I’ve been a loyal user of this semi-operational Mickey Mouseware for 7 or 8 years now. I even paid for it back when it cost money. I like it because of the adaptability and adequate customization. I like that it has mail and IRC clients built-in. I like that you can build-in your own searches. I like that you can add and remove buttons just about anywhere. I like the tabs, and the mouse gestures. Almost as importantly, I don’t like IE or Firefox.
What I don’t like about Opera is just a few glitches here and there. Flash won’t work on some sites no matter how many times I install the newest plugin. Windows Media Player only functions on occasion, and only as “classic”, no matter how many times I install the update. The menus on www.ufc.com don’t work, and the videos on www.msn.com don’t work.
All things I could deal with, especially IF I could log onto the Opera forums and ask questions about them. Ahh, but there’s the rub. I did that a couple of years back. While registering, I noted that it said “pick a username between 3 and 50 characters.” I thought I was being funny so I picked one exactly 50 characters. Namely, MorePowerfulThanSupermanBatmanAndTheIncredibleHulk.
So I logged on, politely introduced myself, said how much I loved the browser, and asked a couple of questions. Every single response was a complaint about my screen name. I was banned with hours. No warning, no request to pick a shorter name, no communication at all. I emailed them to explain the situation and never got a response.
Today I tried once again to log onto their forums because I have a few dozen annoyances that I want to try to resolve with the browser, and I get this shit:
I could go make a hotmail account and sign up under that, but why should I have to? I’m neither a filthy troll nor a conniving sock puppet. Fuck them.
. . . And now; I hate to even admit that I use Myspace, but I do, and I’ve been having all kinds of troubles with it for the last few days. I just tried switching over to IE and it worked perfectly. Back to Opera, all screwy again. This browser might be outgrowing its novelty pants.
Is this a problem with how the page looks? I don’t use MySpace, but chances are that if it renders properly in IE and poorly in Opera, that’s not Opera’s fault.
Microsoft has been historically unwilling to make IE conform to proper browser standards for things like Cascading Style Sheets, while browsers like Firefox and Opera are much better about complying with those standards. Of course, because IE is still the most commonly used browser, a lot of website designers ignore the proper standards and use code that will work in IE. And this means that those sites sometimes don’t work very well in standards-compliant browsers.
This doesn’t make your problem any less frustrating, but i’ve often seen Firefox and Opera blamed for not rendering pages properly, when the fault lies with website designers who design for IE rather than for the proper standards.
Edit to add:
From my (admittedly limited) experience, most MySpace pages look so fucking awful that it doesn’t even matter whether or not they’re rendered properly.
So basically, you manufactured two problems for yourself, and it’s Opera’s fault?
Did you really expect people to not mind a 50-character-long screen name? It’s obviously annoying, and trying to play innocent by saying “But the login system said up to 50 characters!” is not exactly credible.
So, you have an easy solution here, but for some reason you choose not to pursue it.
It’s not offensive and they told him up to 50 characters. They should change the damn instructions if they don’t want 50 charater long names. Instead of allowing a name change they ignore him and keep him banned. The mods at that place are being big assholes. I have had to sign up for multiple accounts and user names one after another at different sites during a registration process, because the product had multiple sites you had to access. Add in the page blanking everything everytime I entered an already in use name, and those identities are far from what I would have prefered. I finally picked stupid combinations, to avoid identical names, to get the registration over.
If they’re not willing to accept a login name of up to 50 characters, they shouldn’t have said they would accept it. Who gives a shit about annoying? It’s about what they said they’d accept.
The pages generally look fine. The problems are that songs often won’t play - I have a couple of friends who make their own music and only post it on Myspace so I have to log on there to hear it. Other problems are that if someone has a video on their page, the page either locks up completely or moves extremely slowly. I sometimes get caught in a loop where anything I click on takes me to a page that says “You must be logged in to do that!”, so I re-login and it happens again and again. The mailbox actually doesn’t display properly: I have to scroll way down to see my messages. None of these problems occur in IE.
Are you serious? Why should their software specify 3-50 characters when they’re going to ban you without warning or recourse if you choose a 50 character screen name? How was I supposed to know how it would display? How could I have forseen that [apparently] no one else out of the thousands of registered members had a 50 character name? It was a spur of the moment thing that I thought would be funny.
On the 50 character thing, web designers need to pull thier heads out. If you don’t want long user names, don’t provide the means. My story:
I signed up for an account that had a fairly long password entry box, 20 characters. So I used my standard, very difficult to guess, 20 character password.
With no notification at all, the registration form apparently accepted this, but in fact truncated it to 17 characters. Did the site’s login form (which also had a 20 character entry box) perform a similar truncation? Of course not. “Error: Password does not match user name”
Fortunatly, the “forgot password” function DID work correctly (not always the case IME) and I was able to figure out the problem.
Another thing I freaking hate is sites that have “unspoken” password rules. Meaning they don’t tell you the rules until they have rejected your password entry. It would also help a lot if they displayed the rules at login, as that has a strong influance on which password I would have used.
I’m not necessarily saying it was unreasonable to choose the name to being with - I’m saying it is unreasonable to get so worked up about being banned for it. The 3-50 character thing was obviously an oversight - perhaps the people who run their message board have no way of changing the text of the login form. Just accept it, sign up again, and move on. No need to throw a little tantrum about it.
You guys sound like a bunch of whiny little kids justifying their misbehavior: “But Mommmmm, technically the rules say this is okay!”
mhendo covered it. What Opera isn’t showing (or seems not to be working) often isn’t a problem with Opera - it’s a problem with the web developer. Being an opera user, I like to let the websites know how badly their sites look to me.
Now, what’s this talk about MySpace looking better under IE?
Well, that page you sent me works fine for me in Opera. Both the song and the video start playing (i agree that starting a song and a video at the same time is pretty silly), and the rest of the page loads without any problems.
It looks pretty much the same in Opera as it does in Firefox, although for some reason it scrolls a little more smoothly in Firefox. Not sure why that is.
Anyway, it doesn’t seem to be Opera that’s the problem. It could be a problem with your Opera configuration, or it’s possible that it’s just not playing nice with some other software on your computer. By the way, are you running the latest version of Opera? I’m using 9.10.
I’m using the prerelease 9.20 - and I know traditionally you would expect this to be causing some of these problems, but I just upgraded from 9.10 (or whatever the newest final is) a few days ago and it has solved several problems and not created any new ones (that I know of. Yet.)
Because if you make one that’s fifty characters long with no whitespace (that latter bit is important), then on forums where the username is displayed to the left of the posts as it is on the Opera forums, the user info area will be so wide that hardly any of the actual posts will fit on some people’s screens. It also fucks up the layout of the thread listing, which means it screws things up even for people not reading the thread.
I expect they wouldn’t have had nearly as much of a problem with it if the name had had some spaces in it, so it could wrap over multiple lines.
I love the Speed Dial functionality.