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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Opera’
03.06.2022
With my personal site and company siteāboth once numbers one and two for a search for my nameāhaving disappeared from Bing and others since we switched to HTTPS, I decided I would relent and sign up to Bing Webmaster Tools. Surely, like Google Webmaster Tools, this would make sure that a site was spidered and weād see some stats?
Once again, the opposite to conventional internet wisdom occurred. Both sites disappeared from Bing altogether.
I even went and shortened the titles in the meta tags, so that this site is now a boring (and a bit tossy) āJack Yanāofficial siteā, and the business is just āJack Yan & Associates, Creating Harmonyā.
Just as well hardly anyone uses Bing then.
Things have improved at Google after two months, with this personal site at number two, after Wikipedia (still disappointing, I must say) and the business at 15th (very disappointing, given that itās been at that domain since 1995).
Surely my personal and work sites are what people are really looking for when they feed in my name?
The wisdom still seems to be to not adopt HTTPS if you want to retain your positions in the search engines. Do the opposite to what technologists tell you.
Meanwhile, Vivaldi seems to have overcome its bug where it shuts down the moment you click inside a form field. Version 5.3 has been quite stable so far, after a day, so Iāve relegated Opera GX to back-up again. I prefer Vivaldiās screenshot process, and the fact it lets me choose from the correct directory (the last used) when I want to upload a file. Tiny, practical things.
Big thanks to the developers at Opera for a very robust browser, though it should be noted that both have problems accessing links at Paypal (below).
Weāll see how long I last back on Vivaldi, but good on them for listening to the community and getting rid of that serious bug.
Tags: Bing, bugs, computing, Google, Jack Yan & Associates, Microsoft, Opera, PayPal, search engine, search engines, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
17.05.2022
Iāve had both Firefox and Opera GX running as replacements for Vivaldi, which still crashes when I click in form fields, though not 100 per cent of the time. Itās running at about 50 per cent, so the fix they employed to deal with this issue is only half-effective.
I see Firefox still doesnāt render type as well. This is a matter of taste, of course, but hereās one thing I really dislike, where Iām sure thereās more agreement among typophiles:
No, not the hyphenation, but the fact the f has been butchered in the process.
The majority of people wonāt care about this, but itās the sort of thing that makes me choose Opera GX over Firefox.
Due to a temporary lapse in good judgement, I attempted to install Ćber again, this time on my Xiaomi. Here are the Tweets relating to that:
Evidently no one at Ćber has ever considered what it would be like if someone actually read the terms and conditions and followed through with some of the instructions in the clauses.
After getting through that, this is the welcome screen:
This is all it does. There’s nothing to click on, and you never move past this screen.
This is less than what I was able to achieve on my Meizu M6 Note when I tried Ćber on thatāat least there it was able to tell me that Ćber is not available in my area (Tawaāand yes, I know Ćber is lying).
This has nothing to do with not having Google Services as my other half has a non-Google Huawei and is able to get the program working.
For me, it’s three out of three phones over six years where this program does not workāand frankly I’m quite happy taking public transport rather than waste my time with this lemon. Maybe one day they will get it working for all Android phones, but I won’t hold my breath.
Tags: 2022, Firefox, Google, Google Android, Opera, technology, Twitter, typography, Ćber, web browser, Xiaomi
Posted in internet, technology, typography | No Comments »
11.04.2022
In 2011, I was definitely on Firefox.
I believe I started browsing as many did, with Netscape. But not 1.0 (though I had seen copies at university). I was lucky enough to have 1.1 installed first.
I stuck with Netscape till 4.7. Its successor, v. 6, was bloated, and never worked well on my PC.
Around this time, my friend Kat introduced me to Internet Explorer 5, which was largely stable, so I made the leap to Microsoft. IE5 wasnāt new at this point and had been around for a while.
I canāt remember which year, but at some point I went to Maxthon, which used the IE engine, but had more bells and whistles.
By the end of the decade, Firefox 3 was my browser of choice. In 2014, I switched to Waterfox, a Firefox fork, since I was on a 64-bit PC and Firefox was only made for 32-bit back then. A bug with the Firefox browsers saw them stop displaying text at the end of 2014, and I must have switched to Cyberfox (another 64-bit Firefox-based browser) around this time.
