Former Dev Gives Gloomy Outlook On Linux Support For the Opera Browser 181
An anonymous reader writes: "It doesn't take a Columbo to figure out that the 'previous employer, a small browser vendor that decided to abandon its own rendering engine and browser stack' is referring to Opera in this comment answering the question 'Do you actually use the product you are working on?' It appears to originate from Andreas Tolfsen, a former Opera developer who is now part of the Mozilla project. From releasing a unified architecture browser including Linux support since 2001, Opera decided to put Linux development on indefinite hold, communicated through blog comments, and focus on Windows and Mac for their browser rewrite centered around the Blink engine that had its first beta release last spring. The promise to bring back the Linux version in due time was met with growing skepticism as the months went by, and clear answers have been avoided in the developer blog. The uncertainty has spawned user projects such as Otter browser in an attempt to recreate the Opera UI in a free application. Tolfsen's statement seem to be in line with what users have suspected all along: Opera for Linux is not something for the near future."
OPERA!? (Score:5, Funny)
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I was thinking the same about "Outlook"...
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Re:OPERA!? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:OPERA!? (Score:5, Funny)
One time at a startup we were trying to figure out what e-mail system to use. I asked my boss what the Magic 8-Ball was (although I knew because I had one as a child). I asked it, "What e-mail system should we use?"
He said, "You can only ask it yes or no questions."
I got the answer: "Outlook good."
We ended up using Outlook.
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And yet, IE remains.
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These are car dealerships, dentist's offices, etcetera. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I sure wish these nationwide companies would update their software...
Re:OPERA!? (Score:4, Funny)
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Opera is dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.
It died when they abandoned their own codebase.
Re:Opera is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
It died right at the start when it was `pay up for love the ads`...resuscitated briefly when it was the only decent browser for pre-smartphones, then got finished off when Safari and stock/Chrome was let free on smartphones/tablets.
Re:Opera is dead. (Score:4, Informative)
It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.
Chrome is just a dysfunctional Webkit, which is just a dysfunctional Khtml....
While losing Presto, which has been around since the early days [wikipedia.org], sucks it's not exactly cheap "me-tooing" the other guys. Besides, one of the reasons for the lack of popularity was the obscure rendering issues occasionally encountered with pages. "Whelp, my banking site just doesn't work, gotta switch browsers" type situations weren't exactly uncommon and arguably speak more about the markup than the engine itself but an end user might not be so understanding. Operas approach makes a lot of sense from a technical standpoint. One could dream about an opensource Presto but with the whole software patent blight I don't see that occurring any time soon.
It died when they abandoned their own codebase.
Seems more like a fork, doesn't it? Feature branch the engine, keep the UI. Granted it's still under heavy development, I'm excited about seeing it mature - I'd like to see how their development tools will be integrated (element inspection and whatnot) since the "old" Opera is known for having many useful features baked in. I'd like to see a webkit with some sweet extensible architecture so we might have Firefox level plugins, see Adblock. I realize this is available now but the effectiveness varies from Chrome to Firefox due to how webkit handles network requests, I'd like to think there is an opportunity here. If development time is ultimately saved as a result, hopefully additional features will once again be the focus instead of reinventing the wheel.
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It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.
Chrome is just a dysfunctional Webkit, which is just a dysfunctional Khtml....
Except that I find more websites work when I enable the KWebKitPart plugin in Konqueror than when I use KHTML for the renderer. So, while they may have had similar origins, WebKit seems to be getting more love.
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Except that I find more websites work when I enable the KWebKitPart plugin in Konqueror than when I use KHTML for the renderer.
Is this due to webkit specific markup or missing features KHTML side? Have an example page we can examine to see where the issue lies?
So, while they may have had similar origins, WebKit seems to be getting more love.
That's how forks work, it was split not simply for the awesomeness, but because they wanted to add features. If they were so satisfied with KHTML they wouldn't have forked it.
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Is this due to webkit specific markup or missing features KHTML side?
It's typically missing features and unresolved bugs on the KHTML side.
Have an example page we can examine to see where the issue lies?
