#1 When you come to these evil websites, do you bother to open up IE to view the page, or do you just say "to hell with it" and leave the website?

#2 Do you find yourself resorting to IE to see if the content is good and then deal with using IE if the website is worth it?

#3 Do you tend to not bother with websites that are reasonably interesting because you know it has non-standard code? In other words, are there sites that you would normally visit regularly if they displayed properly in Opera?

#4 When you resort to using IE to look at a webpage, are you as amazed as I am at just how many advertising popups are really on the internet?

#5 Does IE's lack of mouse button shortcuts drive you crazy?

I know Opera is far from common, but since it's users are growing I just wonder how much traffic webmasters of these sites will end up losing once Opera becomes more mainstream.

WOW... It does load a bunch faster. I am really impressed by it. I like the added mouse short cuts. I am still taking it for a test run.

IE 5.1 for the Mac has, thus far, been stable as compared to Navigator.

I have played with Opera for the Mac but it has locked up already on my limited use with it. So while I won't condem it, I'm not it's biggest supporter yet.

Near the upper right corner is a smiley icon that indicates the Web page's compliance with HTML.

There are very few instances where I have to use Netscape Navigator or IE to actually accomplish something. But it does happen. I try to avoid those Web sites.

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As an example, the Thread on "Measurement Standards" in Film Yak is the first one that comes up with a yellow folder, showing the last post was 26 September. Everything more recent than that has a red folder.

In the Ground Level Forum, anything a post later than (but not included) 25 September 2002 is considered a new post.

In the Film Handler's Forum, anything later than 26 September is considered by Opera as a new post.

On Opera start-up, I have the box checked "Show my home page"

Maybe I have Opera set up wrong....or IE 6 is hogging up the cookies....

I had Netscape in this machine once. I uninstalled it a long time ago. I have it in one of my machines in another location, but I seldom use Netscape unless IE gets confused.

Also, it won't remember my name and password to Film-Tech.

I am running Opera with Windows 2000 Professional.

The little advertising windown in upper right corner is telling me that I should upgrade to Opera 7...perhaps it doesn't know I'm on a Mac?

Steve

Not long back, when trying to register for a class, I looked at the UAH class schedules for the first time since using Opera, and found that they displayed as one big blob instead of having line breaks in the right places. I sent an email to the uah.edu webmaster (different from our itsc.uah.edu webmaster) telling him about the problem. He told me he didn't have Opera, but for me to try the page again after he'd made a change. It still did the same thing. I decided to look at the HTML and I quickly found the problem -- tags specified in the wrong order. After editing, the page displayed fine. I wrote the guy back telling him that he was lucky that the class listings displayed properly in IE (Opera was interpreting the tags correctly for the order they were in) and told him how to fix it (probably swapping 2 lines of code in his Perl script). I didn't get a response, but a month later, it was fixed.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

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I haven't played around much with Opera, since Mozilla serves my needs well for a graphical browser. The best features are a) the ability to turn off unrequested popup windows and b) the ability to turn off animated GIFs.

I hate the newest AOL-spam-junked-up versions of Netscape. At least Netscape 5, 6 and 7 can display CSS properly. But starting with version 6, screen hogging shit like "My Sidebar" or whatever it is called, it gives precious little space for any web pages to display. Most people have 17 inch or smaller computer monitors running at 800 X 600 or less. All that user interface trash (what we call "the chrome") elminates a lot of room for the web page content itself.

As much as many like to hate Microsoft's Internet Explorer, at least it doesn't hog up the screen with all its UI trash like Netscape. It has gotten to the point where I don't accomodate Netscape much anymore when I do web page design. If that browser is only going to give me about a 300 or less pixel wide column to fit a web page design due to their UI trash, they can just kiss off then.

Opera does a decent job with CSS, but people who use the newest WYSIWYG web page design tools like Adobe GoLive 6.0 and Macromedia DreamweaverMX have to be careful about some of their more "user friendly" design options (such as GoLive's layout grid and Dreamweaver's "Layout View"). Building pages in those modes can result in some really funky code. And that can lead to some wierd display problems. Still, DreamweaverMX is the best web page building app out there. GoLive 6.0 is pretty good too, but it isn't as easy (or as fast) to use as Dreamweaver.

I've tried Opera before, but I don't feel like paying $39 for an "ad free" version. I'm shopping around for the best deal on a new dual processor G4 Mac. And most likely when I buy one (don't hate me for this) I'm probably going to go to Microsoft's Mactopia site and get the newest version of IE for it (that is unless it already comes bundled in with Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar).