Opera: Rant/Stylish for?
So I went and installed Opera 9 on my work computer (I can’t install it at home because they don’t release a 64 bit version and they’re closed source). They’ve come a long way from a few versions ago, where 1/3 of the screen was filled with useless (to me) UI elements by default. Still though, the UI sucks. I’ve long believed that the main reason Firefox is better than Opera is not the number of features, but the quality of them. One good example is Opera’s tab preview feature, where if you mouse over a tab you can see a little screenshot with some information on the page. I don’t find that very useful myself (the title of the tab tells me more than a 20X zoomed out screenshot), but it is kinda neat. The problem? The additional info it gives you. It starts enough normally… title, URL… then… MIME type and encoding. MIME type and encoding. text/html and UTF-8. Even being one of the minority of the population that knows what MIME type and encoding are, I still can’t see how that can possibly be useful. “I wish I could determine whether that page I opened a bit ago is application/xhtml+xml or text/html without actually going to that tab.”? There’s tons of better information you could put there. Meta description, when you last looked at the tab, Google PageRank, whatever.
Anyway, after finally finding the option for Site Preferences (there’s a million options over a handful of screens and menus) and noticing that you could define a stylesheet for each site, I started thinking about Stylish for Opera. I realize that Opera doesn’t have a similar extension system to Firefox, but every time I hear a Firefox fanboy complain about Opera’s lack of extensions I hear an Opera fanboy respond that they have UserJS. Does UserJS let you mess with Opera’s options and write files to the local machine? If so, I think a Stylish for Opera is very possible. I plan on investigating this a bit more in the near future.
July 18th, 2006 at 10:55 am
I think they do because when you right click and go to site prefs there is a box on one of the tabs that allows you to use your own css or js file.