He wasn't filing a bug report, just remarking that KHTML tends to be less useful on [admittedly, foolishly magazine-imitating] popular websites. KHTML simply can't compete on resources with Google and Apple (despite their current status, they put a lot into WebKit). Kudos to the Konqueror team for making t
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Kudos to the Konqueror team for making their rendering engine pluggable, though!
Indeed! To clarify, my point wasn't to slam KHTML, or the GP, but to objectively see where the issue lies. After all Slashdot is frequented by movers and shakers, which the NSA even targets ;) It's a good thing there are people out there who enjoy a challenge and are working to improve things. I understand how expensive software is to maintain especially with larger code bases.
Excited about seeing it Mature? (Score:2)
http://blogs.opera.com/desktop... [opera.com]
CrashNBurn71 > dakira â 3 days ago
:: at least Office still has the same functionality - even if it takes twice as long to get there.
.net or WinForms or any of Microsoft's Software Development Kits, or even __Autohotkey__ you could layout a Window with customizable/resizable sections in a day.
Or you know, instead of the past year of this nonsense, Opera DESKTOP could of used WebKit/Blink to render the page, and kept Presto to render the Opera UI. It would of been more memory intensive, but at least it would of been a usable browser.
A thread for every single open Tab is beyond ludicrous. A thread for every window *maybe*.
Opera 15+ is worse than MS Office + the Ribbon
Why anyone is bothering with Opera any longer is beyond me. A year later there's not even a hint of a customizable interface or the Side-Panel. M2 has been flat out abandoned, not a single update since it was split into its own "App".
With
Other Browsers have a handful of developers or less, and are blowing Opera out of the water. (See Maxthon or Slepnir -- the whole Fenrir Inc only has 50-200 employees.)
(*) And yeah some of us actually do Software Development beyond throwing a couple webpages onto the internet, and actually know what CAN be accomplished in a day or a month or a year.
No bookmarks in a year? Opera doesn't want to add bookmarks. Or it would of been done in a week, maybe a month. Its not f'n rocket science.
Many? long-time Opera users would likely agree that Opera was quite possibly one of the top 10 software products ever. quite possibly one of the top 10 software products ever.
(*) Chopera defenders (and the Dev's themselves) on the blog frequently spout about how software development takes time... as the excuse for why almost none of Opera's old functionality has made its way into the new Chrome "clone".
... except Chopera isn'
clone - implies something that is a copy of its "parent"
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Meanwhile, on my work phone (Android 2.3 , 1.4GHz processor and 512 MB ram) Opera Mobile is the only browser that does not crash when multiple tabs are open. WebKit is fast, but Opera wins when it comes to memory.
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I used it all the way up until about 6 months ago when the rendering problems finally got the best of me. It's unfortunate, because it has the best UI customisation bar none. I had my back gesture bound to a small history drop-down menu, so I could jump back to any point in the tab's history. And the way I could group tabs together into collapsible bundles was amazing.
It was things like that that made me start using it, like, 10 years ago. I'm sad that the new version is so non-functional by comparison. Sur
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Mouse gestures are what I'll miss the most when I finally grudgingly upgrade to the new version {unless they have managed to put them in} or something else. I've not checked for a while does any other browser have them.
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It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.
It died when they abandoned their own codebase.
This is why I never upgraded from the 12.x series. Once that stopped working on a variety of sites (namely Mega, and incomplete support for Google Docs), I moved back to Firefox (via Pale Moon -- for some reason my system doesn't like 32-bit Firefox but 64-bit is just fine).
Stripping out Bookmarks functionality and then not replacing it for three straight releases was when I knew the Opera goose was well and truly cooked.
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Their only hope is to open the codebase of desktop Opera. As it stands, mainstreamers see no reason to use it over Chrome or Firefox, and FOSS geeks are turned off by its closed source, cathedral nature. They really don't offer good reasons why they aren't doing this, other than the paranoid notion that the bigger boys will steal their precious code. Sad, really. With the amount of bitching about Firefox losing its way ("muh firebird/phoenix"), Opera could be really quite popular among geeks. I think they'r
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What people think of as desktop opera is not a product. It's a, well, frankly I don't know what the heck is it. Promotional material, maybe? The best I can tell, they get zero revenue from it. The money comes from the codebase they license to various embedded vendors, like Nintendo, for example.