I went back to Firefox when development on Cyberfox stopped, and a 64-bit Firefox became available, but by 2017, it ate memory like there was no tomorrow (as Chrome once did, hence my not adopting it). Vivaldi became my new choice.
There are old posts on this blog detailing many of the changes and my reasons for them.
Iāve always had Opera installed somewhere, but it was never my main browser. Maybe this year Opera GX will become that, with Vivaldiās latest version being quite buggy. We shall see. I tend to be pretty loyal till I get to a point where the software ceases to work as hoped.
Tags: 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, 2022, Cyberfox, Firefox, history, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, technology, Waterfox, web browser
Posted in internet, New Zealand, technology | No Comments »
08.04.2022
Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night.
Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down.
Sadly, thereās a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and I found that ZIP archives would not download properly. Getting rid of a Spotify tab somehow got me around the first bug, but I know others have not been so lucky.
In the meantime, I discovered downgrading did not workāVivaldi wouldnāt even startāwhile upgrading back to 5.2 didnāt solve that problem. Iād see Vivaldis in the task manager for a second but theyād then vanish.
Removing the sessions from the default folder helped me start the program again, but I lost my tabs; fortunately I was able to restore those, in order to duplicate each and every one on my old browser, Opera GX.
I had duplicated tabs onto other browsers reasonably regularly, and I could have retrieved a fairly recent set from my laptop, but itās always good to have the latest.
Right now Iām deciding whether to stick with Vivaldi while its techs work on the problems, or return to a stable Opera GX, which I last used as my regular browser briefly in 2020.
The type display is still really good, without my needing to add code to get the browser working with MacType.
However, I like Vivaldi and what they stand for, which is why I stuck with it for so long. According to this blog, Iāve been using it reasonably faithfully since September 2017. And I have become very used to it over any other Chromium-based browser.
Some of you may have noticed that this website is finally on https, years after that became the norm. There was one line in the code that wasn’t pointing at the correct stylesheet when this blog loaded using SSL. That was finally remedied yesterday (I hard-coded the stylesheet link into the header PHP file). I’m no expert on such matters but it’s now loading a certificate I got at Let’s Encrypt, and it seems to be working.
One of the changes in the stylesheet that controls the indents and the paragraph spacing does mean some of the line spacing in earlier posts is now off. This happened on the Lucire website, too, but it was one of those things I had to do to make posts going forward look a bit better.
Tags: 2017, 2022, bugs, Opera, software, technology, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in design, interests, internet, technology, typography | No Comments »
03.03.2020
After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I donāt know why Iāve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, my experience is unique.
Itās a good position to be inānot unlike being one of two people (that I know of) who could upload videos of over one minute to Instagram without using IGTVāthough itās a mystery why things have worked properly for me and no one else.
When I switched to Vivaldi in 2017, I noticed how the type rendering was superior compared with Firefox, and it was only in January this year when it became far inferior for me. Looking at the threads opened on type rendering and Chromium, and the screenshots posted with them, most experienced something like this in 2016āa year before I had adopted Vivaldi. If my PC worked as theirs did, then I doubt I would have been talking about Vivaldiās superior display.
There’s a possibility that what I saw from 2017 actually was Directwrite, and whatever they’re using now is yet another technology that no one has made any note of.
Iāve posted in the Vivaldi and MacType forums where this has been discussed, as my set-up could provide the clue on why things have worked for me and not others. Could it be my font substitutions, or the changes Iāve made to the default display types in Windows? Or the fact that I still have some Postscript fonts installed from the old days? Or something so simple as my plug-ins?
Tonight I removed Vivaldi 2.11 and went to 2.6. I know 2.5 rendered type properlyāBembo on the Lucire website looks like Bembo in printāso I wondered if I could narrow down the precise version where Vivaldi began to fail on this front. (As explained earlier, after 2.5, no automatic updates came, and I jumped from 2.5 to 2.10.)
