A Night at the Opera

Opera7 has been rubbing me the wrong way. I’m getting lots of positive feedback on the new Inc.com redesign — and also tons of feeback on how the navigation breaks in Opera7/Win. I’m trying to find a solution for the problem.

Doug mentioned that Opera7 has trouble setting a width for an absolutely positioned ul — and he’s right. Since there is no width specified, the list wraps instead of displaying inline like it does on every other standards-compliant browser. Applying a white-space: nowrap; to the #nav is ignored by Opera (a bug?), and while setting a pixel width fixes the problem, it creates additional issues in other browsers. The mini tabs work fine on SimpleBits because I’m not using position: absolute;.

Frustrating. But Inc.com gets approximately 0.00001% of its traffic through Opera. Sure, it sounds like I’m giving up on it — but I’m not interested in finding a hack that is specific to Opera only right now, when it appears to ignore the white-space rule. The rest of the site renders just fine as well.

I’d be interested to hear from others who have run into similar problems with Opera.