I really can't fathom what's the use of desktop Opera other than browsing porn or similar image-heavy galleries. It's really nice when you've got lots and lots of images - like perhaps thousands per page. Other than
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Nope. Opera gets plenty of revenue from the desktop version. Every time you do a Google search, Opera gets money. Multiply that by tens of millions, and you get a nice amount of cash. How about reading up on Opera's finances instead of speculating?
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So where you got the idea that you had more input when paying, I have no idea. It's clearly not true.
I sent them an email or two with suggestions and bug reports and some of that stuff did actually find its way into the product. Seemed like excellent customer service to me, back then. So all I have going for myself is experience.
As for being paid for with google searches: that's adware. That's not a product. You know perfectly well how good adware generally is. Opera is just another example of how bad it is for everyone involved.
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The problem is that you think that just because you said something to them, that was the reason why it was added in the first place. Also, they've been fixing bugs based on bug reports for ages, and are still doing so.
And not a single crap was given that day. (Score:2)
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I used it on Linux until last week, when I switched to Firefox.
I've still not got enough extensions set up, but Facebook and Google Mail now work 100% of the time. Under Opera 12, I was down to about 80% of the time -- I think Facebook and Google stopped testing a few months ago.
Opera was great... till v12 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fuck. FUCK! That's when they got rid of the menu bar and/or when they moved the tabs above the address bar with no way to change it (as far as I can tell). Now I'm too lazy to upgrade because I fear another damn UI change. Firefox gets free reign to upgrade as it pleases (though their choice of embiggening version numbers to the EXTREEEEEEMME still annoys me) as it and its addons seem to upgrade without doing the UI Elements Shuffle Game.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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but the Linux distributions are far more likely to remain stable.
Not really. I used Opera years and years ago when it was faster than Mozilla browsers on Linux. Then they came out with some point version that really messed with the UI dialogs, I didn't like it and it was time to abandon ship.
Other than the UI changes I didn't like, it was a pretty decent browser... I am a crusty old curmudgeon that doesn't like UI changes just for the sake of change ( also hence why I use Seamonkey / Iceape - you know, pretty much the same UI from the 90's ).
Alright story time is over, n
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Opera 12 had a Linux version, and even (IIRC) FreeBSD.
Then Opera rewrote the browser, basing it on Webkit instead of their own engine, and the next version was only available for Linux and Mac.
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Opera 10 still supported Solaris (Sparc and Intel) and Linux on PPC.
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Funny that you say that, when the market share of Opera among browsers was more or less the same as the market share of GNU/Linux among desktop installs.
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Not sure what we should do now. (Score:2)
Oh, so we're now down to this entire list of browsers (minus Opera)? [wikipedia.org]
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What the hell is that? [wikipedia.org]
Anyway, Linux users can continue running Opera 12, I assume it's still out there somewhere. It's the last good version of Opera that still ran Presto.
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You can still download Opera 12 for Linux. And that's actually a good thing, since Presto is still the least buggy engine when it comes to SVG and, as far as my experience is concerned, MathML.
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I should see if it still works on Solaris just for fun (if it ran on IRIX that would be even better...)
Actually paid for this once... (Score:2)
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It was an option on the desktop browser, there was a small button in the status bar. It occasionally popped up a prompt asking if I wanted to enable it (e.g. if I was using crap public wifi).
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and then they offered server side "rendering"
LOL, what was the idea behind that? Did it parse the html/javascript code and send you an animated .gif as a screenbuffer or what?
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and then they offered server side "rendering"
LOL, what was the idea behind that? Did it parse the html/javascript code and send you an animated .gif as a screenbuffer or what?
There are actually two features.
The first is actual server side rendering, where they would send you some kind of compressed image. This method is used by Opera Mini for android, "feature" nokia phones and I guess even iphones.
The other feature is a server side filtering, at the moment its called on the road mode, it strips unnecessary parts of the page (html comments, unused javascript..) and compress it, then it also recode embedded images with higher compression level. This feature s available on all p
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You do realize that the server-side anything was, and is, an option that's off by default?
