*heh*
Frankly, my primary reasons for preferring Opera as my primary web browser all revolve around its elegance. Every other browser is klunky and incomplete by comparison. Example? Mouse gestures. I can’t live without them when browsing. Sure, they can be added to other browsers via extensions, but that’s just so very kludgey, and often the add-on is broken with browser updates.
Etc.
But it’d be silly to not prefer Opera for its technical excellence as well. Take for example its standards-compliance, an area where Opera claims to be further along than other browsers. Is this claim true? Could be. For example, its compliance in implementing javascripting (something that’s almost omnipresent on the web) is just one of the many areas where it shines. On the emerging ECMAScripttest262, Chrome, a pretty darned good browser, returned these test results:
Not bad. Almost a 95% pass rate.
What about the Opera install I’m using right now to write this?
Oh, wait. That’s a 99.95% pass rate*
Of course, that’s just one of many test suites for web standards compliance, but my own experience running the standard test suites on the Opera installs I use regularly and installs of other browsers on the same computers (installs that are ALL kept up-to-date) just reinforces my appreciation for the lil browser that could. *heh* Sure, on some HTML5 test suites, Opera lags Chrome by as much as 23 points out of 450 (70% vs 75% compliance), but since that’s a still-emerging standard, I’m willing to play wait and see there. Acid3? On the limited subset of tests Acid3 is designed to look at, 100% pass for both, so that’s a push, although the Webstandards.org site does say,
“In other regards Opera is a clear leader. It is the only browser that supports more than 90 % of the SVG test suite. It is the only browser that implements Web Forms 2.0, currently being merged into HTML 5. They supported media queries and SMIL long before Acid3 came out.”
And for an overview of the extensive SVG Test Suite results for various browsers, including an older version of Opera than the one I now use, see here. Look at all that green (PASS) under the Opera column… 😉
Just sayin’. 🙂
*Funny thing: one of the ECMAScripttest262 tests, “S11.1.1_A2,” is a test that Chrome did NOT fail. It’s also a test that has been declared invalid by the test authors and is scheduled for removal from the test suite. So Chrome passed a known invalid javascript test and Opera did not. Funny.