They suck. For example the latter picture in the post below is malformed. The original before uploading is fine and well readable. I posted with Firefox as I can’t post images to blog posts at all with Opera. The editor looks horrible in Firefox with a barely readable font as I’m typing this.
I don’t know what went wrong and where but blogging has always been tediously slow with each operation always lasting a loong time (start a new post, insert a picture…), on any operating system. This of course wouldn’t need to be so for technical reasons (a 2 MB connection is enough to stream fine video so sending some text and control inputs plus some small pictures is nothing) but is probably for other reasons – inefficient libraries are used because of compatibility and lack of manpower etc etc.
This is actually the case for a huge number of things nowadays. Many things would be possible but for some little reason are not done. Lack of knowledge, motivation, small money…
I’m about to (i.e. perhaps within a month depending on whenever I get around to it –I’m easily distracted lol) install Opera on my new computer (running Ubuntu 9.04 i386, not going to bother with 9.10 yet) and happened to notice a familiar-looking url among the results of the first page! It’s a small world ^_^
A long shot but is the WordPress editing in any way reliant upon Java? Just asking as I’ve noticed Java (Sun version, haven’t tried IcedTea or whatever the f/oss alternative is called now) operations becoming increasingly (and ridiculously) slow on Xubuntu and Ubuntu during the last distributions. IIRC there have been found issues (some Java math operations I think it was) that have fixes but there’s probably more.
If that’s not related I wonder which Firefox and Opera version (not just version number but also static vs. dynamic for Opera) you’re using and how you installed Opera. Just before starting on this comment I found these two following pages that were of interest and which gives some information about these things with Opera. One of them seems to have tweaks that might be appropriate for your Opera issues on Ubuntu (Gnome desktop environment). Hopefully you might find something of help (they’re recently created or updated too):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OperaBrowser
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-opera-web-browser-in-ubuntu-including-flashjava-plugins.html
Very strange that a png format image is making trouble in open source programs, it absolutely shouldn’t.
As for text being hard to read, do you experience that only within the WordPress editor? If it’s a general issue it might well be anti-aliasing issues within Ubuntu or Firefox/Opera or both (I’ve had anti-aliasing issues in old versions of Xubuntu before) or possibly compiz/beryl/stuff (I don’t know much about those programs yet, been a long time since I last used Gnome and those aren’t high on my list of things to get familiar with/sort out).
Thanks… I tried reinstalling Opera (there’s a different download for Ubuntu 9.10, though the filename is the same and the size to the byte as well…
Now uploading works for some reason. Maybe it was a bug on WordPress’ end? I’m heavily leaning on that. It even mangled the png into something almost unreadable. That damned “crunching”.
It’s probably some font issue in Firefox – the edit window uses something that is not well behaving in Ubuntu Gnome. Probably smoothing yes. I have a crappy onboard Intel 3D accelerator and upgrading to 9.10 solved many opengl garbling problems in at least two applications so in that sense it’s a big win.
On the other hand some software seems a bit slower.