1) Greater website compatibility. I was fixing a friends Windows machine over the weekend and wanted to get him off Internet Explorer, but felt like I had to put him onto Firefox because it seems to have greater compatibility with real life websites. As a longtime Opera user, this saddens me. Included in this is Full Google Compatibility. I think at least some of the blame here falls on Google, which has a 2 browser mentality, but I want to be able to use Google for GMail, calendar, docs. Lots of times you can get it to work by telling whatever “app” to go ahead and try anyway, but I want more.

2) Support for external RSS readers. The Opera RSS feeder is… well, let’s be kind and call it “simple” (you know, like that cousin that sits in the corner during family reunions eating bugs). It simply can’t compete with NetNewsWire. Give me choices and you give me power.

3) Drop the horrendously stupid “Temporary Downloads” idea, or at least give me an easy way to opt-out of it. For those who don’t know, when you click on a file in Opera, it gives you the option to “Save” or “Open” For years “Open” meant “Save to the default directory, and then Open” but someone at Opera finally convinced enough people to change it. What does that mean to you? Well you know that 54MB file you downloaded the other day? Well if you clicked “Open” instead of “Save” then Opera has probably deleted it by now (assuming you’ve restarted Opera since then) with no warning. This is unlike every other browser on the Mac and the only “defense” I’ve heard for it is that otherwise people’s download folders got cluttered. Hrm… let me see… cleaning up clutter versus deleting stuff I may want….. which is a more serious problem?

4) Better tab control. For the browser that had tabs long before any other browser you’ve ever heard of, Opera’s support for what you can do with them has been bypassed by Safari, OmniWeb, and Firefox. OmniWeb may have not only the best controls but it also tells you what will happen with a given link when you hover it (i.e. “Open INSERTURLHERE in a new tab”). OmniWeb also has built-in controls for always opening links to different sites in a new tab, etc.

5) Thumbnails as tabs. OmniWeb again. Coolest feature in a browser in a long time. Tabs are shown on the left or right (which makes sense given today’s widescreen monitors, even on laptops) and each one shows a smaller thumbnail of various pages you have open. Tremendously handy (and you can manually toggle to just a list if you have a lot of tabs open).

6+) Tim A already mentioned extensions (also as his #6) and I wish Opera had them so everyone would just shut up about it already. I also wish that the Bug Tracking, at least for the desktop browser part of Opera would be public, if for no other reason than to get the conversation about changes in Opera out into the public earlier before they are defacto decided.

I’m not tagging anyone else (too chain-letter-esque for me) but I’ll happily accept comments or trackbacks (aka “pings”) below of what you’d like to see in Opera.