For Those Who Forgot about Opera (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, an epic management coup. (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, this was a glorious coup by company higher-ups.
Grats, Opera management. You managed to kick out a good founder [slashdot.org], kick out a good engine [slashdot.org], and kick out any certainty that you won't be sold out to Facebook [slashdot.org] (Facebook, ffs!). You even made me wonder, between Tolfsen's account and the second engine change (from WebKit to Blink) [slashdot.org], if Google has simply stuffed your ranks with their management just to Elop the place.
ggwp.
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Products are things that you pay for. Desktop Opera was not a product for well over a decade. I was really sad when they didn't want my money for it anymore.
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Wait, what? Are you really saying that the people in charge of the company made decisions about the company?
Shock! Horror!
Even Wium Lie, the father of CSS and long-time Opera manager, backs the switch. But I guess he's part of the conspiracy too.
Facebook? Why? They said they weren't plan
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Opera users typically were hardcore about it, and would only let go when you pried their cold dead hand away from it.
Truly, Opera is the Eudora of the web browser world.
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Truly, Opera is the Eudora of the web browser world.
I was thinking the same thing. The only difference being that if you're still using a mail client compliant with 10-year-old standards, you're doing just fine. The old-Opera users will die off much faster than the old-Eudora users.
Binspam / dupe (Score:2)
bloatware (Score:2, Insightful)
It died when it became bloatware just like the rest of the browsers.
Who remembers when it was lean mean small and fast?
I remember a time when surfing with Opera was 3x as fast as ie.
IE got better and Opera got worse and firefox stole the thunder.
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Bloatware? its still probably the smallest footprint browser with a builtin email function.
Emacs is still probably the smallest footprint operating system with a builtin editor function, but it still sucks.
No Market Impact Expected, but Short it anyway (Score:2)
Re:No Market Impact Expected, but Short it anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
There are only two rendering engines for Linux, and they are Gecko and Webkit, both of which have horrible support for a lot of advanced web standards such as SVG and MathML, because the focus today is on who makes the fanciest sliding div effect rather than on actually properly implementing existing stuff. The loss of Presto and the reduction of alternatives is a very sad day for the web.
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A web rendering engine in source code form is pretty much cross-platform by definition, so I don't see what's so Linuxy about gecko or webkit.
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No, there is plenty of mediocre browsers on GNU/Linux. Even Firefox is a mediocre browser let alone Chrome.
People that haven't use pre-15 Opera because of "oh no its not open source" have no fucking idea what a good browser really is. Completely customizable, could be controlled exlusively by the keyboard (something neither IE, nor Firefox nor Chrome are capable of doing). Had native mouse gestures that ridiculed any other half baked solutions you may find on other browsers and so forth and so on. The UI co
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> No, there is plenty of mediocre browsers on GNU/Linux.
Sound like the situation on ANY platform.
Also sounds like sour grapes from one of those diehard Opera fanboys.
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It's not about the inability to promote anything, it's about not having, you know, an actual desktop product that people pay money for. Desktop Opera should have been killed long ago. It was a waste of money for the company, I have no idea why they still offer it. It makes zero financial sense. If I was their shareholder/owner I'd have been royally pissed long ago. I would absolutely love to have a spin-off company offer paid-for version that uses the Presto engine. Ideally, that company should only work on
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
I had been an avid Opera fan since I first started using it quite a few years ago. I used it when it was the only browser that had tabbed browsing. A feature that is now part of every browser out there. The folks behind the Opera browser were innovators. They had tabs, the speed dial, Opera link (which would sync bookmarks and other items between your browsers), and gestures years before other browsers and they fully believed in being standards compliant. When I heard they were moving away from being a browser developer to being a browser repackager, I stopped using it. They went from innovating to tagging along for a ride. I recently fired up the new version of Opera to be very, very disappointed because it was simply a repacked version of Chrome. Most of the features that I had grown to love were gone and I found no reason to continue using it.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
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Dragonfly (Score:2)
I do occasional web development. Opera's dragonfly is a great compliment to Firefox Web Developer toolbar. If Opera were to go, it would be a great loss.
Another webkit is irrelevent (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the strengths (and simultaneous weakens) of Opera was that it used it's own unique rendering engine. That gave it an advantage in specialized situations where others would not quite fit.
