A brief foray with Opera

I’m writing this using the new Opera beta 9 which I just downloaded yesterday. I’m trying it out a little bit to see how it feels, since the numbers show it to be significantly faster than other browsers.

I have a habit of leaving out the good things, so let me just say that there are a lot of nice features about Opera. Here i’m just going to gripe about a few things that I haven’t liked in the hopes that someone out there knows how I can fix them.

Here’s the list:

• The ctrl+F hotkey combo pulls up the annoying IE-style search, not the cool Firefox “as you go” search, which is built into Opera. Can you change hotkeys?

• Opera refuses to stay logged into Wordpress. If I change the page, I’m automatically logged out. I don’t know why this is. This is part of the refreshing problem below.

• New tabs on the PC are SHIFT+T instead of CTRL+T, which is what I’m used to. The change is annoying, especailly since new tabs no longer open up in the background (unless I add another key to the combo).

• Text, especially on the PC, is rendered differently, smaller and weirder. It doesn’t look good. Probably another option I can’t find.

• Links for new windows open in new windows instead of new tabs. Is there a way to change this preference? I cannot find it.

• I need to refresh pages a lot because for some reason when it re-loads pages it doesn’t automatically re-load new comments or other relatively active segments.