Not a complaint, but a bit of praise.

I’ve been using Opera on and off for over a decade and I still remember, going back to the start of the last decade, how v. 11 produced a lot of errors in typography in Windows. Now, however, it’s by far and away the best Chromium-based browser in terms of how it renders type.

Opera GX became my main browser in January after two-and-a-half years on Vivaldi. For some reason that no one can fathom, the type on that became really ugly with v. 2.9. Opera GX (and regular Opera) still display as Vivaldi once did.

I use MacType, which I added when Windows upgraded me to 10. It helps (in my opinion) with how type displays and gives it a bit more fidelity with that the designer of those typefaces intended.

It seems most Chromium-based browsers became incompatible with MacType at some point, and I don’t mean 2016 when Directwrite could no longer be toggled within Chromium. Yet I’ve had some beautiful displays since 2017 when I switched to Vivaldi, something that the experts say shouldn’t happen. Well, it does, and I’ve plenty of screenshots on my blog. Whether MacType is the reason or not, I can’t say with 100 per cent certainty. Maybe Opera is working with Windows’ native ClearType better. Whatever the case, everything looks better in Opera, with Firefox coming a close second.

The point at which Vivaldi changed was 2.9, when it went from Chromium 77 to 78. Yet downloading Chromium 77 showed that its display was poor, too. As is Edge, as is Vivaldi, as is Brave, as is Cent Browser (on default).

As far as I can tell, Opera is based around Chromium 79 and suffers from none of these issues.

Whatever you’re doing to give me great type, please don’t change it.

Typography still looks great—happy with this!

Thank you, Peter. I’ll need to experiment for a period to see what happens. I found a flag inside Opera (Chromium UA compatibility, #chromium-ua-compatibility) that changes the Opera user agent to a standard Chrome one. I’ve enabled it and I’ll see what happens over a couple of weeks. If nothing changes then it’ll be something else.

Typography still looks great—happy with this!

Since making Opera GX my default in January (switching from Vivaldi), I noticed the Alexa rank to my work site (jyanet.com) drop steadily. It’s a site that’s not really high on traffic (the rank is in the seven figures, so pretty low) and I was likely to be the only person visiting it to check stuff. Before that it was pretty steady. I noticed the same pattern on my personal blog (jackyan.com), which has quite a few visitors, but despite increasing my posts, the rank has also dropped, again beginning to when I made Opera GX my default. I’ve allowed GX to send data to Alexa with its extension, but nothing appears to be going through. Is this to do with the browser ID, a native privacy setting, or something else? (Or is it Alexa not counting GX because it doesn’t recognize something in the browser ID string—in which case I really need to be asking them?)

Not a complaint, but a bit of praise.

I’ve been using Opera on and off for over a decade and I still remember, going back to the start of the last decade, how v. 11 produced a lot of errors in typography in Windows. Now, however, it’s by far and away the best Chromium-based browser in terms of how it renders type.

Opera GX became my main browser in January after two-and-a-half years on Vivaldi. For some reason that no one can fathom, the type on that became really ugly with v. 2.9. Opera GX (and regular Opera) still display as Vivaldi once did.

I use MacType, which I added when Windows upgraded me to 10. It helps (in my opinion) with how type displays and gives it a bit more fidelity with that the designer of those typefaces intended.

It seems most Chromium-based browsers became incompatible with MacType at some point, and I don’t mean 2016 when Directwrite could no longer be toggled within Chromium. Yet I’ve had some beautiful displays since 2017 when I switched to Vivaldi, something that the experts say shouldn’t happen. Well, it does, and I’ve plenty of screenshots on my blog. Whether MacType is the reason or not, I can’t say with 100 per cent certainty. Maybe Opera is working with Windows’ native ClearType better. Whatever the case, everything looks better in Opera, with Firefox coming a close second.

The point at which Vivaldi changed was 2.9, when it went from Chromium 77 to 78. Yet downloading Chromium 77 showed that its display was poor, too. As is Edge, as is Vivaldi, as is Brave, as is Cent Browser (on default).

As far as I can tell, Opera is based around Chromium 79 and suffers from none of these issues.

Whatever you’re doing to give me great type, please don’t change it.

No idea how this works. Installed it, doesn’t do anything.