Since they changed to using webkit, they are, in my opinion, basically irrelevant now. They might have well just become another one of those circa 2000 Microsoft Internet Explorer shells.
Say what you will about Presto not working on site x, y, or z, more diversity is good, and it helps keep real standard in check. There were once too many sites that were only viewable in IE, I do not look forward to a future internet that is only viewable in Google Chome.
Is there any hope at all that they might open source the Presto Rendering engine?
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Hell no, why would anyone want it open sourced? Then it'd be impossible to make any money on it, seriously, unless there was a big benevolent backer like Google is to Firefox. I would gladly pay USD45 for a home license for Opera as long as it would be maintained and I'd feel like the users have input into the development. By home license I mean a license for all members of the household, on all their supported desktop platforms.
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While as a developer, I appreciated the diversity in rendering engines Opera brought to the table, as a user, I don't think I would care. If Opera was better than Chrome with Presto, it could be better with Blink--with the added benefit of lots of obscure sites actually working.
How many Opera users actually celebrated that Opera worked on less websites than Chrome as a good thing?
Now, if Presto was faster (which it could be, at times), then that's another argument. But diversity wasn't what made them fans
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If Opera was better than Chrome with Presto, it could be better with Blink
Just this. It seems unlikely that Opera could not, in theory, implement all of the things its users loved on top of Chrome.
But when we see them dumping their rendering engine developers instead of setting them out to do this, we know that they have cash-flow issues, and apparently they're going to follow the death-march pattern that so many managers seem to choose when faced with such problems.
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They didn't. Hardly any engine developers were let go. Of the 90 people who left or were fired in total (out of about a thousand employees), less than half were engineers. Engineers include testers and developers, so in reality maybe 20 or so developers out of several hundred actually left.
In fact, I read a while ago that Opera was one of the main contributors to Blink. How were they going to do that if they
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In a few odd cases, it was a failure of Opera's JS engine and masking as FF/IE would not actually resolve the problem.
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I really liked the browser, but man, their Mail seems to have royally sucked when I was using it for a couple of years between 2001 and 2005.
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Since most people don't care about the engine, this is clearly not true. If more sites work they are more likely to get more users, and that makes them more relevant than before.
Yeah, but who is going to pay for it? They spent insane amounts of money trying to catch up with other engines.
Headline correction (Score:2)
Former Dev Gives Gloomy Outlook On Linux Support From the Opera Browser
FTFY. Linux will always be there for Opera to run on, if it wishes to.
Tell the devs to relax (Score:2)
I don't think anyone is wanting that anymore.
Opensourcing their codebase (Score:1)
I used Opera only because of its engine. Now there is nothing, not even my precious Linux support. So, stick with 12.16, or stick with something both FOSS and modern.
In the words of Dan Harmon (Score:2)
As a long time Opera on Linux user, the "pivot" the company has taken towards Webkit and a dysfunctional UI is like "being held down and watching your family get raped on a beach"
I use Opera...wait stop laughing! (Score:3)
So I actually have been actively using Opera for a while now. As well as it having a place in my history as my primary browser back in the day. And by now you might have then inferred that while I use Opera it is not my primary browser. Let me explain.
Since, at least as far as I'm aware, you still can't give a command line options to any Windows browser to tell it where/what size to open it has been convenient for me to use Firefox on my main monitor for my primary browser and then a 2nd browser that opens up on my 2nd monitor. Further it is nice having my 2nd monitor browser be different since then I can keep 2 effective sets of bookmarks. Since my 2nd monitor browser is in effect more a media device than my primary browser.
And for that Opera has worked great. In fact it still is working right now on my 2nd monitor where a YouTube video is playing right now. The UI was decent, it did not eat up a ton of resources, and overall did exactly what I wanted it to do and did it pretty well.
Well just a week ago I wanted to do a reinstall and so I packed up all my programs config/data files and did the deed. Opera's data files sit in:
C:\Users\$UserName\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera x64
Notice that last bit...my archive said just Opera not Opera x64 which I thought was a little odd since Opera kept auto updating for me so I thought I was running exactly the same thing that I had been not 45m prior. But whatever, I could see why that could happen between version installs but not updates. I was wrong.