It was 2.9 where the bug began, namely when Vivaldi moved from a Chromium 77 base to a 78 one. This is different to what Ayespy, a moderator on the Vivaldi forums, experienced: version 69 was when they noted a shift. Yet Opera GX, which works fine, has a browser ID that claims itās Chrome/79.0.3945.130 (though I realize they can put whatever they like here). Brave, Chrome and Edge look awful.
We can conclude that not all Chromium browsers are created equally (goes without saying) but I understand that the rendering isnāt something that each company (Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) has fiddled with. Therefore, something Iām doing is allowing me to have better results on Opera, Opera GX and Vivaldi versions up to 2.8 inclusive.
Vivaldi 2.8
Opera GX
Firefox Developer Edition 74.0b9
Tags: 2016, 2020, Chromium, Opera, software, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in design, internet, technology, typography | 1 Comment »
17.02.2020
I wonder if itās time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefoxās and Opera GXās text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldiās tech people havenāt been able to replicate my bug). Thereās a part of me that gravitates toward Firefox more than anything with a Google connection, and I imagine many Kiwis like backing underdogs.
Here are some examples, bearing in mind Windows scales up to 125 per cent on QHD.
Vivaldi (Chrome renders like this, too)
Opera GX (and how Vivaldi used to render)
Firefox
Opera renders text slightly more widely than Firefox, but the subpixel rendering of both browsers is similar, though not identical. Type in Firefox arguably comes across with slightly less contrast than it should (especially for traditionally paper-based type, where I have a good idea of how itās āsupposedā to look) but Iām willing to experiment to see if I enjoy the switch back.
In those 29 months, a lot has happened, with Navigational Sounds having vanished as an extension, and I had to get a new Speed Dial (FVD Speed Dial) to put on my favourite sites. FVD uninstalled itself earlier today without any intervention from me, so if that recurs, Iāll be switching to something else. I donāt like computer programs having a will of their own.
A lot of my saved passwords no longer work, since I change them from time to time, and it was interesting to see what Firefox remembered from my last period of regular use. Iāll have to import some bookmarks, tooāthat file has been going between computers since Netscape.
The big problem of 2017āFirefox eating through memory like crazy (6 Gbyte in a short time)ācould be fixed now in 2020 by turning off hardware acceleration. Itās actually using less right now than Opera GX, and thatās another point in its favour.
I also like the Facebook Container that keeps any trackers from Zuck and co. away.
I did, however, have to get new extensions after having resided in the Vivaldi and Opera space for all that time, such as Privacy Badger.
If I make Firefox the default I know Iāll have truly switched back. But that Opera GX sure is a good looking browser. I might have to look for some skins to make common-garden Firefox look smarter.
Tags: 2020, Chromium, computing, Google, Microsoft Windows, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, typography, user interface, web browser
Posted in design, internet, typography | No Comments »
31.01.2020
The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life
Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and thatās not counting video game consoles), Iāve tended to have a screen thatās better than average. When 640 Ć 360 was the norm, I had 1,024 Ć 768. My first modern laptop in 2001 (a Dell Inspiron) had 1,600 pixels across, even back then. It was only in recent years that I thought my LG 23-inch LCD, which did full HD, was good enough, and I didnāt bother going to the extremes of 4K. However, with Lucire and the night-time hours I often work, and because of a scratch to the LG that a friend accidentally made when we moved, I thought it was time for an upgrade.
Blue light is a problem, and I needed something that would be easier on the eyes. At the same time, an upgrade on res would be nice.
But there was one catch: I wasnāt prepared to go to 27 inches. I didnāt see the point. I can only focus on so much at any given time, and I didnāt want a monitor so large that Iād have to move my neck heaps to see every corner. On our work Imacs I was pretty happy to work at 24 inches, so I decided Iād do the same for Windows, going up a single inch from where I was. IPS would be fine. I didnāt need a curved screen because my livelihood is in flat media. Finally, I don’t need multiple screens as I don’t need to keep an eye on, say, emails coming in on one screen, or do coding where I need one screen for the code and the other for the preview.
