14 DAY TRIAL // Opera has always a been a top-notch browser, in terms of speed, features, standards compliance and so on. But it has never gotten much love and has a very small global market share.
This is why most websites don't bother to do compatibility testing for Opera as well. That's especially true for complex web apps even if they come from the almighty Google.
Web standards should ensure that a web page works and behaves identically in any browser, but the reality is different.
Thankfully for Opera users and those wanting to try it out, Google has now updated both Google+ and the Google Toolbar to ensure full compatibility with the Opera browser.
"Good news for everyone who Googles!," Opera wrote. "In the past, Google services didn't always work quite as they should have done in Opera, mostly due to that old bugbear of browser compatibility," it said.
"But Google has now performed the tweaks, fixes and possibly even rain dances necessary to make Google+ and the Google Toolbar work better in Opera," it announced.
Google+ has been around for the better part of a year now, so it was about time Google got around to adding Opera compatibility. It's not clear what Google did or why, or even if it targeted Opera in particular, but the social network now works properly in the Norwegian browser.
Normally, Opera has to work around buggy websites rather than the other way around. But websites have limited resources, even Google, and a market share of a few percentage points is not enough to justify going through the trouble of checking that each feature works properly in Opera.
In a perfect world, all websites would work as intended in all browsers, especially with all the talk about web standards, of which Google is a big supporter, at least on paper.