I'll give you a mountain bike for every bank site you can find that works with Opera. I'm talking released versions, not betas. This cannot be.
-urlwolf
Have one ready, Caixa Galicia works
. It should be said that most bank sites SUCK hard, very hard, so hard my eyes bleed after trying some examples. There's something that rubs the wrong way when you see some of the biggest banks in Spain (and, in two cases, some of the biggest of the world) with sucky sites. I mean, they make record profits in times of economic crisis, at least they could invest them in something *useful*. No, wait, they are banks, what the hell was I thinking...
The web is an adverse environment for Opera users. This is getting worse, not better, because people create broken sites in Opera faster than we can report them and Opera devs can fix their releases. Not to mention that Opera decision-makers take pride in ignoring user feedback like no other company.
I'm considering collecting 'signatures' to ask Opera to change their behavior. It may imply renewal of the director's board, so it may never work no matter how many people sign it. Why? Because they still make the best browser, and I want it not to suck.
This will sound old, I know, but from my experience the problem is mostly outside Opera's reach. When you see sites failing, whose behaviour can be corrected with a few lines of JavaScript, you know those coding them are not making the work as they should. I wonder why people don't design a standards-compliant site, with specific fixes for IE if needed, instead of targeting a specific browser.
Can Opera Software do better? Sure, nontroppo already listed all they are doing, and I'm sure they can do other things. But I'm afraid there's no magical solution in the short-term, apart from ditching Presto and adopting Gecko (which I don't think it's as easy as it sounds). For now, cross browsing is the unique solution :-(
Getting a new management could maybe solve a few things, but I am not aware of the power Tetzchner and his board has over Opera development direction, apart from general guidelines. I mean, they have other things to care about. Even in that case, major reworking in Presto it's not an easy task, and after all, such thing is scheduled for Peregrine.
Besides, Tetzchner already fired the entire board a while ago after they tried to fire him for business decisions.
Smaller banks from Spain: (caja rural, general) Not working
-urlwolf
Caja General (Granada?) seems to work OK.
Having said that, I use admuncher and I have the sneaking suspicion that it may be interacting with sites the wrong way. I've seen people (on opera forums) saying that development is too slow - I'm just too used to it to switch it off, but it may be causing more harm than good.
Yeah, it should be a good idea to turn it off when encountering problems, and reload the site. It's not the first time I encounter problems with the adblocker activated, so I guess the same could be happening with Admuncher.
As nontroppo said, things improved over time. If you think about it, this is not as different as the situation with Firefox a while ago. There were all this bashing against it because some sites failed to render correctly with it compared with IE. It's true that back then AJAX was just a football team and a cleaning product, but the general situation is the same. Through aggressive marketing, word of mouth, and being a better browser than IE, Firefox turned out the stakes in its favour, and now the number of incompatible sites is quite low.
And that's one of the problems with Opera, marketing. While most developments in Firefox are featured in the tech press (the most recent one being the impressive improvements in JS performance), with major new releases being featured in the mass media, Opera has this stigma of being an underdog. Rarely it's featured in the press, except when major versions are released, and it's usually mocked by the usual trolls (apparently people are happy with just two options). While Asa Dotzler is disliked by a lot of people, we have to recognize he played a important role in Firefox market expansion, and Opera Software should learn from him, while trying to not fall in the traps he fell (turning a browser choice into a religion, for example).
This also includes listening to people. Opera always has a bad habit of not doing it, although after the Opera 9.5 criticism, it seems they're improving this. This is also a very difficult task, because they have to cater both to the longtime users as well as to the newcomers, and there is always a clash between those wishing for a very specific function versus those who want a more general feature, including cloning ideas from the competitors, and clearly, this is a difficult thing to maintain balance with.
Some of the things they really should be part of the browser is a extension system, perhaps not as featured as Firefox's (due to security concerns, and perhaps some inability to interact with the whole browser GUI), but enough for most tasks. I've never been a great fan of plugins in browsers, because the paradigm seems different than plugins with other type of programs, but I'd like to have some extra functions in the browser without waiting for the next versions. And an update system, which is one the most demanded functions as well. And real clipboard copy :-). It seems that the two first ones are coming, so it's a matter of time.
That should improve Opera's image, and market share as well. Meanwhile, they could fix some of the most annoying problems in the current version, like random freezings accompanied by massive HDD I/O operations.
And even in that case, my opinion is that Opera will always be a niche browser. Perhaps not as niche as it's now, but at least in a Safari way. People is accustomed to what they know, and even if that new thing provides the same functionality and some more, it takes time to being accustomed. In the case of Opera, the extra functionality is rarely used by many people, and why change from Firefox to Opera if there's no real incentive to do it, and problems can appear? I saw this scenario happening many times before, "Yes, Opera is very nice, but I'll stay with Firefox". Perhaps Opera is missing something that is key to attract people, but I can't imagine what it would be.
And this is what happens when you let me too many time with a keyboard. I'll go do something else now
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