Here’s a 36 second video showing me moving the tabs from top (default) to left, right, and bottom.

Opera 9.24 (MP4, 1.1mb, 480x360) (or 9mb Quicktime fullscreen version).

Compare that with this two minute video of me searching for, finding, and installing the appropriate Firefox extension, followed by me restarting Firefox, and then the extension just absolutely failing:

Firefox 2.0.0.8 Tabs on Side (MP4, 4mb, 480x360)

(For those of you with bandwidth to burn, checkout the fullsize version Firefox 2.0.0.8 Tabs on Side (Quicktime, 34mb, 1280x800) (note: the two movies are identical in content, it’s just the size which differs).

Note that in both cases I used rooSwitch to create a clean set of preferences for both apps. The Firefox video shows this, the Opera one doesn’t. Some might complain that adds about an extra 30 seconds to the Firefox video. That is true; however, if I just wanted to set the Opera tabs to one side, I could do that in a few seconds rather than trying them all out, as I did in the video.

I used rooSwitch to make sure that Firefox wasn’t being hindered by any other add-on. It was a “virgin” installation.

Result?

Vertigo 0.5 simply doesn’t work. Why? I don’t know.

There’s also Widefox.com which also is supposed to allow you to do this, but I didn’t wade through the seven pages of instructions to make it work.

The next time someone tells you Firefox “with extensions” can do everything Opera does out of the box ask them to show you how to put your tabs on the left or right.

Then when they tell you “Well, with Firefox plus extenions, you can do a lot of things that Opera can’t do” direct them to my experience where Fast Video Download gives me a nice, blank preference’s window.

I’ve tried exactly two extensions, and neither of them have worked. That’s not even getting into the business about conflicting extensions.

There are 89 of them, which made it a little hard to read (IMO). Plus, since they are daily readings, I thought it would be good to put a blank line after each week.

How to do that…. hrm…. well, I could use a <br> which isn’t valid (but works) but I’d have to count the lines and make sure I had them in the right places.

I could make separate <ol>’s and reset the value at the beginning, so the end of the first week and beginning of the second would look like this:

</ol>
<ol><li value=”8”>

But, come on, then I have to make a bunch of different lists, when it’s really one list. I have to hard code all the values into a list. Hardly elegant or semantic.

And I still have to count.

The whole thing reeks of ugly hack.

Isn’t there a way that my computer can do the work for me?

Turns out, there is.

CSS3 nth-child pseudo-classes to the rescue. Here’s one of their examples:

tr:nth-child(2n) /* represents every even row of an HTML table */

Well, what if instead of 2n we used 7n?

li:nth-child(7n) { margin-bottom: 1em;}

Whammo Presto! See for yourself at http://gfpc.org/bind/readings.html

Except…

It doesn’t work in Firefox. Not, not even the latest nightly.

Nor does it work in Safari. Not, not even the latest nightly.

I don’t actually have IE7 installed anywhere, but I’m going to go ahead and assume it doesn’t work there either.

It doesn’t yet work in any public version of Opera.

I wonder which browser will be the first to support this very useful new addition to the world of CSS?

2) Support for external RSS readers. The Opera RSS feeder is… well, let’s be kind and call it “simple” (you know, like that cousin that sits in the corner during family reunions eating bugs). It simply can’t compete with NetNewsWire. Give me choices and you give me power.

3) Drop the horrendously stupid “Temporary Downloads” idea, or at least give me an easy way to opt-out of it. For those who don’t know, when you click on a file in Opera, it gives you the option to “Save” or “Open” For years “Open” meant “Save to the default directory, and then Open” but someone at Opera finally convinced enough people to change it. What does that mean to you? Well you know that 54MB file you downloaded the other day? Well if you clicked “Open” instead of “Save” then Opera has probably deleted it by now (assuming you’ve restarted Opera since then) with no warning. This is unlike every other browser on the Mac and the only “defense” I’ve heard for it is that otherwise people’s download folders got cluttered. Hrm… let me see… cleaning up clutter versus deleting stuff I may want….. which is a more serious problem?

