I always liked Opera's philosophy of "do what IE does" rather than Firefox's policy of interpreting the more ambiguous parts of the standards in a way that conflicts with IE's pre-existing way of rendering. It meant that pages just plain worked first try on Opera no matter which browser you targeted initially. That definitely wins me over.
That being said, Opera is the only modern web browser that we no-longer test for on Twiddla. For a while we were putting in little Opera-specific hacks to work around its painfully slow rendering engine (which ironically is the reason it's such a pleasant browser to develop against), but eventually it became too much effort to be worth it considering the 1.35% of our traffic that it comprises.
So yeah, I'm with you in hoping it doesn't go away. Still, I'll stand by my statement that breaking the user experience to make a point would be a fatal mistake for them.
>> "I always liked Opera's philosophy of "do what IE does" rather than Firefox's policy of interpreting the more ambiguous parts of the standards in a way that conflicts with IE's pre-existing way of rendering."
So Opera duplicates IE's idiotic bug ridden excuse for rendering, whilst Firefox does things properly. I'd rather firefox/webkit TBH.
IE is and always has been the standard. It's only in the last few year that Firefox has captured enough market share that the W3C "standards" have any real bearing on the situation.
Of course, had the W3C simply used the box model in place in IE and Netscape at the time it wrote its CSS specification, rather than inventing its own, nobody would be calling the IE way of doing things idiotic. It would simply be the logical way of rendering content in boxes.
For a while we were putting in little Opera-specific hacks to work around its painfully slow rendering engine (which ironically is the reason it's such a pleasant browser to develop against)
I've only used Opera since it became free in version 9, but it's always seemed a lot faster than Firefox and IE. It's even gotten noticeably faster upon all the significant updates I've seen.
It's surprising to see you describe Opera as IE-like (broken) and slow, but since you probably have more experience in these things, I'll have to take your word for it.
