Opera dealbreakers

I’ve been trying opera for a few days now, and I’ve managed to find fixes for a number of the differences I found earlier (coming from Firefox, which is so intuitive to me now it’s like breathing).

There are a number of reasons I really like Opera - it’s prettier looking, faster, and the tabs interface seems more intuitive. But there are a few things that I’m so reliant on that I don’t see myself switching over to Opera as my main browser.

I’ve looked through the forums and googled around for answers, but until Opera offers these functions, I’ll probably stick with Firefox.

Granted, these are both “annoyances” more than “missing features” - but that’s half of browsing, right?

Ctrl+click to open a new background tab - I’ve developed the habit of clicking links in the middle of reading posts or articles, and I like that in firefox, if you ctrl+click, it opens them in a new tab in the background. When I’m done reading one article, I’ll move to the next. In Opera, it’s Shift+ctrl+click to do the same, and ctrl+click merely follows a link in the current tab. I’ve accidentally navigated away from many things in the past day or so.

Find-as-you-type - my favorite, and arguably the single best feature in Firefox is that when you hit ctrl+f to bring up “find”, it opens up a little search bar at the bottom of the screen that sorts through the page as you type. It’s easy, intuitive, and infinitely less clunky than the standard windows-style bing-up-a-search-box method that makes it hard to see what you’ve found, annoying to open and close the find field, etc. etc. etc.

Opera has this functionality, but for some reason it’s not what happens if you hit ctrl+f. Nor is there apparently a way to bind a key to this function.

It’s too bad, because other than that (and a few missing extensions I had in FF) I really like this browser.