Opera's default interface is too cluttered. I happen to like using 800x600 windows so I can see what's going on in other apps as I work. Do you know how little space that leaves for Opera for showing Web pages? zOMG forced horizontal scrolling.
Even after spending time cleaning up the interface and ditching all the bookmarks and toolbars, I'm constantly reminded that there's something I'd like to do that isn't being done.
Why can't the Transfer window automatically delete all completed downloads from its history?
Why can't a view the source code of only a selected part of a page?
Why can't I write my own custom search engine shortcuts for the URL bar?
Why does it not cache images that have been scrolled offscreen but are still on the same page (they're rerendered each time I scroll them back on screen)?
Why can't I do a right-click Show Image on images that failed to download without refreshing the whole page?
Why am I forced to arrange my bookmarks in alphabetical order?
Why can't I use UTF-8 characters in my bookmark titles?
Why can't I use native Qt widgets with "native" skins? Come on, even Firefox, a GTK lookalike, does a better job!
Why can't I select certain font sizes? I want 11px fonts to be consistent with the rest of my apps.
Firefox does it all and does it well. Anything it doesn't do, I can make it do with Extensions. What's not to like?
> when you think there's no more that can be done to improve UI
Do I think that, now? Opera's interface started out horrid - MDI in a web browser, what the hell? - and has slowly progressed to being merely dismal - it's a huge and cluttered mess at this point. Feature-wise, I'm sure there's a lot to like, but the presentation leaves much to be desired still.
Firefox is definitely on the right track with the less is more approach.
Time to bump the drama thread!
I just tried out the beta of Opera 9 on OS X, and while the new interface is a definite improvement, it's still pretty blatant that the Opera team has no real interface designers.
The whole thing is skinned, and the default look is supposed to be "Macintosh native", but of course it isn't. Everything is subtly different. I keep getting these flashes of the "that's not right" feeling, which totally kills the smoothness of the interface. Icons look wrong, dialogs use the wrong kinds of windows, things are laid out differently than all other programs...
Furthermore, there are tons of these little things that just don't work well - for instance, there's a little tooltip-like popup that appears when you hover over a tab, which has a thumbnail of the page. This might be useful, except you have to hold your mouse pointer still over the tab for a second before it opens. In the same time, you could have clicked it, seen the contenst, and clicked elsewhere. The popup acts like it was supposed to stay open once it's appeared, so you could just run the mouse pointer over the tabs and see the contest of each, but this seems to only work in practice one time out of ten. So you end up hovering for a second over EACH tab you want to look at. This is clearly utterly useless.
User interface design is hard because it is so subtle. And I've not seen any version of Opera that gets the subtleties right. They get the big and easy features right, but not the details. Like the widgets they added (The first question here is "why?", but lets ignore that for now) - widgets in OS X work because they sit on a separate, hidden page that can be shown on command. Opera adds widget that just float around on the desktop, getting mixed up with regular windows, and looking generally out of place.
So I'm still not going to use it. It's just too ugly and unpleasant to use.