I've got one of those cute scrolling areas that's made by putting a wide div inside of a regular-sized div and adding a couple lines of javascript. (Exact code isn't relevant to the question; in my case it holds a series of thumbnails with popup full-size pictures.) Yesterday I got an awful scare when it looked as if the arrangement didn't work in Opera: no matter what I said or constrained or exclamation-marked, it flatly refused to keep the inner div on a single line. And, of course, if the overflow drops down to a second line, the user can't see it at all because the whole point is that you don't auto-generate a scrollbar.
Turns out the culprit is a preference setting, "Fit to width" under Zoom Pages. I never use Opera except for code-testing, so I have to assume this setting is on by default. (It explains some weird behavior in other situations, and I can see where it would be useful on some sites, notably the ones that are always hot-linking to my images.) Looks like it takes any horizontal dimension that's wider than the current window and simply ignores it. There's no way you could expect the browser to figure out that this particular value is supposed to be greater than the available width.
So how do other people deal with this? Is there a way to look up the preference setting? Either to override it for this site alone (following the spirit rather than the letter of the pref, so I'm really not going against the user's wishes) or to throw out a one-time message telling users how to make the scroll area behave as intended.
I don't speak php so the answer, if any, would have to come from javascript. If the preference setting can't be read directly, I might be able to figure out something analogous to the routine that checks if you've got a particular font installed, like seeing if a 4000-px div comes out wider than a 3000-px div. But that's definitely in Option C territory.
