-click setups", which claim to make Opera look and feel like IE/Firefox, might improve the experience enough to try again.

To compare the initial user experience and see if this IE/Firefox Opera change made things better, I first removed all traces of Opera and Firefox from my system. I then downloaded and installed both the latest 0.9 branch Firefox build (20040717), and Opera 7.52 (Build 3834) and did fresh installs of both. I installed and launched both, adjusted the screen size to something not huge and restarted. I took screenshots of second launch on both, then updated Opera with the IE/Firefox one-click setup, restarted Opera and took another screenshot.

As you can see, the initial Opera experience is pretty painful. I'm not sure why they decided that the second launch needed to spam the hell out of the browser window with pop-ups, but I guess they've gotta make money and I suppose selling ads in the toolbar just wasn't enough.

The IE/Firefox (which neither looks nor feels anything like Firefox) setup is a fairly large improvement to the stock Opera setup. At least all the pop-ups seem to have disappeared, but it still suffers from toolbar overload, having very nearly twice the vertical space taken up by toolbars as Firefox (ignoring that vertical toolbar which is just an artifact of my arbitrary window sizing).

The IE look, even though it hides that strange side toolbar thing, actually seems to use up even more of the available screen space with toolbars than the stock Opera look (though a quick calculation shows that to not be the case). The menus aren't really much better with this setup and the IE-style buttons have a horrible mouse-over highlight that goes in exactly the wrong direction, getting brighter, lower contrast, and much lighter rather than slightly darker with more contrast. This makes them painfully difficult to recognize when you hover over them.

All is not lost, however, and if this IE Opera "set-up" was tweaked just a bit more, and was the "out of the box" experience for new users, then I might just find myself using it a bit more, and so might a lot of other Opera "watchers" out there. After about 30 minutes of playing around, I came up with this configuration which feels a lot closer to IE (and Firefox) than the official set-up. If anyone from Opera is listening, maybe you can update that setup to look more like this:

flame prophylactic: I use Opera semi-regularly to compare layout results with Gecko browsers and I appreciate the fast and standards-supporting layout engine as well as the multi-platform consideration. I'm not an "opera hater" but I do think that an overwhelming majority of people on the web would be totally overwhelmed by the heavy and chaotic application interface. This is meant as constructive criticism and not rival bashing. If you want to flame me for offering this criticism, don't expect a response.