4) Better tab control. For the browser that had tabs long before any other browser you’ve ever heard of, Opera’s support for what you can do with them has been bypassed by Safari, OmniWeb, and Firefox. OmniWeb may have not only the best controls but it also tells you what will happen with a given link when you hover it (i.e. “Open INSERT_URL_HERE in a new tab”). OmniWeb also has built-in controls for always opening links to different sites in a new tab, etc.

5) Thumbnails as tabs. OmniWeb again. Coolest feature in a browser in a long time. Tabs are shown on the left or right (which makes sense given today’s widescreen monitors, even on laptops) and each one shows a smaller thumbnail of various pages you have open. Tremendously handy (and you can manually toggle to just a list if you have a lot of tabs open).

6+) Tim A already mentioned extensions (also as his #6) and I wish Opera had them so everyone would just shut up about it already. I also wish that the Bug Tracking, at least for the desktop browser part of Opera would be public, if for no other reason than to get the conversation about changes in Opera out into the public earlier before they are defacto decided.

I’m not tagging anyone else (too chain-letter-esque for me) but I’ll happily accept comments or trackbacks (aka “pings”) below of what you’d like to see in Opera.

Interpreting the results of a survey is not.

For example, the Opera developers recently posted Reality Show Results… wherein they showed what settings were commonly used or not used.

NOTE: Opera is not spying on anyone, these users were asked explicitly if they would be willing to share this information.

Huibk wrote:

Not all of the data tell us much, but some are clear enough to draw conclusions:

Under that, the second entry is:

A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%

Conventional wisdom might make you think: “Well, they added a preference, but no one is using it, therefore they should just remove the preference which shouldn’t bother anyone since no one is using it.”

That reasoning, however, is completely flawed.

What the data doesn’t tell you is why no one has it enabled by default.

It is because they don’t want to use it…

…Or because it fails horribly on a regular basis?

Let’s just take one example of a relatively popular page such as Apple’s iPhone page.

This is what it looks like on my ridiculously large 1600x1200 screen (note the image has been scaled down, but you can click on it to see its full overblown glory):

Looks pretty good, eh? Plenty of whitespace on either side, and no horizontal scroll bar.

One would assume that this would mean that applying “Fit To Width” would not change the look of this page at all.

Well, behold the power of assumption. Here’s what the same page looks like with Fit To Width enabled:

So we shouldn’t assume that Fit To Width will act logically, and Opera shouldn’t assume that the lack of anyone using Fit to Width by default means that no one wants to use it.

It may mean that they’ve discovered that this feature just doesn’t work very well on a large number of sites.

Improve the feature and maybe more people will use it.

NOTE: This is not just a bug for Mac OS X. Windows is also vulnerable if QuickTime is installed!

Initial reports were that the bug required that Safari be used to go to a certain website, however current reports (unconfirmed but reasonable) indicate that the problem is in Java handling in QuickTime, that any Java-enabled browser is a viable attack vector, if QuickTime is installed, and disabling Java stops the vulnerability.

While the Opera browser has not been confirmed to have this bug, it’s far better to be safe than sorry. (So far the specific details of the bug have not been released.)

Until the bug is fixed, you can easily disable Java in Opera, either by going to Preferences → Advanced and then clicking on Content. Uncheck the box next to Enable Java, as shown here:

or press F12 (or Alt + F12 in Mac OS X) to bring up the quick preferences window and disable it as shown here:

(Note: screenshots are from MacOpera, but WinOpera will look largely the same.)

Opera is capable of setting Java on/off on a per-site basis, however, due to what I consider a design flaw in Opera, you cannot turn OFF settings like Plugins or Java or JavaScript globally and override that choice for particular sites.

I would much prefer to be able to disable Plugins, Java, and JavaScript by default and enable them only for such sites that I choose (what I would call an opt-in policy). However, Opera is not currently designed to let me do that, it functions only as opt-out.

Links are the foundation of the web.

Messing with links is a bad idea, pure and simple.

If you choose to mess with links, it had been be extremely important. For example if you highlight a word which is an important term because you have put the definition in a tooltip (which is a bad idea from an accessibility/usability perspective, but that’s beside the point for now) then I might be able to forgive you making that word look like a link, so that when a user mouses over it, the definition pops up (a footnote would be better).

