[ph0ust]

ok, so i prefer to only use opera as my browser. unfortunately, for the last several months it seems that opera 7.54 on my mac SUCKS at rendering pages. all format is whacked, menus are all over, pages are terrible, it is slow, and generally sucks in all ways.

i don't get it, did i do something wrong and not know it? i basically have to use firefox and safari more now. opera on my dell seems fine. any help is really appreciated, as i want my favorite browser back. thanks.

[Millennium]

Do you have a link to a page that's having problems?

Opera does have one issue with the Mac that most people consider a flaw: it doesn't treat the CSS measurement "px" as meaning onscreen pixels. Instead, it treats "px" as 1/90 of an inch. Of course, since the Mac's screen resolution is assumed to be 72dpi, not 90dpi, this means that Opera renders 1px somewhat smaller than an onscreen pixel. This wouldn't be so bad if they scaled everything (including all images) to fit this "ideal resolution", but they don't; in particular, images are not scaled. The effect this has on many layouts is outright disastrous.

Every other browser treats the difference between a Mac pixel and a Windows pixel as not being significant enough to bother scaling anything; 1px is treated as an onscreen pixel and that's that (and because everything in these browsers follows that decision, it doesn't hurt layouts). Opera, on the other hand, goes its own way. Technically they can do this -either way is correct according to the standards- but Opera's hardcore interpretation of this part of the standard is so hopelessly impractical that it has hurt Opera/Mac's adoption severely.

[ph0ust]

seems most pages have a problem to some degree or another. one particularly bad one is brookstone: www.brookstone.com

seems strange that so many sites are affected though. is this something that opera is going to fix?

[workerbee]

Originally posted by ph0ust:
seems most pages have a problem to some degree or another. one particularly bad one is brookstone: www.brookstone.com

seems strange that so many sites are affected though. is this something that opera is going to fix?

Renders perfectly OK here in Opera 8 (Beta).
Did you set up Opera to use your own style sheet, or to use "user mode" instead of "author mode"?

Opera 8:

OmniWeb 5.1:

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Opera does have one issue with the Mac that most people consider a flaw: it doesn't treat the CSS measurement "px" as meaning onscreen pixels. Instead, it treats "px" as 1/90 of an inch.

Opera 8 beta doesn't do that for me.

I hate Opera mostly because it looks crappy and has a lot of very Mac-unlike behaviors (like no Drag & Drop) that I can't get used to.

[Millennium]

Hmm. Maybe they've fixed that in recent betas. I'll have to check this out.

In any case, the problem isn't so much that Opera scaled pixels (using the past tense in case it's not true anymore) as that they didn't consistently scale pixels. If you scale one thing, you have to scale everything, or it doesn't work.

They really should clarify this in the CSS standards: "To determine whether a given resolution is different enough from 90ppi that the 'px' measurement should be scaled to something other than one onscreen pixel, consider whether a bitmapped image would need to be scaled in order to be viewable in any meaningful way. If a bitmap would need to be scaled, then so should the 'px' measurement. If not, then do not scale it."

[Millennium]

Originally posted by ph0ust:
seems most pages have a problem to some degree or another. one particularly bad one is brookstone: www.brookstone.com

Do you have any other examples? Brookstone appears to be using browser sniffing to send different content to different browsers, so it's hard to tell what is a problem with the layout and what is not.

[osxrules]

I stopped using Opera when it made lines over pages that had frames when I scrolled. It's actually pretty slow too. I didn't notice until I loaded a big web page. Firefox and Safari really shine in the speed dept.

I don't remember it having any features I needed that weren't in Safari or FF. Plus they don't have banner ads.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
They really should clarify this in the CSS standards: "To determine whether a given resolution is different enough from 90ppi that the 'px' measurement should be scaled to something other than one onscreen pixel, consider whether a bitmapped image would need to be scaled in order to be viewable in any meaningful way. If a bitmap would need to be scaled, then so should the 'px' measurement. If not, then do not scale it."

Err, sorry, why scale pixels? If you want something that doesn't scale, use points!

[Millennium]

Originally posted by TETENAL:
Err, sorry, why scale pixels? If you want something that doesn't scale, use points!

The idea of scaling pixels was actually intended for printers. A pixel onscreen is generally said to translate to a dot on the printer, so if you didn't scale pixels when printing you'd end up with images and text so small that they'd be unreadable. It's been common practice to scale images and such for printing ever since the first graphical printers that had a higher resolution than monitors did.

Points, by the way, do scale on a screen. There are 72 points in an inch. The original Mac monitor was 72dpi, and the original ImageWriter printer was 72ppi, so everything lined up quite nicely. It was the first and last time that users had true WYSIWYG, where a pixel onscreen exactly corresponded to a dot on the printer. This is all ancient history, but to this day the Mac OS -even OSX- assumes that all monitors have this same resolution. Printer drivers scale accordingly.

Windows, on the other hand, assumes 96 dpi for their screens. I haven't the faintest idea why they chose this, given that mid- to low-end monitors are only now starting to hit that kind of resolution, and this decision was made back in the earliest days of Windows. Printer drivers on Windows likewise scale their images according to this assumption.

When it came time to make a decision, the W3C decided to simply set a standard resolution whereby a pixel was equal to 1/90 of an inch. Your guess is as good as mine concerning where they got that number from. However, the standard also says that on devices with resolutions "close" to 1/90ppi, user-agents can ignore this measurement and simply use 1px as an onscreen pixel. Evidently, Opera felt that 96ppi was close enough, but 72ppi wasn't. This wouldn't have been a problem if they were consistent about it, and scaled everything to this resolution. But they weren't consistent about it, and many page layouts suffered because of that.

Anyway, if you use points as your measurement, you will once again run into scaling problems, but you'll hit them on Windows, not on the Mac. Mac browsers simply treat one point as one pixel onscreen, since that's the resolution which the Mac assumes your screen to have. On Windows, however, a point is slightly larger than a pixel, and so you have to do strange rounding tricks, which will result in a point sometimes showing up as one pixel and sometimes showing up as two. The end result is that 72pt shows up as 72 pixels on a Mac, but 90 pixels on a Windows machine.

[Sarc]

Originally posted by workerbee:
Renders perfectly OK here in Opera 8 (Beta).
Did you set up Opera to use your own style sheet, or to use "user mode" instead of "author mode"?

where did you get Opera 8 beta for Mac OS X ?
I can only find it for Windows.

[workerbee]

Originally posted by Sarc:
where did you get Opera 8 beta for Mac OS X ?
I can only find it for Windows.

Blechh, Windows! Wouldn't want you to be forced to use it, so here's the link for the OS X version

[Sarc]

Originally posted by workerbee:
Blechh, Windows! Wouldn't want you to be forced to use it, so here's the link for the OS X version

thx for that, appreciate.