AppleMatters chooses Opera over Safari or Firefox

October 9, 2005

AppleMatters asks: Is it time to ditch Safari? and, happily, concludes that not only is it time to ditch Safari, but Opera is a better option than Firefox.

The author noted one problem, which I believe is easily solved:

But the biggest problem I’ve encountered with Opera is sometimes it does not redraw the browser window when you are scrolling. Restarting it clears the problem but it does return in time. (Yet again I appreciated Opera remembering which pages I had open) Without this problem, Opera would have been my favorite browser by a wide margin.

The simplest fix for this is to go to the View → Toolbars → Customize, as shown here:

[ Screenshot of View, Toolbars, Customize menus on Mac ]

Then click on the “Skin” tab and uncheck the “Enable special effects” as shown here:

[ Skin tab in the Appearance panel of MacOpera ]

That should solve the problem (which should be fixed in the next version of Opera). Turning off Special Effects will have minimal effect, most notably the Opera’s Notifications will appear and disappear more quickly.

Also rather than restarting you might want to try refreshing (which is different from reloading) by going to Tools → Advanced → Reload from cache. That may solve the problem as well. (See Reload vs Refresh for more.)

BTW the cool little circle mouse highlighting was done using the nifty freeware program Mouseposé.

  • Hi. I am the author of that article. Your tips don't seem to have helped :(


    But I'm going to go check out Opera 9. With the redraw prob fixed, it will be "daylight second" to Opera.


    I've used Opera on and off for many years on Windows and have always been a bit of a fan, but didn't mention that in the article so I didn't have to deal with people questioning if i had a biased starting point. Which I didn't. It was an objective review.


    Opera has so many niceties, nice little touches - eg the highlighting of tabs (pages) you haven't viewed yet or for a while.


    I'll bookmark this site and cut some links to it.


    thanks :)

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