Luden.se - Opera Heisenbugs

Opera Heisenbugs

From Eric S. Raymond’s Jargon file:

[from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.

This is a collection of strange observations of the Opera Browser that for some reason or other did not make it to a bug report.

Date:	2005-01-28
Version:	Opera 8.00b (probably build 7401) on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot Screen shot - Detail
References:	Article in news:opera.tech
Details:	This odd thing happened once when I was zooming a page. The right part of the text is one pixel higher than the left (or maybe it’s the other way around). This is most visible in the fourth and fifth paragraph in the screen shot detail.

Date:	2005-06-23
Version:	Opera 8.00b1 build 7401 on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot 1 Screen shot 1 - Detail Screen shot 2 Screen shot 3 Screen shot 3 - detail
References:	Article in news:opera.tech
Details:	This fine mess was created by mouse-wheeling the page up and down, while it was partially obscured by another application window.

Date:	2007-10-31
Version:	Opera 9.50b build 9613 on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot
Details:	Is it me or is Opera suffering from double vision? And who’s the second guy in the user mode icon? I’m pretty sure I was alone at the time.

Date:	2007-09-09
Version:	Unknown, but probably 9.23 or 9.50a
Links:	Screen shot
Details:	They say that Opera gives you more features than any other browser. In this case, it gives you an extra image.

Date:	2004-08-21
Version:	Opera 7.54 build 3865 on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot
References:	Article in news:opera.general
Details:	They say that Opera is the fastest browser on Earth, and with its ability to download at 36.9kB/s over a 46667bps connection, it surely is.

Date:	2004-10-08
Version:	Unknown, but probably Opera 7.60p1 build 7141, or maybe 7.54u2 build 3929.
Links:	Screen shot
Details:	One of the many great features of Opera is its ability to start downloads immediately, before you've even picked a destination directory. I was still fairly surprised when Opera managed to download 11kB without a connection to the remote server.

Date:	2005-07-16
Version:	Opera 8.01 build 7642 on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot
Details:	Apparently, this download finished 15 seconds ago, but the server changed its mind and is sucking it back at 1.8kB/s.

Date:	2004-10-25
Version:	Unknown, but probably 7.54 or 7.60p1
Links:	The page Screen shot
Details:	When viewing one of my own web pages, some hiccup caused the HTTP headers, complete with chunk sizes, to be displayed in the browser. I have no idea whether this error was caused by Opera, or by Apache, Proxomitron or something else entirely.

Date:	2007-11-10
Version:	Opera 9.50b build 9613 on Windows 98SE
Links:	Screen shot
References:	Article in news:opera.beta
Details:	I was checking something out on my own web site, and followed a link to a news item. The news items have a pseudo `:target` selector which gives them a red outline. When I followed the link, the background inside the outline started blinking. Going back to the previous page left a blinking rectangle where the outline was. The blinking stopped when I switched to a different page (`Ctrl-Tab`) or a different application, but as soon as I returned to that page, the blinking continued. I can reproduce this when my DVD player, WinDVD 3.0 is running a movie (pause kills the bug), and I press `[F9][F5]` in Opera. Go figure... The screen shot shows the blinking rectangle after I went back from the News page to the previous page. Jernej Simončič, who filed a bug report about this, says the blinking background is a caret (text input cursor).