Oddly, there arenāt many monitor manufacturers doing QHD at 24 inches. There was a very narrow range I could choose from in New Zealand, with neither BenQ nor Viewsonic doing that size and resolution here. Asus has a beautifully designed unit but I was put off by the backlight bleed stories of four years ago that were put down to poor quality control, and it seemed to be a case of hit and miss; while Dellās P2418D seemed just right, its negative reviews on Amazon and the Dell website largely penned by one person writing multiple entries. I placed the order late one night, and Ascent dispatched it the following day. If not for the courier missing me by an hour, Iād be writing this review a day earlier.
I realize weāre only hours in to my ownership so there are no strange pixels or noticeable backlight bleed, and assembly and installation were a breeze, other than Windows 10 blocking the installation of one driver (necessitating the use of an elevated command prompt to open the driver executable).
With my new PC that was made roughly this time last year, I had a Radeon RX580 video card with two Displayport ports, so it was an easy farewell to DVI-D. The new cables came with the monitor. A lot of you will already be used to monitors acting as USB hubs with a downstream cable plugged in, though that is new to me. It does mean, finally, I have a more comfortable location for one of my external HDs, and I may yet relocate the cable to a third external round the back of my PC.
Windows 10 automatically sized everything to 125 per cent magnification, with a few programs needing that to be overridden (right-click on the program icon, then head into āCompatibilityā, then āChange high DPI settingsā).
Dellās Display Manager lets you in to brightness, contrast and other settings without fiddling with the hardware buttons, which is very handy. I did have to dial down the brightness and contrast considerably: Iām currently at 45 and 64 per cent respectively.
And I know itās just me and not the devices but everything feels faster. Surely I can’t be noticing the 1 ms difference between Displayport and DVI-D?
I can foresee this being far more productive than my old set-up, and Ascentās price made it particularly tempting. I can already see more of the in- and outbox detail in Eudora. Plantin looks great here in WordPerfect (which I often prep my long-form writing in), and if type looks good, Iām more inclined to keep working with it. (It never looked quite right at a lower res, though it renders beautifully on my laptop.)
I feel a little more ālate 2010sā than I did before, with the monitor now up to the tech of the desktop PC. Sure, itās not as razor-sharp as an Imac with a Retina 4K display, but I was happy enough in work situations with the QHD of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and having that slightly larger feels right. Besides, a 4K monitor at this sizeāand Dell makes oneāwas outside what I had budgeted, and Iām not sure if I want to run some of my programsāthe ones that donāt use Windowsā magnificationāon a 4K screen. Some of their menus would become particularly tiny, and that wonāt be great for productivity.
Maybe when 4K becomes the norm Iāll reconsider, as the programs will have advanced by then, though at this rate Iāll still be using Eudora 7.1, as I do today.
Incidentally, type on Vivaldi (and presumably Chrome) still looks worse than Opera and Firefox. Those who have followed my blogging from the earlier days know this is important to me.
Vivaldi
Opera GX
Tags: 2010s, 2020, Chromium, computing, Dell, design, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, New Zealand, Opera, retail, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser, WordPerfect
Posted in design, internet, publishing, technology, typography | 3 Comments »
10.01.2020
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnāt notified me of any updates for monthsāI was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:
My font settings had also changed.
Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iām used to:
Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iām missing Vivaldiās easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenāt too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXās extensionsā window isnāt as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereās that), and thereās a GX home page thatās superfluous for me.
I donāt need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnāt eat up capacity for their games. Itās not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itās important that type is properly handled. I donāt know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatās probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
Tags: 2019, 2020, design, Opera, privacy, technology, typography, user interface, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in design, internet, technology, typography | 5 Comments »
23.02.2012
Con Carlyon inspired this post today. He’s kept an eye on the best browser and forwarded me a test from TechCrunch where Firefox, Chrome, IE9 and Opera 11 are pitted against one another. The victors are Firefox and Chrome.
My needs are quite different from most people. For starters, the number-one criterion for me on any browser is decent typography. Firefox has been, at least since v. 3, the most typographically aware browser, picking up the correct typefaces from stylesheets, and providing access to all installed fonts on a system through its menu.
I had done these tests before, but I thought it was about time I revisited the main four browsers and their typographic capability. These were all done on the same machine, and the full screen shots are available if anyone wants to see them. Firefox and IE9 were already on my system but were checked to be current and up to date. Chrome and Opera were downloaded today (February 23, 2012).
