Before you read this article, keep in mind that
most of these issues have been resolved. See Opera Issues Resolved,
at Least for Intel Macs for the details.
I can't really pick a hands-down favorite among the four big Mac
OS X browsers - Safari,
Chrome, Firefox, and Opera* - although I suppose it says
something that I'm inclined to use Opera the most and Safari the
least.
Opera's speed combined with some small but very convenient features,
such as the pulldown zoom slider menu that works in real time, keep me
coming back to Opera. However, my happy relationship with the Norwegian
browser has been a bit strained over the past six months or so.
On my Intel
MacBook, more Opera builds than not since about version 10.60 have
obstinately refused to start up with either my OS X 10.5 Leopard or 10.6 Snow Leopard production
systems, so for several months while 10.61 and 10.62 betas and finals
rolled out, I've been stuck using a version 10.60 beta build that does
work.
It's some sort of software conflict, because I checked out version
10.62 on a fresh new OS X 10.5 user account I created for testing
purposes, and it works fine there, but it resolutely "quits
unexpectedly" on startup in my working account. I've tried removing
every Opera related item I can find from my Preferences Folder, but no
joy.
Presumably, a clean system install would cure it, but with nothing
else noticeably glitching up, I'm not inclined to invest the
considerable amount of time that would take, so I keep persevering with
the latest build that will run and hoping a newer one will not manifest
the issue.
Opera 10.6 and Tiger
On my old G4 Pismos
running OS X 10.4 Tiger, all
the incremental Opera builds since 10.60 (and before) have started up
fine, but they have been so unstable that they've been essentially
unusable. Text entry on web pages and form fields was excruciatingly
slow, when it didn't send the browser into terminal spinning beach ball
mode, and stability was poor in general.
Consequently, I was delighted to note in the release notes for the
Version 10.62 final (when it was released last week) that bugs like
"Not being able to click or select links or text" and especially
"Entering text being very slow on OS X 10.4 Tiger" had been
addressed in this version.
I wasted no time downloading the browser and trying it out. The good
news is that it is now usable with OS X 10.4 - and it's even
faster than before (Fairer Platform reports that Opera 10.62 has increased its
HTML5 compatibility score to 203 from the previous 159), plus text
entry is indeed improved. However, it's still prone to beach ball
lapses and can hardly be described as stable, although I've not yet
experienced a complete crash or lockup that didn't resolve itself.
This leaves me conflicted over whether to revert to the rock solid
stability of version 10.61 or to continue enjoying the speed of version
10.62 and just proceed in a gingerly and gentle fashion so as not to
upset the browser's delicate equilibrium.
So far I've opted for the latter.
I am grateful that Opera is the last of the major browsers to
continue supporting OS X 10.4 with the latest version, now that Firefox
has terminated Tiger support at Version 3.6 and Safari users are
relegated to second-class version 4.1.2, while Chrome has never
supported Power PC.
iCab still supports Tiger with its
contemporary version 4.8; Sea Monkey with version 2.0.8 and Camino
2.0.4 are continuing Tiger support for now, but since they are both
based on the Mozilla Gecko browser engine and Mozilla has dumped Tiger
support for post-3.6 Firefox, it's questionable for how long.
I expect that good ol' iCab will hang in with Tiger for a while yet
( they still offer a 68k classic Mac OS browser with development frozen
some years ago), but rumor has it that Safari 4.x will be the last of
the Mohicans for Apple's Tiger browsers, so I'm hoping that Opera will
continue to get the bugs out of version 10.62.
Appendix
New in Opera 10.62:
User interface
Fixed
- Selection jumps while backspacing in a rich text editor
Opera closing when searching on hotels.com
- Not being able to click or select links or text
Opera freezing when leaving a canvas, audio, or JavaScript game
- A missing plugin dialog might cause Opera to close
- Bodyless documents causing Opera to close in accessibility
mode
- Entering text being very slow on OS X 10.4 Tiger
- Enabling on demand plugins as the default for Mac 10.4 and PPC
- Loading of streaming plugins in Opera Turbo
- Typing slowing down when there are many bookmarks
Display and scripting
Added
- 9 More MIME file types and suffixes for compressed tar files
Fixed
- Fallback not displaying for Java types when plugins are
disabled
- Items disappearing from the cache
Mail, news, chat
Added
- FastMail domains and hotmail.co.uk to the email
auto-configuration
Fixed
- Missing images in feed preview (media RSS)
