“Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of carpenters and kings… “

IOW, this is yet another post avoiding politics and current events. Oh, I suppose I could revert to “Kipling Tuesday” and let his ascerbic words on “current events of yore” stand in stead of my own poor commentary, but I just don’t feel like doing that today.

Instead, how’s that browser war going for ya?

*heh*

I’m still down on Internet Exploder and every version of Chrome I’ve given a shot at my eyeballs. Safari and Firefox are about dead even with me on the scale of “so-so-to-lukewarm” and the newest Opera has some “features” that were initially a bit off-putting.

Yeh, how’s that for a surprise? Me, issuing a mini-micro-nano-pan of any version of Opera. Well, the latest Opera 10.50 beta had me ticked off for a bit when the menu bar was AWOL. That meant accessing all sorts of functions from erasing private data to customizing keyboard shortcuts were hidden. I guess that’s fine if Opera wanted to be Chrome, but it chapped my gizzard. Oh. Accessible–mostly–from the new “Opera button” on the left side of the Tab Bar, but only mostly. To get the full spread, I had to use that “O” button to reinstall the menu bar. It would certainly have been nice for Opera to have noted that lil “feature” somewhere on the “New Features” page that is linked to on the “Starting Opera” page that is loaded on the first start of the browser, but no, had to dig and fumble around for it. An astounding misplay by Opera Software.

Still, once I had access to importing my bookmarks and had recustomized some things, the 10.50 beta did seem to be just the ticket to wipe out the bad taste of other recent browser tryouts. For a wee taste of just one feature that Opera still maintains that is at least an order of magnitude better than other browsers I’ve tried to like, here’s a screen shot of one of the multi-tabbed “Preferences” dialogs with a drill-down mini-dialog popped up:

Of course, the multiple, granularized preferences dialogs available in easy-peasy GUI format from within the browser are just the tip of the iceberg in Opera customization. Since it also uses easily-edited ini files, it’s even more customizable that way. And, of course, additional tweaks are available via opera:config typed into the addressbar. Multiple power levels of customizing available multiple, easily-accessed (once the “menu button for dummies–or Chrome-Firefox-Safari-Internet Exploder users”–is deactivated *heh*)

And wide-ranging customization via features already built into the browser is just one of many reasons I prefer Opera over its imitators. *heh*