Wasn't trying to imply that you said it was hard to hit :/
Oh come on, CTRL+SHIFT N is not hard, hell, I use my left hand fr CTRL+SHIFT so its just as easy to hit N as it would be P.
^ Not sure how you expect me to interpret that any other way, honestly.
I just meant that I liked it more than the "standard" shortcut for the reasons I mentioned... I could care less about consistency in browsers for what shortcut they make something, if I plan on sticking with 1 browser for a long time...
The thing is, with the number of good browsers out there now, it's hard to justify
not keeping things consistent. Even if you don't count end-users, picture what web designers have to go through. On top of rendering engines that give
slightly different results they have to deal with a multitude of different interfaces. And again, IE and Firefox managed to come to a silent consensus on most of their common commands. Considering they're the two top browsers by far, you'd think Apple, Google, and Opera would be paying more attention.
To add to that, why do you think most of the common shortcuts are identical between Windows, Mac OS, and various X11 environments? Consisistency, even between platforms, is crucial for adoption. Why is it easier for me to jump between using keyboard commands on Windows and Mac OS X than it is to jump between IE and Chrome?
I still find that every time I end up using IE 9 it feels sluggish to me, and FF just doesn't feel right to me any more. Chrome's really minimal interface, and still fast speeds.
On every system I've used lately (and we're talking about four different boxes with a wide range of specs), IE9 has been the fastest on systems that it runs on, followed by Opera, followed by Chrome, followed by IE8 (on my laptop, which has XP), followed by Firefox. IE shares a lot of "problems" with Windows, as in most of its problems are caused solely by a third-party. The only systems that I'd say ran IE9 poorly are ones that had a bunch of add-ons or were riddled with toolbars. Adobe Reader is a great example of a bad "legit" plugin. Bad coding ruins everything.
Edit: As I suspected, I was able to customize Opera's keyboard shortcuts to make it work in a way that I'm used to. Its flexibility proved to be quite a boon, too, since I was able to use Chrome's private browsing shortcut to open a new private tab and IE/Firefox's shortcut to open a new private window. Not too shabby.
As for the tabs not stretching to the top of the screen, I'll just have to live with that. To illustrate what I'm talking about, here's a snip:
As you can see, the tabs do not extend to the top of the screen. In fact, double-clicking the space on top will restore/maximize the window, just as double-clicking on the taskbar would. Right-clicking brings up the context menu for Opera's main window, not the one for the tabs.
Like I said, this probably wouldn't be a big deal with a more precise pointing device, like a mouse or trackball, but on a trackpad it's very irritating. Thankfully, Opera's flexibility makes that easier to deal with by allowing me to customize the tab switch shortcut keys back to the familiar CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN, so I'm satisfied.
So yeah, Opera is definitely remaining my browser of choice on my laptop. It's fast, flexible, and exceedingly compliant, so I'll keep it.