07-03-2008: I'm a little late on checking this now that Opera 9.5 is out, but it does seem that the bug is no longer in Opera. They should've fixed it long before 9.5 came out, but it is what it is; at least it's fixed and my employer's application can now, hopefully, support Opera.
04-07-2008: I've submitted this for a third time to Opera and tried the latest version (9.27) and of course, it's still not fixed with pic!
04-08-2008: How's this for strange: upon viewing the page for the first or 500th time, the select lists contain extra items, but clicking on the above link and then going back will result in the select lists being populated properly. Even going back to the furthest page and then going forward again cures this problem. It seems the only time it is an issue is when you go directly to the page by either clicking on a link or typing it in the address bar. I also decided to go one extra step to see what Opera would do with an array of month names. Turns out Opera has decided to sort the array making my array key order go from 01 through 12 to be 10, 11, 12, 01, 02, ..., 09. Below you will find two different methods used to display the month names: one array has keys, while the other is dynamically generated. I used jQuery to automatically perform the action when the page is loads because it's obvious jQuery isn't the problem.
Neither of these two lists have blank rows despite using the same method of list population (loops + new Option()). Opera, care to explain this?
03-01-2008: I've submitted this page describing the problem a second time to Opera and posted on two forums and still no solution.
02-18-2008: For me, the problem is there all the time. A friend of mine using Opera on XP (9.25) said he gets it initially, but the lists are populated correctly when he refreshes. I've tested this in Opera 9.25 and 9.26 on XP and Vista, experiencing this problem on both systems. For your pleasure, here's a screenshot:
I try my best to make all my sites be cross-browser compliant, so naturally I'd run tests against Opera to see how my sites perform. In regards to CSS, I've have very minor issues with Opera, but when jumping into the JavaScript aspect, well, things change. One of my projects with my employer relies heavily on AJAX functionality, where multiple select lists are populated depending on the data that you've selected. What I noticed and what I'll point out below is that Opera seems a bit confused about how many rows it should be adding, but the problem isn't just how I repopulate the rows, it's also when the initial population of the lists occur.
Here's a date script I put together so that I don't have to rely on what a user types (because you simply cannot trust user input, if you do, you're in for a world of hurt). The number of days listed in the second column changes with each month you select, including leap years. The default date is currently set to my birthday, 12-11-1982. In IE and FF, you should notice no problems in the select. Opera? You should see 31 additional blank items after 31 in the days column, and five blank items following 2008. Pressing the button will reveal that all of these "blank" rows have a value of the lists first item: 01 for days, 1978 for years. Supwitdat?!
So let's eliminate the wonderful jQuery and go with a pretend-jQuery-does-not-exist option.