This is not a test about Java or overall speed, just typography. But I would have to give the speed crown to Chromeābearing in mind that my Firefox is full of extensions and add-ons.
The Lucire home page
Not the latest HTML, but there is a fairly standard stylesheet. Here is how the four browsers performed.
Firefox 10.0.2
I am used to this, so I don’t see anything unusual. Firefox is my browser of choice (though I have since tried Waterfox 64-bit, and noticed no speed difference). It picks up the web font (Fiduci, in the headline), kerns (see We in Week) and the text font, Dante, is installed on this machine. It’s the first type family specified in the stylesheet.
Kerning: 1. Font fidelity: 1.
Chrome
Not much difference on the left-hand side. However, Chrome fails to pick up Dante, even though it’s installed. It’s opted for Monotype Garamond for the body text. It’s the eighth typeface family specified in the stylesheetāan unusual choice. At least two of the other typeface families preceding Garamond are installed on this machine.
Kerning: 1. Font fidelity: 0.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
Awful. IE9ās bugs have already been documented on this blog, and it is very limited on which fonts it allows you to access in its menu (TTFs only). There is no kerning, and Monotype Garamond, again, has been chosen as the text font. There were some even less attractive choices on the home page that I didn’t take a screen shot of.
Kerning: 0. Font fidelity: 0.
Opera 11.63
Interestingly, Fiduci is picked up for the headlines and Dante for the text. But a bug that Firefox had back in v. 2 in 2006, and which I filed with the makers of Opera in 2010, remains present. Opera fails to display characters above ASCII 128 properly, and when it hits a ligature, it will change the following characters to a different typeface, in this case, Times. No kerning, either.
Kerning: 0. Font fidelity: 0Ā·5.
A Lucire news page
Much the same comments apply from the above, but it gave me confirmation of each browser’s issues.
Firefox 10.0.2
The first choices in each CSS spec are picked up.
Chrome
Instead of the Lucire typeface in the central column, Chrome specifies Verdana, the sixth typeface family for the spec.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
Same as Chrome, except without the kerning.
Opera 11.63
Correct typefaces, but for the changing fonts in the middle of the line.
Conclusion
If I really didn’t care about typeāand most people don’tāI would have a hard time choosing between Chrome and Firefox. On this test alone, Chrome was the fastestābut I suspect a Firefox without add-ons would be comparable. But once you factor in type, Chrome makes some very odd decisions, as does IE9, about which fonts it chooses from the installed base. It doesn’t, consistently, pick the first oneāand previous versions did.
Interestingly, Chrome now displays Facebook in Verdana. When I first encountered it, it displayed Facebook in our in-house Lucire 1, which we had programmed to substitute for Arial on our older machines.
So somewhere along the line, someone changed the way Chrome picked fonts, but having something installed is no longer a guarantee it will even show up on Google’s browser. That can’t be good for corporate environments where companies have paid a site- or company-wide licence to have the correct fonts installed. But I’m glad Chrome now uses the kerning pair data in fonts, and that’s made a positive difference to legibility.
IE9 is simply terrible. It made the same wrong calls as Chrome, but, to make things worse, it won’t even use the kerning data. Of the four tested, it comes dead last.
Opera is not far ahead, mind, at least based on the arbitrary point scale I assigned above. While it picks up the correct typefaces, some might think its irritating habit of changing fonts mid-line to be more annoying. It could well be, as this does nothing for reading. Imagine every quotation mark and every word with a ligature changingāfor no apparent reason. As mentioned, this bug was in Firefox in 2006, and Opera knows about it, but evidently Opera users are not displeased with the glitch and it remains unfixed.
Typographically, Firefox 10.0.2 is the victorāand that’s no surprise. When I discovered bugs in Firefox 4, I was met with professional developers on the forums who actually understood type and the niceties behind the OpenType spec. Those are details some professional typeface designers don’t know. It looks I won’t be changing browsers any time soon.
Tags: 2012, Chrome, design, Firefox, fonts, Google, internet, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Opera, technology, typography
Posted in internet, technology, typography, USA | 6 Comments »
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