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I’ve been getting some info about this on Opera’s IRC channel, so I came to know a bit more about this problem, how it’s about IPv6. I’ve been told to disable IPv6 on my Snow Leopard and router: even though I have always had disabled IPv6 on my Leopard (I forgot to re-enable it a while ago), my routers have no control over IPv6. I am a bit lost now. But I’ll explain what’s the problem:

EDIT: you can find another solution for the problem here

Sources:

1. http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/52921-opera-free-snow-leopard-connexion.htm
2. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=289103
3. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=288711

The stupid solution: virtualize it.

Are you desperate just like me? Virtualize it!

Nah, this is not a serious solution. But if you want to do this, prepare your copy of Windows XP and download VMWare Fusion, then use the Unity option to make Opera for Windows show. It’s still funny enough: it’s working, even through I am under Snow Leopard.

Fake Opera vs Real Opera!

This is a nice thing to know. Keep this in mind.

What’s up with Opera?

On the update to Snow Leopard (from now SL) there’s a flaw between Opera’s DNS resolving service and SL’s. Opera uses SL’s DNS service, and for some reason, there’s some problem with this. What happens is that Opera starts trying to resolve an IPv6 address, and IPv6 just doesn’t work. This means there’s a bug in SL that makes impossible for Opera to understand the connection method, and it takes like half a minute or more to realize IPv6 is having issues, and then the fallback to IPv4 happens, and more time passes, then the page will load. It’s going to take one minute. Now, let’s go on our Web 2.0 with one minute long page refreshes. Rather not.

You can find in the first source I gave a page in french (that seems I can somehow understand thanks to ages of studies of Roman Latin) a short explanation, basically what I said in English now.

There are two threads now about this issue, the second and third source I listed on the top. The first has a series of  people having the same problem: it’s everybody using Snow Leopard AND Opera obviously. And nobody can go around it by simply disabling IPv6.

Maybe we’re getting somewhere!

What does it mean, IPv6 is disabled and Opera still is stuck at looking for IPv6? Most likely, the problem is really basical: Opera tries to resolve IPv6 anyway, completely missing the fact that IPv6 is disabled. Most likely, it’s not even hooking to IPv6 module correctly. But there has been a way to overcome this: the virtual machine with XP!

The virtual machine gives a normally working hook for the Opera connection, and the virtual machine connects through the internet through Snow leopard with its own working hooks. In other words, we’re emulating a working IPv6 for Opera.

Solution?

OpenDNS. From the third source link I gave.

It actually works flawlessly. Here’s the guide to set it up, it’s just simple copy and paste, no need to do the registration in “Part2″ and “Part 3″ is not needed either: https://www.opendns.com/start/device/apple-osx-leopard/ (there’s a misleading image here, you have to add the DNS settings to the network card you’re using, not to a disabled one).

With this, you cut out the problem of resolving IPv6 problems. But of course this shouldn’t be a permanent solution, and I hope Opera releases a bug-fix version to make this little community of 3% users worldwide happier. Just don’t forget to disable OpenDNS when Opera works again.

Last note: 5% of computers are Mac, 3% people in the world use Opera, and maybe 3% of people upgraded to Snow Leopard now. I feel like we’re actually just 5 people out here with this problem.