Within a day of these abominations spreading across the web (and they seemed to hit all at once) I immediately started blocking them by disabling JavaScript on the offending sites using Opera’s per-site preferences (right click on a page, click “Edit site preferences” then click on the “Scripting” tab and then uncheck the box next to “Enable JavaScript.”

I didn’t think much more about it.

Until I saw this in the RSS feed for MacMegaSite today:

Do you find those IntelliTXT popup ads annoying? You can get rid of them now by submitting news. I’ve instituted a new points system, where you earn 10 points for every article submitted, 5 points for forum posts, and 1 point for comments. Once you earn 50 points or more, you’ll no longer see IntelliTXT popups as long as you’re logged in. All users have been credited with points for content already submitted.

Dear Content Providers: if you are doing something which your users find annoying, consider this:

Stop doing that.

Look, no one really likes ads (and most of the people who claim to are usually lying or have some vested interest in ads being read by people), but they can be done well. It takes time and effort.

IntelliTXT is not a good example. They are annoying. They try to guess at important words, and often fail, and are distracting. I’ve yet to find anyone who really thinks they are helpful.

But the idea that if I make 10 posts in the forum means that I no longer need to see the ads is particularly galling. What that tells me is that they really aren’t necessary, they are just annoying.

As John Gruber said of Snap Previews: “And if you have these things on your site, turn them off. They’re stupid and distracting.”

At least Snap gives us a way to disable them globally. IntelliTXT does not. However it is fairly easy to disable them for one particular site. Simply add this to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1         macmegasite.us.intellitxt.com

You’ll need to restart lookupd which you can do using this command (NOTE: if you don’t understand what this is doing, just restart your Mac instead. I take no responsibility for any typos or unforeseen consequences of running this command in Terminal):

sudo kill -HUP ps -auxwww|fgrep '/lookupd'|fgrep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'

and you may have to restart your browser.

The real moral of the story is this: if you find out something about your site annoys your readers, do you really need to keep doing that?

The reviewer, Jeffery Battersby, is the same one who did the browser roundup back in September 2005 and a 170 word review-lite of Opera 8.5.

In the latter he wrote:

And in Opera 8.0.2, there were pop-up windows that told you the browser had blocked a pop-up window. (The coincidence is not lost on us.) Those annoying notices are now gone.

One small detail to note: he was wrong. The notices were not gone. They stayed in place as ever. He did correct the other mistake, which was that he wanted the word “irony” not “coincidence”… and he has dropped the royal “we” in the new review:

Opera still [still? I thought they were gone according to the last review? -ed] sports annoying pop-up windows, which let you know every time the program blocks a Web pop-up ad. The irony of this is not lost on me, but what I’d prefer to see is something more akin to Firefox’s informational band, which appears just below the browser’s address bar, but which doesn’t pop in and out of view.

“Annoying” is in the eye of the beholder. What would you prefer:

1. a “band” which forces all of your content down to alert you of a blocked popup
2. a small notification window which will appear and then disappear, without taking up any screen real estate

Oh, and you can easily turn off #2 if you do not want to be notified of blocked popups, as seen here from the preferences window:

To test between Firefox’s popup blocker and Opera’s, I visited http://www.popuptest.com/popuptest2.html which is a page designed specifically to test your popup blocker. Here is what Firefox showed me:

That image is 1013 pixels wide and 35 pixels high. The width is determined by the width of my browser window. I had adjusted Firefox’s window to be large enough to view the content of ESPN’s website on my MacBook.

What do I notice? Well, a lot, and I mean a lot, of wasted space. There is an X over on the far right if I want to use my mouse to click on it to get rid of the band and reclaim my window space. On my MacBook, vertical screenspace is at a premium, so I find it annoying to lose 35 pixels for this alert that really doesn’t need to stick around after it has told me about the problem.