I had been running Opera 12.x. I did not really keep track of it since all the dev's lost their heads and went for version number bloat and all that. So when I hit Opera's download site I just grabbed the latest version, installed, turned it on once, killed it, replaced the default config files with mine, and turned it back on and...
It was like installing Win8. Total UI change for the worse. (This was now Opera 19 btw.) No way to even put up a button for bookmarks. Everything had to go though a "quickdial" type page. Options were dumbed down. Just bad bad bad. It took me to realize that I was running what amounted to a whole new Opera and not the old one that had served me well.
Here: http://www.opera.com/download/... [opera.com]
You can see where the change was. The old Opera, which they appear to still be doing some updates to, stops at 12.x and then the reboot starts at 15 and is up to 19, lol, now. That version is something that again I liken to a Win8 version of Opera. I did not use it long enough, the new version of Opera, to give it any sort of proper review. All I know is that it was bad for me, reeked of some sort of desire to force tablet UI on desktop computers, and dumbed down everything as if I was using some Apple OS/app.
I am not opposed to change but where Opera is going now will not have me as a follower.
Outlook? (Score:2)
Does Opera still matter? (Score:2)
I cannot think of a single reason to use Opera browser over Chrome or Firefox. Their email client is a minimalistic joy to use though.
No loss (Score:2)
Firefox is the only full-function browser that is:
1) Native multiplatform for all the major desktop platforms (Linux, MS-Win, MacOS).
2) Fully Open Source.
3) Managed by the community.
And on top of that, it has fantastic extension/addon support, performs very well, is very standards based, is actively supported and enhanced, has great site support, and is available for mobile too. So I am shedding no tears over the loss of Opera.... and I did use it many years ago.
To me, a distant second is Chromium, but it
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Unfortunately, Firefox has a problem. Single-thread. Those UI freezes keep getting worse and as web pages become more complex. And this problem has been acknowledged by Firefox devs on Mozillazine multiple times. Solving this is no easy task and will require a complete rewrite of the XUL rendering engine, potentially breaking everything. The days of Firefox as it currently is are numbered.
Here is Bill McCloskey's blog post [wordpress.com] about the efforts from Mozilla to rescue the situation.
What comes after Opera? (Score:3)
I've been a loyal Opera user since version 3. It was awesome using tabbed browsing on dialup. I'd click to open windows in the background and finish reading the page I was on, and then close it and go on to the already-loaded page. I remember all the brouhaha about IE's slow page loading, and wonder what all the fuss was about. But, now that Opera is over (don't even talk to me about the "new Opera", a dysfunctional skin of Chrome), I'm wondering what to do next. The last version of Opera will last another 6-12 months, I think, before it stops working with new websites. What browser is for me?
Chrome? Nope. I don't like it, plus Google's gone evil.
IE? Nope.
Firefox? Well, I'd really prefer a different answer. I hate adding plugin after plugin, only to have them all go incompatible when FF does an upgrade. Opera just worked and had every feature I wanted. Plus, FF is just sluggish on my system, a laptop from 2012.
What else is out there that a diehard Opera user will love?
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Interestingly enough, it's quite usable and doesn't seem to be any slower than whatever passes for native Opera under Linux.
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Except you can't write a full feature browser using ModernUI - it's not allowed. Opera used to support a lot of platforms (Solaris comes to mind) that they dropped. Has nothing to do with free platforms.
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While they're at it, they should come up with a new name b/c Americans don't like going to the opera and haven't for the last 60 years or so - they think going to the opera is for losers.
I never realized that Americans perceive it like that. :)
Here in Europe, "opera" is an excellent brand name and it gives mental images of sophistication, grandiosity and high quality.
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As a Canadian, I'll admit the name puts me off.
The whole product has a kind of uncool aura around it. When I hear the name I picture the type of browser my non-technical grandmother would use to look at pics of her grandchildren.
It shouldn't matter, but it does. I kinda liken it to AOL.
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Opera 12.16 == same here ! but soon it will be .. (Score:2)
replaced.
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The interesting thing is: I have seriously not noticed the rendering engine switch!
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