On the subject of Opera and GUI usability...

[feren]

I've discovered after using Opera again for a whole five minutes -- after months of not using it at all -- that I've slipped right back into the usage of mouse gestures to control browsing. I can flip back and forth between pages, open and close windows and do all the basic things I want to do with simple movements of my mouse.

Then I paused in my web browsing to go pawing through a network share in Explorer, and I couldn't understand why I wasn't going back one directory level no matter how much I gestured with the mouse. It took me a little while to figure out now, that's simply not going to work because the software doesn't support such a behavior.

Maddening.

Comments

[roho.livejournal.com]

I dunno how often I've cussed at IE for that.
"Dammit, go back a page! Stop popping up context menus! ... Oh, wait."

[duncandahusky.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have that problem all the time. Now, if Opera 7 can do everything I need it to AND be stable (betas make me nervous, so I haven't messed with it too much) - I'd love nothing more than to push IE off to a quiet, unused corner of my hard drive.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

Initially, I thought mouse gestures were a revolutionary GUI enhancement. Then I got a laptop with a touchpad. It's significantly more challenging, though not difficult, to pull off a mouse gesture on a touchpad than it is with a mouse. I love, love, love my touchpad, though.

Opera 7 is probably out for the Mac now, but I've been quite satisfied with the speed and OS X-ness of Chimera, which is based off Mozilla. Tabs are as much a browsing enhancement as mouse gestures.

[roho.livejournal.com]

I'd say its universal support is overall much better than Opera6, but not perfect yet.
Some important (to me :P) sites that I can go to now, that I couldn't in O6:
My credit union.
My credit card.

Some sites that still don't work:
My 401(k) info.
My other credit card.

And annoyingly enough, there's one thing I've found that worked great in 6, but won't in 7, and that's the LJ Friends Groups Filter page...you can't add/remove friends from groups in Opera 7.