Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Cool Features

1. Fast page rendering.
2. Adherence to W3 standards.
3. Tab grouping (off by default).
4. Built-in RSS subscribing.
5. I’m not personally a fan of it, but some like their e-mail client and browser in one.

Bugs

1. Copying images to the clipboard does not appear to work.
2. Drag-and-drop of images does not appear to work.
3. Select-and-drag of text does not work.

Suggestions

Where to begin…

General

1. Menu command capitalization style is still wrong in many places.
2. Many menu commands do not display their keyboard shortcuts.
3. Keyboard shortcuts should not be displayed in contextual menus.
4. Why are there so many PC site bookmarks in the default collections?
5. The icon should be centered in the Dock.
6. Windows should not be able to extend beyond the Dock if it is at the bottom of the screen.
7. Search fields should be in one row. Capitalize both the engine name and search: “Google Search”.
8. Text input fields do not behave properly: up arrow should place the cursor at the beginning of the field, down arrow at the end. Also, Option-Delete should delete the entire word to the left of the insertion point, Option-Forward Delete to the right. For more detailed info, see Apple’s HIG for editing text.
9. The “Go” button works as such, but looks like a plain text label.
10. Why the “Wand”? We have this thing called the “Keychain”, which already does a bang-up job of storing login/password combos.
11. Why do the Notes and Transfers windows open by default at near full screen? This isn’t Windows!
12. Transfers should be labeled and referred to as Downloads since they are not bi-directional. The keyboard shortcut could be Command-Shift-D, which currently pastes (WTF?!) in some contexts.
13. The Command-Option-T keyboard shortcut is supposed to be for toggling toolbar visibility, which obviously does not exist but should at some point.
14. The standard Help keyboard shortcut is Command-?.
15. Keyboard shortcuts for switching between pages/tabs such as Command-Shift-Left Arrow/Right Arrow would be nice.
16. Users coming to Opera from other Mac browsers know pages as “Tabs”. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, please use that term. Particularly since in this implementation they really are tabs.
17. The scroll track does not use my System Preferences -> General choice for how it reacts to clicks within it.
18. Don’t show the application name next to the window name in the Dock menu.
19. Pop-up menus should open with the present selection immediately beneath the mouse, with the other options arranged as they appear in the list.
20. Windows that have toolbars (including the Preferences window) should have toolbar display toggle widgets.
21. The Preferences window should not be modal.
22. When adding items to toolbars, the + cursor should be displayed.

Preferences

1. I’d much rather the preferences be organized like they are in System Preferences and most other OS X applications. This would require icons for all sections and rather substantial changes to the layout, but it is an important part of making an application fit into OS X.
2. There are several places in which single column views use header rows rather than an external label above the column. This should not be done.
3. Many preference buttons remain blue after their corresponding dialog has been closed.
4. Checkbox items should not be triggered by clicking on the line beyond the text.
5. The Help button should be a circular 20px by 20px purple question mark button.
6. The Apply button should not be used. Preferences should take effect immediately after they are set.
7. Either create icons for all the preference sections or don’t use them at all. Otherwise, the Prefs window looks sloppy. (I know it’s a preview!).

Start and Exit

The radio buttons for setting startup behavior are decently done, but there needs to be a sentence giving the user more information about what the settings do, i.e. “When Opera starts…”

1. The “Continue from last time” bit might be better worded as “Re-open the pages that were open when I last quit Opera.”
2. Do not use the term “exit” in place of “quit”.

Languages

1. Look at Apple’s International System Prefs pane as a general example of providing language customization UI.
2. Entering a pathname or navigating to a language file for setting the UI language? A drop-down menu with all of the available languages makes more sense.
3. “Choose…”.
4. The Add/Remove buttons could be placed immediately beneath the Preferred languages list in +/- form.
5. The languages within the Preferred pane should be rearrangeable using drag-and-drop.
6. There is no reason the fallback encoding pop-up menu needs to be that wide. It also decreases readability.

Personal Information

1. Field labels are right-aligned. This isn’t GNOME either!
2. All field labels should be punctuated with a colon.
3. Macs do not ship with two-button mice. Do not refer to a button that many Mac users will not have. Use “contextual menu” in place of “right mouse button”.
4. Why can’t the personal information be optionally automatically drawn from and synchronized with the Address Book? I’ve already got it there. Please don’t make me enter it again.

Search

1. Select the default search engine for new windows:
2. You can perform searches in the address field using the keyword letter followed by search terms. For example, typing “g Opera” will search Google for “Opera”.
3. Preferred number of search results per page:
4. “Site Default” rather than the angle bracketed “Default”.

Skin

1. A button to load a page with additional skins would be nice.
2. Don’t show the menu bar in the skin preview.
3. Size:

Mouse and Keyboard

1. The keyboard setup editor should be arranged similarly to the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preference pane.
2. Rather than displaying (defaults) for every item, it might make more sense to show (custom) or (modified) for keyboard shortcuts the user alters.
3. The keyboard setup editor window should be resizable.

Windows

1. Again, text field labels should be right-aligned and include a colon as punctuation.
2. Reuse existing page for what?
3. Open new tabs next to the active tab.
4. Use smooth scrolling. This is actually a system-wide preference now, but I imagine some users would like to be able to turn it off in their browser.
5. Show tooltips for what? Buttons? Links?

Sounds

1. Do not use program - use application.
2. Not sound file - just Sound.
3. Choose…
4. The Choose… button should open the selection dialog to a folder with sounds in it, not the user’s Opera preferences folder, where nary a sound can be found. Opening it to /System/Library/Sounds would be better, but still crappy because it provides no way to preview the sound files.

Fonts

1. Choose…
2. Providing WYSIWYG font display for the most common page font types (General, Monospace, and Cursive) and moving the others to an Advanced section would simplify the experience for users who only want to change page fonts.
3. Application interface fonts should really not be customizable. If this feature stays, it should be placed in the Advanced section along with the detailed CSS customizations.
4. Close up the gap between the Minimum font size: label and the input box, implement a menu to the right of the box to switch between pixels and points.
5. Drop the International label - just use the button.

Page Style

1. Default zoom of what?
2. The numbers should have the percent sign to their right.
3. The drop-down menu is way too wide.

Multimedia

1. Images:
2. Page icons:
3. Show images as pages load
4. “Show image animations” rather than “GIF animation”. Some users will not know what a GIF is.
5. Place the current “JavaScript options…” button to the immediate right of the JavaScript checkbox and label it simply as “Options…”.

Programs and Paths

1. Show e-mail client? What the hell does this preference do?
2. Source Viewer:
3. Protocol Handlers

Bookmarks

1. Do not use icons in the Bookmarks menu unless they are page favicons.
2. The divider between the Bookmark editor folder and contents should have a dot in the center.
3. Importing Gecko-based browsers’ bookmarks should include the Description field content.
4. The Description field should be an optional column in the bookmark manager.
5. Ditch the Trash. Instead, consider creating Internet Location Files for deleted items in the user’s actual Trash. You could even go so far as to create folder hierarchies when they are deleted.

Bookmark Properties

1. Because the Description fields accepts line breaks sent using Return, the OK button should not be colored.
2. The location field should be disabled for folders.
3. Why the tab at the top when there is only ever one section?
4. Again, the Help button should be the circular button with a question mark inside.