Note to Firefox developers: the word “Preferences” there is a terrible one. I had never clicked on it before, but imagine my surprise when I did. I saw this:

The word “Preferences” describes 75% of the options there. The first 3 of 4 are preferences, and they are all good and useful. But what I never knew about until just now was that Firefox gave me the option to show the popup which had been blocked. The word “Options” would be a better choice, as it tells me “There are things to do here!” which covers both preferences (global and site-specific) and the option to open the blocked popup.

By contrast, here is what Opera showed on the same page:

Even that might not be truly helpful. To see what this looks like in practice, I took a video (thank you Snapz Pro) of my MacBook (I reduced the size by 50% so that it would be viewable).

Is that annoying? I don’t know. Yes, a popup to alert of a stopped popup, Oh the coincidence irony! Yes, we get it. Of course there’s just about nothing about Opera’s popup notifier that is really anything like a popup ad, but the irony.

But is it annoying? Depends. I find it informative, without stealing my screen real estate. It tells me what I need to know, and then goes away. To me, that isn’t annoying, it’s brilliant design.

Of course I could disable the notifications altogether, just like I could with Firefox. But the truth of the matter is, no matter how dumb popups are, there are still some sites which use them for things I do want to see. Some sites use them to announce free shipping or a discount of some sort. Occasionally a legitimate clicked link will trigger a popup which is mistakenly blocked, and the notice tells me. If I want to ignore it, 5 seconds later it will disappear. I find that a lot less disruptive — and therefore a lot less annoying — than the alternative.

Safari, on the other hand, bizarrely ships with the popup blocker turned off. It is easy enough to enable it, but then there is no notification whatsoever that a popup has been blocked. This can easily cause problems as discussed above.

OmniWeb’s settings allow for the popup notifications to be made in the status bar. That, to me, seems like the best option. However, in my testing (which was exclusively done at the aforementioned site), there were no notices of popups blocked. Still, if that were to work, it would be very good. Camino has that option, although it is done with a little icon rather than text, and there is no way to view the blocked pages without unblocking the domain. I might not want to unblock the entire domain just to check whether or not one popup was useful.

Is everything that Firefox does the right way to do it? No. Is Opera wrong here? No. It’s a difference of opinion. Certainly it has irked this particular reviewer who has mentioned it in several different reviews.

Problems viewing websites?

If there is one criticism of Opera which has some validity, it is about site compatibility. The author writes:

Opera doesn’t always play well with the different types of code on the Web. For example, while viewing a Web page in Opera, I noticed there was an image missing that I knew, after viewing the same page in both Safari and Firefox, should have been there. Opera Software, the maker of Opera, told me that Opera did not recognize the image because the HTML code was missing a closing angle bracket (“>”) around the text that represents the image in the HTML code. Opera shouldn’t have to compensate for coding errors, but the other two browsers handled the image with no problems.

That last sentence striles me as odd. Surely the author is aware that every web browser has to compensate for coding errors. Opera ought to as well. While I don’t know the page in question (no link was provided), it certainly seems like a problem Opera should have been able to deal with. I only wish that the review had also mentioned that Opera comes with a built-in menu option (Help → “Report a site problem…”

I’m not sure the author was aware of that feature. The article isn’t long enough to give me a sense of how well he knows Opera. But I have reason to doubt. After at least 3 separate occasions when Mr. Battersby has reviewed Opera, he apparently did not know that Opera had mouse gestures. This fact is made clear in the errata now posted at the bottom of his current review:

EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified Mouse Gestures as a new feature available in Opera 9. In fact, Mouse Gestures have been supported by previous versions of Opera. The text has been corrected to reflect this.

Opera has had mouse gestures since April 10, 2001.

That is five and a half years. You can find this out by looking at such sites as Mouse Gestures in Wikipedia or Building a better computer mouse (CNet). It’s a fairly well known feature which has been emulated not only by several Firefox extensions, but also by other apps which create system-wide Mouse Gestures (read the CNet article for more details).

Five and half years. Opera has had Mouse Gestures since before 9/11 was anything more than another date on the calendar. Opera had Mouse Gestures for 3.5 years before Firefox 1.0.

