Opera browser

[Stefan A. Smith]

Jenny writes:
> Has anyone used Opera for a browser on public PCs?

I am not an expert on Opera, but I've used it for several months at home 
and at work.  I have had occasional problems with it crashing while 
printing, and occasional problems with windows being blank after trying 
to cancel an email message.  I am a heavy user of the Web.

But I think most heavy users of any Web browser have experienced problems
with instability that may or may not be due to the browser's code.  For my
needs, Opera is superior to the Big Two in relation to crashing and general
instability.  There are plenty of other benefits too, as you probably 
read about in the recent discussions here.

Problems I've noticed: I have had difficulty getting into one particular
Web broker's secure site with Opera--otherwise it seems to handle secure
sites well; I don't like the bookmarks as much as NS; and there is no 
built-in support for gopher addresses.

In response to Pauls comments:

>It seems to fail to honor common CGI routines, e.g. page counters.

This I haven't noticed, but haven't looked for, either.

>It often aborts a page-load mid-stream.

Never happened to me, that I can remember.  In general it loads pages
faster than NS or the older versions of MSIE that I've tried, so even with
the occasional blip, I'd be happy.  If it *often* happens to Paul, we
might be looking at different types of pages--that is, perhaps Paul looks
at more pages that are lengthy or have more graphics, and has observed a 
problem that I haven't. 

>It cannot handle long URLs (?? -- try a metacrawler search and see what
>   you get -- for me it always complains about an unknown MIME type and
>   refuses to display the metacrawler search response without configuring
>   a new application).

This I have noticed with MetaCrawler, but not with SavvySearch, Dogpile, 
or Internet Sleuth. 
 
I have also considered suggesting Opera for our public-access computers. 
So far I've held off, mainly because the campus' de facto standard Web
browser is NS, and NS is what our patrons are used to.  We plan to have
20-30 Web-capable computers in our Reference room, and I think we should
be as much in harmony with the other campus computing resources as
possible. 

If I were in a situation where more mediation was possible (perhaps with
just a few dedicated Web stations where people are readily available to
answer browser-related questions), I would probably go with Opera, at
least on a trial basis. 

When introducing a product outside the mainstream, we have to be prepared
to do a fair amount of hand-holding, even if the product does not appear 
on the surface to be significantly different from the ones people are 
used to.

Stefan


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 Stefan Smith                        |             University of WI Oshkosh
 Electronic Access Coordinator       |                   Oshkosh, Wisconsin   
 Libraries & Learning Resources      |                    smithsa at uwosh.edu
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