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Latest Version of Opera Ignores Hosts File

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I discovered a rather nasty UI bug last week with the new portal we are building for a customer. Unfortunately, the layout issue only occurred in the Safari browser.

Since I couldn't repro the issue in Internet Explorer or Firefox, I decided to see if Opera exhibited the same problem as Safari. Consequently, I downloaded and installed the latest version of Opera (note that I've rebuilt both my desktop and development VM since the last time I used Opera).

Unfortunately. I discovered there's a known bug with Opera version 10 that causes it to ignore your local hosts file (e.g. %SystemRoot%\drivers\etc\hosts).

Oh c'mon, Opera Team, you've got to be kidding!

How can you expect a developer to even try your browser if he can't browse to a site in his local development environment using a fully qualified domain name (e.g. https://www-local.fabrikam.com)?

Needless to say, I didn't spend much time trying to workaround the issue. My prediction: Opera is all but extinct in another year or two.

That's too bad. From what I remember, Opera used to be a pretty good browser -- and maybe it still is, aside from the bug with the hosts file. It was certainly years ahead of IE6 in terms of Web standards compliance.

Does anyone know the current browser stats? It wouldn't surprise me if Opera was surpassed by Safari some time ago.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2011
    Are you counting the Opera variants as well? Or just the desktop version?

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2011
    Hello ! Could I know your opera verson ? Because I need a browser that can ignore the "hosts" . I am also a webmaster , but to test the website in local and browser the website in remote server , I often need change the hosts , it is terrible !!

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2011
    @wkl17, I haven't used Opera in a long time and honestly I don't recall the version that I was using at the time I wrote this blog post. You can try finding the version based on the date of my post (10-29-2009) if you think that would be helpful to you.

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2011
    @Jeremy Jameson, Thank you !