This is not the same as not knowing that Opera 9.1 is going to have anti-phishing capabilities built-in. This is not the same as not knowing how to customize toolbars or how to use opera:config — although anyone reviewing Firefox without understanding how to use its toolbars and about:config would certainly lose credibility. This is about someone having basic knowledge of the app that he is reviewing.

37signals recently ran an article about the difference between trying something and using something. (Hat tip Daring Fireball Linked List.) In it they wrote:

Most product reviews are based on trying something, not using something. That’s why many reviews are pretty thin or don’t get to the core essence of the product. The real deep knowledge of a product can only come from using it. Using it is what reveals greatness or failure on an intimate level.

I suspect that Mr. Battersby has tried Opera 8, 8.5, and now 9.02. Please note that I do not attribute any malice to his positions. He does not seem to be a Firefox fan in sheep’s clothing trying to undercut Opera by comparison. He simply isn’t qualified to give anything more than a brief “Yeah I tried Opera and this is what I noticed” review. He found something he liked (Mouse Gestures and Widgets, the latter of which have been in just about every press release or article that I’ve read about Opera 9), and something he didn’t like (the pop up notice when popup ads are blocked and the difficulties that Opera has with some sites). He wrote up his review, sent it in, and Macworld published it, apparently without anyone else noticing the part about the Mouse Gestures until someone (not me) emailed them to tell them of their mistake.

What bothers me here is that Opera has gotten so little real attention.

I mentioned the word count (547 words) which puts it ahead of Mozilla releases Firefox 2.0 (416 words) which is not so much a review as a press release. There have been at least 2 other substantial articles on Firefox, First Look: Firefox 2 beta (1,996 words) which discussed the beta of Firefox 2, and Firefox 2.0: A second first look (676 words) which was written upon Firefox 2’s actual release.

I admit that the word count bothers me. Macworld confers importance by the focus that it gives a particular app. Having discussed Macworld’s coverage of Opera with some of the editors at Macworld, they have said (and this will come as no surprise) that part of their emphasis on Firefox comes from the fact that more people use Firefox. I can understand and accept that. I do wish, however, that when they do commit to doing a review, it would get more than 1/4 of the word count that Firefox gets in beta (and most people admit that “Firefox 2” was hardly a huge release, with many people wondering why it merited a whole version bump from 1.5). I should also note that while Macworld had devoted some 2600+ words to Firefox 2, neither of them has been an official review of Firefox 2, which I suspect will come at a later time.

Note to The Mac Observer: those double-underline link advertisements suck.

Yes they do.
The simplest solution is to add this line to your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com

Many other sites have sub-domains of the domain “intellitxt.com” such as “macnn.us.intellitxt.com” which can be added similarly:

127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com
127.0.0.1 macnn.us.intellitxt.com

After you edit /etc/hosts (as root) you will need to restart lookupd. You can do this in Terminal.app:

kill -HUP `ps aux|\
grep “^root” |\
fgrep /usr/sbin/lookupd |\
awk ‘{print $2}’`

Note that you can put all of that on one line of you remove the \ after the | but I broke it up to prevent it from wrapping.

Also note: if you’re Terminal-phobic, just reboot.

“But… but if you don’t view our ads, you’re stealing! And our children will starve… Not to mention the puppies! Good lord, think of the puppies!!!!”

A gentle note to content providers: you have an absolute right to put ads on your site. I have in the past, and probably will again in the future, use AdSense. The problem arises when your ads become so distracting that they detract from your site.

First there were animated GIFs. Then people started using obnoxious animated GIFs for ads. This led web browsers to give people the ability to stop animated GIFs.

For example, Opera allows people to turn animated GIFs on and off via the Quick Preferences, which are accessible by pressing F12 in MSWindows or alt + F12 in Mac OS X.#

Next there came Flash. Then people started using obnoxious Flash ads. This led web browsers to give people the ability to stop Flash or all plugins.

For example, Opera allows people to turn plugins on and off via the Quick Preferences.

Then came pop-up and pop-under ads. This led browsers to give people the ability to stop unrequested pop-up ads.

For example, Opera allows people to turn popups on and off via the Quick Preferences.

Notice a trend?

