Tag: opera

From Comic Con to Opera Seria

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

This night… we went to the Opera, which are Comedies & other plays represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perpective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions. So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most magnificent & expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent: The historie was Hercules in Lydia, the Seanes chang’d 13 times, The famous Voices Anna Rencia, a Roman, & reputed the best treble of Women; but there was an Eunuch, that in my opinion surpass’d her, and a Genoveze that sung an incomparable Base: This held us by the Eyes and Eares til two in the Morning…

-John Evelyn, Venice, 1645.

With all of the chatter about Comic Con going on right now, it’s a good time to take a moment to reflect on the fact that young men nerding out about new types of spectacles is not a new phenomenon. John Evelyn (1620-1706) would have been 25 at the time that he wrote this entry, having completed his education at Oxford College and basically taking the grand tour of continental Europe to dodge the first English Civil War.

If you’re interested, after the jump I’ve reposted the entry with hyperlinks to information about the things mentioned by Evelyn:

Continue reading “From Comic Con to Opera Seria” →

Browser Autopsy #1: Opera

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Opera: Same Song, Different Tune

That title doesn’t actually have anything to do with what I think about the Opera Web browser. I just wanted to use a bad pun.

I initially intended to use a different web browser every week until I had tried all of the major browsers. That plan went away quickly for two reasons:

  1. There’s actually not many high performance browsers out there. The list basically stands like this: Firefox (which I already use), Safari (which I use as my… private browser [and I hate]), Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer (which is not available for OSX).
  2. I got tired of Opera really quickly.

Opera is not a bad browser. The reason that it frustrated me is that it encourages a very specific pattern of internet usage and user behavior. I’m not going to fully cover every feature of of the browser, or even every way that it is different from Firefox. What I will list are the major problems with using Opera as a heavy internet user.

Compatability Issues

One of my favorite web related services out there is XMarks, the bookmark sync service. It makes browsing on different machines, migrating between browsers, and accessing your bookmarks from the web extremely easy. It currently doesn’t support Opera. This is a minor annoyance, but it’s not the only service that doesn’t support the browser. Many of the Google beta programs also do not support the browser.

Other Technical Issues

Opera is widely touted and promoted for being fast. That’s true (to a point; Chrome is as fast or faster). At the same time, on more than one occasion, websites with many elements (columns of text, embedded media) displayed as a scramble with overlapping text.

User Behavior

Little design element also suggest that Opera wants its users to browse in a different way than I (and I would guess most power users) do. There is no bookmark toolbar, and it seems like the Opera developers have banked on people liking it’s complex sidebar (the sidebar also has  filesharing, history, IM and app tabs). The sidebar and the bar at the top of the page are not that wide, but they feel clunky. There is a lot of wasted space in between tabs at the top of the page, and it doesn’t seem to encourage many open tabs.

These are all features that you can add with an extension in Firefox, and that points to the problem with Opera.