Living at the (English) edge of the world

For people interested in font rendering in current browsers, which has really gone downhill due to how horrible the font rendering in Blink based browsers on Windows is, and especially given that we’ve recently lost the possibility to even disable DirectWrite in Blink browsers completely, it might be worth noting that after three years, there’s finally been a new MacType release yesterday that also introduces the possibility to tweak DirectWrite behaviour.

MacType latest release

In case you don’t know, MacType is (somewhat contrary to the name of the project) an application that basically replaces Windows ClearType with FreeType, a font rendering engine that’s mostly used in Linux (and which in my opinion is absolutely superior to ClearType/DirectWrite and is also much more tweakable). It doesn’t offer the same amount of customizability when it comes to DirectWrite as it offers for general Windows font rendering, not by a long shot, but you can still tweak it a bit.

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Whenever I think about what Opera means to me, it always comes to this. One small, simple, cute little GIF smiley I’ve first seen God-knows-how-many years ago:

That’s basically it. For such a simple thing, it really does sum up my feelings spot on. Though it might almost be more accurate to say it DID sum them up. We’re still not quite there, though. There’s some hope left just yet, but it’s getting harder and harder to hold on to it.

That tiny little image right there represents a ton of emotions and memories for me. Sure, some of it is for personal reasons – that image popped up on the internet around 2003. Or, to put it on a more personal level, just around the time I met my girlfriend. I was already an active Opera user back then – I’ve been using Opera as my main browser since around version 3.5 or 3.6, meaning since something like 1998 or 1999. From 2000 up, I was already pretty enthusiastic about Opera – the fastest browser available, jam-packed with revolutionary things and features no other browser had back then, and customizable like nothing you’ve ever seen. So yeah, I was really digging Opera, as they say (or at least I think they do). And I was spreading the word.

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Like many others, I was caught by surprise by the Google+ social network redesign. Since I thought a lot of it simply doesn’t make much sense from the desktop side of things (the key elements are too small and away from the center of your attention) and using Google+ would be much more unpleasant for me, I thought about creating my own CSS user style for Opera, correcting my biggest gripes. Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting into and didn’t really expect to spend several days on it (which could probably be less if I actually knew more about CSS or if I actually was a webdesigner), but I’m rarely seen to back off a challenge. I’m quite pleased with the results, though. And I’ve even managed to workaround some Google+ bugs in Opera – given I’m not a pro at all, I’d say that’s not too shabby.

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Edit 21.7.2011: There is now a more elegant and more correct solution available thanks to XP1 from MyOpera.com as mentioned either in the comments of this post, at MyOpera.com or in my post at my Czech blog (Czech only for now, sorry about that – English version of the post coming ASAP) here.

It seems there’s some demand for the English version of my Czech post about Google+ Opera workaround, so I’ve decided to write this up in English as well. You can also follow this thread at My Opera forums.

It’s been quite hard not to notice the phenomenal success of the Google+ social network in just a few days since its unofficial launch. As usual when dealing with all things Google, Opera users were facing another thing that was hard not to notice – the Google+ top notification bar…is sort of missing the actual notifications in Opera. Which in turn makes it kind of hard to use Google+ in Opera efficiently, since you really have no idea about the number of new comments or any other events you should be notified about. You can of course use another (=worse) browser, you can just use the mail notifications or you can get your notifications on your Android device, if you happen to have one (but although the Android G+ app is really nice, to be using it as a notification device for your desktop browser is not really that convenient). Thankfully, it seems like there’s another option to work around this problem.

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