Annoying ads + time = user dissatisfaction.
User dissatisfaction + time = browser technology to overcome it.

Content providers seem to misunderstand that annoying their readers is not acceptable. And so we have the godawful double-underlining ads, perhaps the worst so far because they distract from the actual reading of the text itself, the king of content on the precise sites which are using these ads.

Treat your readers with hostility, and they will seek out technological ways around their dissatisfaction. Thinking about trying to find a different method to push ads on your site? It may work… for a short time. You can keep playing cat & mouse with your readers. What will you gain from that? I see 4 options:

1. Some will stay and not really care
2. Some will stay but be annoyed
3. Some will find a way around it.
4. Some will just leave

Now there’s no way to tell what percentage will be in each of the 4 groups, but it looks to me like a 75% chance of a bad result.

Why not try to find another way, a less obtrusive way. Some folks like AdSense, although that certainly has the option now of being intrusive, with graphic ads, even video ads. Some folks like The Deck. I’m sure there are others.

The double-underlined ads are just the next iteration of annoyance-as-marketing-plan. Some day you will be as embarrassed about them as those who used the previous iterations. If that day hasn’t arrived yet, it should soon.

What about readers?

What if you’re not one of the content providers, what if you’re just someone who reads some of these sites? Well you can use the method I outlined above. It’s a little techie, for sure, but it has the advantage of working for all the browsers that you have installed.

If you use Opera, and there’s really no compelling reason why you aren’t, there is another option. On the same F12/alt+F12 menu there is another option that you ought to look at: “Edit Site Preferences…” You can solve 95% of the problems at 95% of the sites with one setting:

Go to Site Preferences, select the “Scripting” tab, and disable JavaScript.

This is no panacea. Some websites won’t work without JavaScript enabled. These are what we call “crappy websites.” But many sites use JavaScript for no other purpose than these various annoyances (JavaScript is responsible for the pop-up ads and some of the Flash ads which use JavaScript to load them). So it’s worth a try if you find a problem that you can’t otherwise fix.

The great thing about today’s Interweb is that when you find a problem, chances are that someone else has found it too, and chances are that they have tried to find a solution, and chances are that someone found a solution. It only takes one person to break the system and tell others.

Footnotes:

1. For the curious, here’s what the Quick Preferences Panel looks like in Windows and Mac:
   

The only problem is that there are far too many games to watch on any given Saturday, even if they were all televised (which they aren’t).

What’s a guy to do?

Well, if the guy uses Opera, he can use http://wap.espn.com.

But he can’t use IE. Or Firefox. Or Safari. Or Camino. Or OmniWeb.

Just Opera.

Why? Well, for years Opera has been developing mobile-friendly technology. Their mobile version of their browser is a huge success.

The desktop version of Opera also has the same capabilities, which includes the ability to view WAP pages, so instead of this:

(Firefox’s view of the page)

You get this:

(Opera’s view of the page)

That’s just a snippet of the page. They also have stats, etc.

ESPN also has a similar feature on their main page, but it’s loaded with ads, graphics, etc. (In my experience it also lags more behind realtime than the wap version, but that’s not an exhaustive test.)

Using this feature of Opera lets me follow several different games at once. I can open different windows with different games and see them all at the same time.

ESPN also has an auto-refresh setting which will update the page every 30 seconds. But for some games that’s more than I need. For some games I only want to update every few minutes, so I can control that by right clicking on the page and selecting “Reload Every” and then selecting from the option menu shown above to have it refresh every 1/2/5/15/30 minutes #. Track the games you want, as often as you want.

I’ve seen statistics that something like 80% of Internet users are on high speed. Given that sports fans are driving sales of High Definition televisions, I suspect that a lot of sports fans probably have broadband. Me? I would if I could (broadband, not HD, which I still consider to be overpriced) but I can’t get it here.

Still it’s just another nice “little feature” Opera offers, made especially nice by the fact that no one else offers.

There aren’t a whole lot of WAP sites out there (that I know of) but ESPN and wap.switchboard.com are the only ones that I use regularly. Both of them give me exactly what I want: fast information without heavy ads and graphics.

