Promotion Tip:
Learn To Like Opera

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

With all the problems developers have with browser compatibility, you'd think the last thing most would welcome would be yet another browser to worry about! Although it's often true that Web developers love to hate browsers, most developers are just flatly in love with Opera. And when you consider all the cool functions that make viewing and testing pages a snap, who can blame them?

New On The Scene

Opera's development began in 1994 as a research project in the Norwegian telecom company, Telenor. By 1995, it had branched out into an independent development company named Opera Software ASA.

The company's stated goal is to produce "the best Internet experience on any device" by providing a browser "…that operates across devices, platforms and operating systems, and can deliver a faster, more stable and flexible Internet experience than its competitors."

Opera's Web site states that it has "gathered a cult following on the Net" and claims 4.5 million users worldwide. It's particularly popular in Europe.

You can download a free copy (that includes advertising) or purchase an ad-free copy for $39.

Web Developers like Opera because it adheres strictly to HTML and CSS standards. Other users like it because it's generally faster than other browsers and offers many ways to easily customize the browsing experience.

But there's even more to Opera than that.

Easy Tests For Accessibility

Opera 7 helps you quickly identify three of the most common accessibility problems:

Absolutely, one of Opera's best features is the ability to toggle images on and off without getting bogged down in a bunch of menus. Did you ever wonder how your page looks to visitors who surf with images turned off? One mouse click (or one keyboard click) in Opera shows you the ugly truth.

For instance, look at these screen shots taken from the online news and opinion site Salon.com.

With images turned on:

And with images turned off:

See how the columns resize? The main story becomes the narrowest column on the page when the image isn't displayed.

To toggle this feature on and off, click your mouse button on the camera image next to the URL bar or press G on your keyboard. Opera lets you turn images off completely, view all images, or view only the images that have already downloaded and been cached.

You can also turn off table support. That gives you an idea of how your page may look (or sound) to visitors using non-graphical browsers like Lynx. Although tables are really useful for page layout, they also may cause accessibility problems in non-graphical browsers. The table feature in Opera 7 is a quick way to identify table linearization problems that visitors using various assistive technologies might encounter on your page.

Finally, there's the issue of style sheets. Even many experienced Web designers don't realize that user-defined style sheets can override the styles they so carefully prepared and tested. The majority of users who do create their own style sheets generally do so to compensate for a particular disability - like using a very large text size because of vision problems.

See how your page looks without the styles applied just by pressing Control-G on your keyboard. That allows you to toggle between author style sheets (the ones the page designer developed) and user-defined styles. If you've used advanced style techniques like absolute positioning, you may be unpleasantly surprised by the result of this test!

Hand-held Browser Testing

You aren't just worried about how your page looks to people with disabilities though. There's no guarantee that visitors will always use a browser on a regular computer screen to access your page. They may prefer their TV screen using the WebTV browser, or something much smaller - like a cell phone or PDA.

Opera can't help you with WebTV testing: for that you'll need to download and install the WebTV viewer. Or it's even easier to let Browser Photo take the pictures in WebTV and show you how your pages look in that browser along with 15 other browser and operating system combinations.

However, if you've ever wondered how your page might appear on a cell phone screen, Opera 7 gives you an easy answer! It contains a small screen emulation tool. Easily approximate how a page will look on small screen devices just by selecting View/Small Screen from the top menu or by using the keyboard shortcut Shift-F11.

Here's how the same Salon front page might look in a cell phone display:

This is actually quite a valuable service because Opera plans a public release of a mobile version of the browser later this year. Nokia 7650 and Sony Ericsson P800 phones already come with it installed. The company hopes to negotiate with other manufacturers to make Opera the standard on all hand-held devices.

Not A Complete Testing Solution

Although Opera gives you an incredible assortment of options for page viewing and testing, remember that it's designed to be a Web browser, not a testing tool! Most important: it won't alert you to other browsers' quirks and display problems. Opera's also a browser with a relatively small user base. At present, even WebTV has more users than Opera. However, Opera users are committed to the browser and they're often the technologically-savvy users who are pave the way for more widespread use.

You'll still need to validate your HTML code and test your pages in a variety of browser and operating system combinations. NetMechanic makes that job easy. HTML Toolbox scans your pages for coding errors, proprietary code, broken links, and slow load time. Then Browser Photo shows you actual screen shots of your page in 16 different browser and operating system combinations - including Opera.

Opera is still the new kid on the block, but it's getting more and more popular. Its insistence of strict adherence to standards forces you to write good, standards-compliant code that will age well as new technologies develop. Give it a try!