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.