I have a bunch of WAP and other mobile-friendly sites bookmarked at http://wap.tntluoma.com/ if you are curious to check out more of them.

Footnote:

1. Opera’s refresh menu also will let you choose to refresh every 5/15/30 seconds but that’s fairly silly in this situation because ESPN’s system isn’t designed to update that fast. If you want a 30 second update, use the one ESPN offers. Using 5 or 15 seconds is just a waste and sends extra hits to ESPN’s servers for no reason, so don’t do that. ↩

For example, when people talk about why they don’t use Opera, they will often talk about sites that don’t work with Opera. When I ask, they can almost never remember an example.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that means that they are wrong.

While I don’t often find myself with sites that won’t work, it does occasionally happen, and it seems to happen to me most often when I am trying to check out of some online store, which usually means that I have to go to another browser and refill my cart and re-enter my shipping and related info.

Here’s the latest example. I was checking out of the online store at alban.org when Opera showed me this:

Yowsa! “This certificate has been revoked by its issuer”?!?!?! That sounds like something terribly dastardly must have gone on. What did they do to get their SSL certificate revoked? I’ve never heard of such a thing happening.

Thinking that it might not be as fatal sounding as Opera made it out to be, I copied the URL to Firefox. Of course then I had to go back and re-enter all my cart items. When I went to checkout this time, I wondered what Firefox would say:

Ah…. So that’s it. Opera was complaining because I had typed in “alban.org” rather than “www.alban.org”

That’s it?

Now, granted that if there were my online store, I would make sure that anyone who asked for “alban.org” was automatically redirected to “www.alban.org” but this isn’t the first time I have seen this happen.

Q: What should a browser do in this situation?

A: Whatever it should do, Opera isn’t doing it well.

One could argue (from a security extremist’s point of view) that Opera is doing the right thing to protect users from potentially malicious sites. But Opera isn’t doing it well.

Let’s look at the error more closely.

You tried to access the address https://alban.org/CartCC2.asp which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the Web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

This is almost verbatim what you see when you type in an URL and the page isn’t available. That is to say: this looks like a generic error message from Opera. It shouldn’t.

As an aside: I have always thought that any browser ought to be able to tell whether I typed in an address (error prone) or not. Opera ought to be able to tell that I clicked on a link to get to this page, and did not type it in. So suggesting that I check my spelling is foolish.

Secure connection: fatal error (44)

25 Geek Cred Points for Opera showing us an actual error message. This could be useful in diagnosing the problem. I say “could” because I don’t honestly know if it would be or not.

The certificate has been revoked by its issuer

As I said above, it certainly sounds severe. But is it true? Is that what error code 44 means?

Let’s compare that with Firefox’s error:

Ok, the first thing I have to comment on is the font size.

Note to Firefox programmers: not all of us are 18 with 20/20 vision. That’s a heck of a lot of type in a small space. And why? Do you really think anyone is browsing with a window 362 pixels wide? Give me a bigger font, some more line height, and I’ll be happier.

The good part is that Firefox is doing several things right. The default actions here are to either Cancel (protect the user) or “View Certificate” So if I am Joe Average User and just hit ENTER, I’m not going to do anything nefarious.

Even better is the explanation.

You have attempted to establish a connection with “alban.org”. However the certificate presneted belongs to “www.alban.org”. It is possible, though unlikely, that someone may be trying to intercept your communication with this web site.

It wasn’t until I saw this that I realized that I had put in alban.org instead of www.alban.org. Once I realized what the error was, I realized how foolish it was.

Then I clicked “OK”

Firefox gave me the information I needed to make a decision, and then let me make the decision.

Opera threw up a confusing error message which may contain true information, but wasn’t helpful, and gave me no way to proceed, which meant that I had to switch to another browser, re-enter all my items into my cart, and then re-enter my shipping information.

While someone at Opera might say that this is protecting the user, the reality is that it did nothing but get in my way and put up a “ROAD CLOSED” sign where there should have been nothing more than a “PROCEED WITH CAUTION”

How many times would this happen to Joe/Joan Average User before he/she would switch to another browser?