Does Any of This Sound Like You?

I recently wrote to the (hopefully) nice people at Opera, concerning a bug that has been with the browser on every machine (at least 200, conservative guess) I have ever installed it on, both my own, and customer’s machines. It is something that may or may not be a bug, but if not a bug, it should be thoroughly explained, and I might add that it should be changed to similar behavior to other browsers – to lessen the annoyance factor.

My letter that was included as part of the bug report:

Before I begin describing this problem, let me say that perhaps I don’t have the industry-specific terminology for what I will describe, but I will try to be as clear as I can be - because I use Opera every day, I speak of it enthusiastically to many, and I would really like this problem repaired. It has been a problem since my earliest usage of the browser [revision 8.53].

Now, the problem may only be a setting that I don’t have correct, but if so, I need to know how to affect the change, and for the good of the browser, it would be good to make the change a default setting. Also, I have made sure that the problem is not with my system. I have 9 computers in my house, and all of them, from 900MHz Athlon to 2.6GHz quad-core Phenom 9950BE, exhibit the VERY SAME behavior. So, the problem is not one of the system being too sluggish. The problem does not occur with Internet Explorer, nor does it occur with Firefox, and this has been the case through each revision of Internet Explorer and Firefox. It is consistently showing up only in each iteration of Opera.

This is also reproducible in Windows 2000 , on a couple of machines I own, however all machines I have ever personally used or worked on for others, exhibit this in Windows XP. I am sorry I have no evidence for Vista, as I don’t personally use it, nor have I installed it on Vista machines used by my customers. The XP problem is irrespective of what Service Pack level XP is at, and makes no difference whether the OS is XP Home or Professional.

Let me also say that I have looked in the Opera help areas, and scoured some of the discussion areas. I have seen several things close to the problem, but after a little investigation, the problems described were not exactly the same. I have been very methodical in my research, and my work to try to eliminate the problem has used the scientific method, so I believe all the variables have been accounted for. Please do not jump to the conclusion that I simply don’t know how to set up a machine, as I do it for a living, and when I do this I am very meticulous.  Also, as above, the behavior is peculiar to Opera alone.

Now, the problem -

Whenever I am in any other program - it does not matter what the program might be - if I try to click on an embedded URL, the browser comes up, and Windows gives the nasty ‘CHUNG’, with Windows saying that the address either doesn’t exist or there is some other problem, so make sure you are typing the address correctly.  When Opera has already been started, and is either minimized or simply out of the way, the call from one program (any program) to the browser works fine.  This would seem to me to be a problem of some time component, where Windows will not wait long enough for the browser to fully come up. No matter, the URL is not properly passed.  I have also read in the Help online that sometimes this is due to a very long URL, but I have verified that it matters  not one bit how long or short the URL is (in the situations I have personally observed). Again, I stress that IE and Firefox do not exhibit this behavior (not in any revision level, whereas Opera has shown this with EVERY revision level I have used). Sometimes the problem can be mitigated by clearing the cache in Opera, but the problem soon returns when a few things are again cached. Also, the latest builds, oh, say since 9.27, have not even responded to this cache clearing procedure.

Can this be repaired, or if done by design, can you let me know how I can change the behavior?

Thanks,

My Name
My e-mail address

Now this seems like something that should have been corrected long before now, or if done purposely, fully explained.

Have any of you Opera users (it’s okay to acknowledge that you use it, you won’t be criticized here!) seen this problem? Have you reported it? I would say that my experience is large enough, statistically, to be significant, as I work on many machines, from various manufacturers, most having only the OS in common.

I find it less than heartening that the Opera website states that only if the team needs more information will they be contacted – you would think if you took the time to explicitly quantify a bug, that they could take the time to say if it was repaired, or possibly by design. I would think this would be especially true for someone who has shown that they are not simply restating a well known behavior.

Got any stories of dealing with software companies about buggy design or behavior? Tell us about it!

__Update__

I have just installed Google Chrome, and it exhibits the very same behavior (that is, it is well behaved, and does what is expected) as Internet Explorer and Firefox. I certainly hope to hear from the Opera Team soon.

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