[brudgers]

I gave up on Opera because it was unusable on a small site that I use regularly. The site's owner licenses vBulletin and hires some local web guy to customize it (local being rural Pennsylvania).

I was the only person using Opera on the site. It wouldn't be a surprise if I was the only Opera user the web guy encountered all year.

IE, Firefox, Chrome all worked properly. Using Opera was turning me into a whiner as far as the site's owner was concerned. And he was justified, using Opera was just a luxury that was creating a PITA for him...on a site he was providing gratis.

I suspect his site was broken in terms of standards. But from my standpoint, it was Opera that was broken.

Don't misunderstand me, I chose Opera originally because I admired the project's goals. I still admire the feature set Opera provides. For me, it's tradeoffs became increasingly impractical. I want my browser to deal with the problem of broken sites in real time, not contact the site's owner for a long term solution.

[hoppipolla]

To be clear, we aren't running some idealistic enterprise where we value standards compliance over real world usefulness. Indeed Opera has historically been more willing to implement IE quirks than other browsers, a policy that has recently come to cause problems because some sites punt us down an legacy-IE-only codepath that we don't work with, rather than a standards codepath that would work fine.

Our sitepatching is specifically designed to solve problems in real time rather than needing the site owner to make any changes, or for the user to upgrade their Opera.

Did you report a bug on Opera for the site that you were having difficulty with? Often half the battle is knowing that there is a problem, and having good steps to reproduce. With those things we likely could investigate whether we have a bug that needs to be fixed or whether the site is treating us differently to Gecko/WebKit for some reason, and come up with a solution.