I’m a multi-boot user of several Linux distributions. When I use a gui browser it’s either firefox or opera. For most things I prefer opera. I recently installed OpenSuSE 11.3 to an HP Pavilion with Athlon 64 processors and integrated Nvidia graphics, for which I’ve had to use the Nvidia drivers on all of my linux. I use startx to fire up one of 4 DE/WM environments (usualy E17) With all my other Linux Opera works well. But the opera installed to my opensuse 11.3 via yast has issues…
It’s identified as
Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.6.30Version/10.61"
The first thing I noticed with it was that it takes unusualy long to load.
Using a run command prompt, I can command “opera” to start. Then open another run prompt to start firefox. And use firefox to check my bank balance before opera finally opens???
Once opera finally opens it seems to work normally except for the fact that on many pages it insists on using a very annoying font that I have trouble reading. I looked at all my font settings and none of them look like this font. It makes no difference whether my "presentation mode is set to use “page fonts and colors” or “my fonts and colors”. I don’t think it’s something weird being done by the page authors because Firefox displays the same pages normally. As does the Opera I get with my Arch, PCLinuxOS, & Xubuntu installations on this same computer.
An example of a basic page that it’s insisting on using this horrid font for is:
On certain pages I have 1 font with Opera that looks rather bad but nothing like the screenshot you posted, am not sure if its of any help but did you try checking Opera for UNIX - Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, there are several posts about opera and font issues.
Thanks for the pointers… Found one interesting opera forum thread that may have some clues… I’ll have to find the time to experiment. If it works for me I’ll follow up to this thread with the results… But it might take awhile. ( my Lady is jealous of my computer… sigh!)…
I don’t know about those “improvements” you mention. But there are enough things I like about opera to make it worth putting up with the horribly slow startup. (at least now that I found a way around that Y2KBUG font issue) It helps that the way I use my two chosen gui browsers means that once I open opera, it tends to stay open for the rest of my login session, during which it’s likely to be used for multiple purposes. Whereas firefox is more often used for quick do & die things such as when use firefox to do an online banking session. After which I Always close the browser completely.
I think the main reason I prefer opera to firefox for general use is because I run multiple linux distributions on the same computer with a personal data partition. And unlike firefox, opera will let me replace it’s bookmark file with a symlink pointing at a file on my data partition. This enables me to use the same bookmark file regardless of whether I’m running OpenSuSE, Arch, PCLinixOS or Xubuntu etc…
In any case, have a good one… {or even two good ones if you can find so many… }
I’ve found Opera to load much faster when I’m using IceWM instead of kwin or compiz-emerald. Seriously amazing the difference. Have you come across much info on this issue of slow loading? The little I’ve searched mainly reference page rendering times ect…
“Improvements” would be in the area of html5 support of course. (Which I really need to spend more time with)
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