Opera 9.6 and indeed extremely rapid. Some sites don't render well, mut 99+% of the ones I gone to do. Very happy with it.

I went to those links and they load and scroll as fast as any other site I've been to. I suspect it's a problem on your end, not Firefox (unless it's an extension) or the forums.

Bara

that's likely the problem

Just to give you an example how bad it is:

Opera (can't even login, only lurk):

4375ms

Firefox 3.0.1:

24689ms

And no, it's not my browser or my connection, every other site and forum from the US works just fine. And the 25 seconds rendertime are not even the worst. Sometimes it takes so long to load a page that I thought I'd get a timeout in Firefox.

It would be really nice if you guys could fix the site for Opera, it's one of the fastest and most secure browsers and this is the only commercial site I know that doesn't support it.

I've seen enough from other Opera folks on the boards to be sure that this is a problem we share as end users, not something basic to Opera+SD forums.

My last guess about it was blocked content from third-party tracking sites like googleanalytics.com, but Kryo didn't think anything like that would be involved with forum logins. Earlier, I thought it was something about my old firewall, but I've since swithed to Kaspersky and still can't log in via Opera, which I'd prefer to use.

Any Opera users and/or 'neutrals' in the browser wars out there got some troubleshooting advice for the Colonel & me?

strangely opera works pretty well. the only reason I don't use it regularily are the lack of good plugins and the complete lack of support for the new mac multi-touch gestures.

not being able to login sounds like some security settings or blocked resource files. try deleting the opera settings and/or cache folders (backup sounds nice) and then login.

$&%!@#*!!!

Okay, thanks guys, I'll give that a try. I remember it worked at some point but I can't recall if or what I might have changed. Error console only pops up a bunch of CSS stuff and I'm too lazy to look further into it atm...

Google spy is blocked of course and my firewall shouldn't be a problem. Maybe I'll try a clean installation on my other PC.

I've done a little bit of testing and I'm finding that it's the images that cause FF to be slow for me.  Using firebug, there's about 1Mb of data per page, mostly images  Most of the images are in the 50Kb range and there are lots of them (even smilies and small graphics), and the background image at the top is 221Kb, and the repeating background is pretty big as well.

Completely disabling images via the firefox webdeveloper extension makes the page scroll fast (normal).  I would suggest doing some overhaul of the graphics, there's no reason a smilie needs to be 60Kb

Wanted to add one more metric.  According to Firebug's Net tracking (tracking all requests made by a page), this page uses 8Mb of content, all of which was cached, but I had to fetch it at some point in time.  But that also means that the browser has to render 8Mb of things.

There are 173 image loaded on this page (before posting this post), at a total of 7Mb of images, roughly 41.5Kb/image average.

Yes, I also ran the net tracking stuff, along with the YSlow tools, and found the images to be quite heavy.  I'll see about finding a better format for handling images, possibly doing sprites for everything with the exception of smilies (since those are handled by TinyMCE, the 3rd party tool we use as a WYSIWYG editor).  I'll keep these in mind and find ways to decrease the overall size of images, especially for the Demigod and Elemental forums.

Bara

Just one more thought   I tried using the web-developer extension to just disable the background image, and with that gone the page is fast, so there might be some optimizations you could make centered around just the background images.

Created a quick greasemonkey script that removes a couple of the background images that slow down the page a lot for me.  For some reason it doesn't speed up page load time, but after the page is loaded, scrolling works great

http://www.staticmethod.net/greasemonkey/sinsforumcleaner.user.js

Requires Greasemonkey, at least version 0.5.0

Please post anything you learn from the experiment. I've had the problem across multiple updates to Opera for which I chose the Upgrade option. Maybe a truly fresh install will do the job, but I really hate restoring my bookmarks & settings & whatnot. I'm awfully lazy...

Just removing certain pictures doesn't help.

I still maintain that firefox has problems rendering certain stylsheet methods. I noticed earlier that Firefox has acceptable speed when using default zoom. But increase by one zoom level and it slows down to a crawl.

Anyway, I reported this to the mozilla dev team as a bug. maybe the zoom feature needs some serious bugfixing. Opera handles it well, but so does firefox on websites other than stardock forums.

check out the xmarks plugin for firefox. saves your bookmarks online and synchronizes them over all computers with the xmarks plugin.