Opera implemented user javascripts for the Opera 8 beta 3 release, something which was appreciated by many - and one use was for GMail. With GMail you could previously tell it to log in even if your browser wasn’t supported, and a ?nocheckbrowser-argument was added to the URL. Then it stopped that option, giving non-supported browser a basic, less useful implementation.

Opera was such a non-supported browser, despite handling the standard implementation just fine. The nocheckbrowser-argument still worked, but you had to enter it manually. It wasn’t perfect, as you still were thrown back into the simple interface sometimes. Enter the user-javascripts. Some javascripts to keep the argument in place were quickly made and published by other users, and I quickly started to use one of them, making GMail a nice experience once again.

I never gave it any thought after that, until I a few days ago used an earlier version of Opera without user javascript - and GMail worked flawlessly there, too. How come? Well - it turns out Google has yet again tweaked GMail to give us a better experience. The choice of using the simple interface is still there, but now as a link at the bottom of the pages. Wonderful And with the storage space growing each day, who’s complaining? Not me.

Of course, with Opera working flawlessly with GMail once again, I’ve turned off that particular userscript.

Categories: Browsers, Web anything