Urgent help needed for Opera Extension

pristinepeak

There is a post on the said issue here on Opera's "Extension Wish List". There are many users who don't use Firefox and instead use Opera. It is not possible to go in details for difference between the approaches but it's about user choice. FF is buggy and bloated in many ways (I am not interested in a flame war) but by and large Opera 11 is a great nimble footed experience. I have been using it for the past 8-9 years much before FF was even born.

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=768842&t=1293964065&page=1#comment8249922

It's imperative to have a full fledged support for the browser which is at least having numero uno position on mobile platforms. It is possible to add support to this and the extensions by themselves are standard compliant and easy to auto update.

Request again for extending support to Opera users.

mronkko

Is there a programmer who is working on Opera compatibility and is stuck because he does not understand some part of Zotero code, or what makes this issue urgent?

I am not affiliated with Zotero, but have done some coding for Firefox and been reading these forums for a while. There are two issues with browser compatiblity: First, the project has limited resources and the development team probably wants to prioritize missing features over supporting as many browsers as possible. Second, the plugin frameworks for most browsers are not nearly as extensive as the one provided by Firefox making fully porting of Zotero practically impossible.

Also comments like this in the Opera forums regarding Zotero developers are probably not conducive to cooperation:
"Seems that the author is out of sync with reality."

If there is a developer that is willing to put work hours towards porting Zotero to other platforms, I have no doubts that the Zotero team will provide as much help as they can. At least for me stating that I needed some instruction how to code a particular feature to Zotero was met with most helpful comments here on the forums.

adamsmith

well - the way to go would probably to make an Opera plugin just like the one planned for Chrome, IE, and Safari - I can't imagine that'd be incredibly hard. That would than be used with Zotero everywhere, if I understand the concept correctly.

But you can't expect Zotero to do provide this. I'm glad you're happy with Opera, but using a niche browser does, unfortunately, have it's price, and the scarcity of add-ons and add-on developers is one of them. If anyone wants to go ahead and write this, the zotero dev list would be the place to ask for help, which I'm sure will be happily given.
http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev

Simon

If Opera has a similar API to Chrome and Safari, we will probably support it eventually. However, Chrome, Safari, and IE are all higher priorities simply because these browsers have a larger market share. Once we have Zotero working with these, we'll revisit getting it to work with Opera.