Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm calling these "stray peeves" because I haven't adopted them as pets yet, though a DNA test will show each to be closely related to a pet peeve of mine regarding readability/useability vs. "stylishness" or unfortunate limitations resulting from poorly chosen assumptions.

1) Who formats an entire story deliberately center-justified and using a stylesheet that doesn't leave any space between paragraphs? Not the way to get anybody to bother reading what you took all that trouble to write...

2) Webcartoonists who use eensy weensy fonts in their speech bubbles don't usually annoy me as much as they do right now; I guess this is really a browser complaint: why can't I magnify the images in most browsers? (Related to this, I was looking at sites with a lot of math on them earlier, and most of the equations were done as images; it would have been nice to be able to scale those as well.) It works in Opera; why not in Firefox and Konqueror? Or am I supposed to keep changing my screen resolution when I switch apps, or even when I switch tabs within the browser and go to pages laid out for different screen sizes?

3) [related to #2] I want Opera to be reliable again! I don't know whether it's some configuration issue specific to my Debian machine or a problem others have been having with Opera 9, but when I upgraded to 9.10, Opera started hanging at odd intervals and needing to be killed manually and restarted. I'm currently running 9.20 and having similar trouble. Until now, Opera's been a rock, and there are a bunch of little things I took for granted that I really miss when I use Firefox (well, Iceweasel, the Debian-badged build of Firefox). I want to be able to go back to just using Opera again.

I thought other browsers had caught up to Opera by now, and that switching would be mostly a matter of getting used to subtle differences in the user interface aesthetic. I've been telling people looking for an alternative to MSIE, "I like Opera myself, but a lot of my friends really like Firefox and apparently it's about as good; I suggest either of those." But it turns out that Opera's still actually ahead when it comes to features I use regularly. After having used Firefox for a few weeks, I think I'm going to have to go back to simply recommending, "Install Opera" -- at least once I know they've got it stable under Linux again.

Hey, at least when Opera does need to be killed, the next time I restart it I'm right back where I left off with all the same tabs open and the same pages loaded. When Firefox crashes, whatever I was in the middle of goes bye-bye. I've heard there's a plug-in I can download to give it Opera-like session recovery capability, but I haven't gotten around to digging up the info on that yet.

I don't think Opera 9.10 has the same problem under Windows, but I'm not sure -- I think I put 9.10 on the WinXP laptop I borrow when visiting anniemal, but I don't remember for sure. The Win2K machine in the other bedroom has had its RAM tied up with other stuff lately so I hven't gotten around to upgrading the browser past Opera 8.51 yet -- maybe after I get around to closing the other apps I've had running there. And I'm guessing that if a lot of other Linux users were having this problem with 9.x, I'd have heard screaming by now. I'm hoping the next beta release will fix it for me.

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-12-23:

"Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it." -- Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957).

(submitted to the mailing list by Reddy, Michael)