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rocking with opera

May 18th, 2006 | tech

There’s something that’s really, quite honestly, pissing me off with my IE browser. Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to make an IE user click on a flash graphic to “activate” it before it works. This “feature” is a royal pain when it comes to sites like this one. I don’t want to activate every page. I thought ‘OK, I’ll just deactivate this crap’, but then was told by someone who knows more about this stuff than me that it’s up to the webpage builder to deactivate it and my browser settings are powerless. booo…

On the bright side, Opera browser doesn’t do this crap…yet. As I mentioned in past posts, I recently went on a download spree looking for new browsers. My favorite find was Opera. I played with it a little bit, but found a few limitations as far as webpages not being built to accomodate the browser. This said, my main browser is still IE.

Tonight while listening to the Chris Moyles’ Show I decided to sit down and play with Opera some more. I got into the customizing stuff. First I got rid of the extra toolbars I didn’t need/want displayed. Then, just to change things up, I went to ’skins’ and changed the color schemes…first it was gold, then jungle. Currently it’s red, but I’m sure I’ll keep changing it just for fun.

After playing with the colors I figured out what each ‘button’ icon does, and which ones I wanted to keep on the toolbar. This led me to find the voice feature. Not only can you give voice commands, but you can select text on a page and have the browser read it to you. I wanted to have a go, so I checked the “enable voice” box. Up pops some thing saying I needed to download some plug-in to make it go. Sure why not.

After the voice option was enabled I pushed the icon. Some guy said ’sorry I don’t understand’. Huh? So I highlighted some text and pressed the ‘v’ button. Before I knew what was happening a male voice was reading the highlighted text. The sound of the voice was rubbish so back to the options menu. I selected the female voice and tried again. It’s not the sweetest female voice ever, but it’s better than the male voice.

Anyways, this newly found feature will be tested quite often over the next few days. If I like it enough maybe IE will bow out to Opera forever.

2 Comments

  1. PDF
    May 20th, 2006 at 12:24 am

    I mentioned it once, but here’s for documentation’s sake. It’s rad that features designed for accessibility reasons can also become features that are entertainment for others.

    And would you please just stop using IE? You and I don’t even know how many other million people make my job way more difficult than it needs to be.

  2. majafa
    May 20th, 2006 at 1:47 am

    I’ll stop using IE once all web designers (not talking about you) learn to build websites that accomodate all browsers, not sites that are just built for IE. There are simply too many features that work on sites when using IE that don’t work properly in FireFox and Opera.

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