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Opera Linux

Opera Releases a New Version For Linux 99

motang (1266566) writes "Opera released Opera 24 for Linux. Currently it is in testing (developer) mode, and only for 64-bit Ubuntu, but hey it's a start since everyone thought Linux support was abandoned. In my test it is pretty rough around the edges, only has ambiance theme as it has been hard coded, and all the window controls are on the right and not on the left like what Unity has. But it is a start."
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Opera Releases a New Version For Linux

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  • Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mirix ( 1649853 ) on Monday June 23, 2014 @11:10PM (#47303357)

    Instead of having firefox which wants to be chrome, or running chrome directly... I can now run a wrapper around chrome!

    • by Fjandr ( 66656 )

      It's a lot more than a wrapper.

      • by SpzToid ( 869795 )

        That's just like before I wrapped the fish and chips with it, I read the Daily Mirror first. Its a lot more than a wrapper; its a dog trainer too!

    • Mod parent up. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, 2014 @11:53PM (#47303521)

      Instead of having firefox which wants to be chrome, or running chrome directly... I can now run a wrapper around chrome!

      I'm still running Opera 12 for Mac OS for precisely this reason. I had no clue about this retarded Opera gambit until I auto-upgraded to Opera 15 one day and suddenly found that all the Opera features I knew and loved were missing with no plans to port them.

      What's with the state of the browser market? It seems to go through great cycles... there was a early burst of diversity in the mid 90's, but that zenith was supplanted by the nadir of the IE monoculture (we are still feeling the effects of IE 6). Early versions of Firefox represented a bloom of reinvigorated innovation (such a variety of add-ons!) but firefox was eventually slowed by bloat and the demons of its single-process paradigm. Chrome then seized the mantle of stability via its multi-process approach.

      Now, "do-no-evil" Google has established another monoculture. I almost ragequit using Chrome last Friday when I learned it is now impossible to install any Chrome extensions on Windows Chrome without using a Google account. WTF?

      These are bad times for browser users. I await the beginning of the next great cycle. I hope to be inspired by the next innovator. "Disruptive" is a cliched term, but god damn it, this monoculture needs to die.

      • by SpzToid ( 869795 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:38AM (#47303725)

        On Linux, it also seems to be impossible to install chrome extensions without a Google account. At least open-source firefox doesn't require registration just to make use of its open-source extension code. Mozilla also works to protect users against extensions that aren't kept up-to-date..

        • by qupada ( 1174895 )

          Even more fun is installing native code plugins, which requires the root password. I went hunting in Chromium's code recently, trying to work out what locations it would load Google's Talk/Hangouts plugin from, in an attempt to trim the list of locations the plugin's files have to be symlinked to when installing it.

          Whereas the "old" NPAPI plugins have a bunch of allowed locations, but usually /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins is common to most browsers suporting them and Firefox even appears to allow them to be i

        • On Linux, it also seems to be impossible to install chrome extensions without a Google account. At least open-source firefox doesn't require registration just to make use of its open-source extension code.

          In that case we're talking about free and non-free software (as speech), not open/closed source.

        • by hawkinspeter ( 831501 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @06:54AM (#47304783)
          I just tested out chromium (the non-google version of chrome) and that allows you to add chrome extensions without a Google account.
          • by SpzToid ( 869795 )

            This is very good news, thank you!
            [sarcasm]Hopefully Google will start to promote open-source Chromium more heavily, as opposed to registered-account-required Chrome. [/sarcasm]

      • Me too, i can't find a way to use sessions in the new opera so i'm stuck at 12.16 until they implement it. i'm surprised no other browser has stolen "sessions", they stole pretty much everything else from opera
      • The new Opera is even worse in this regard. They have made it impossible to get rid of google search or to set your own search engine as default. They force google search upon you. Even Chrome doesn't do that.
      • Still on 12 here, too. I'm still a bit miffed that they took the choice away from having tabs below the address bar or having bookmarks or buttons to the right of the main menu or having a dedicated stop loading button from 9 or 10. The only thing keeping me from going Firefox full time is mouse gestures.

      • How is it a monoculture? Can you give examples of sites that only work in Chrome or say "this site works best in Chrome" a la IE6? I think it's unlikely website owners would annoy all the iDevice users who don't have access to Chrome.

        I didn't know you needed a Google account to install extensions so I just logged out and installed a random extension. It didn't ask me to log in again so I don't know if it was happy that I just exist in the Google world or whether they've taken that requirement out again i

      • Browsers are really, really, really hard to make, and Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all give theirs away for free, insuring anyone who tries to compete also has to do the same. Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.

        And if you think these are bad times for browsers then you have no idea my friend. Not too long ago it was IE or nothing. And what Monoculture? We've got 3 major players all meeting the standards pretty well (4 if you count webkit/safari, which with iOS installs is nothing t
        • by Anonymous Coward

          (Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Opera employee; pretty much all of what's below has been said by others before or can easily be inferred from it.)

          Opera ceased selling a web browser to consumer years ago. Opera, having been ad-free for around nine years, with the exception of a couple of quarters in the black in 2009/2010, has been pretty profitable; this is well before any work started on anything based on WebKit or Chromium. Since 2010, Opera has basically been posting record profits quarter after quarter. You can

        • by hkmwbz ( 531650 )

          Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.

          Opera has been profitable for a long time. They've had tons of cash in the bank most of the time as well.

      • You should see what they've done to the mobile version of Opera. I'm still bitter about the whole thing.
      • I wish I could still use Opera 12.x - I've run into far too many JavaScript problems. Go to any sitepoint article that has "disqus" comments, each Opera (sitepoint) tab will consume 12-20% of the CPU; other sites are worse than that.

        Opera would of been much better off either replacing their JS engine, or Hooking up with FF to bring out a browser that is stable with lots of tabs, and still has a usable (non-lagged UI). FF is getting their with the multi-process Nightly.

        I think if Mozilla would stop pu
    • by xfizik ( 3491039 )
      In what way does Firefox want to be Chrome?
      • by mirix ( 1649853 )

        Have you even seen the last few releases?! I've used firefox since the beginning, and the last while has been a steady decline into a chrome clone.

        I'd change browsers if there was something to change to... Everyone seems to want UX designer wetdream minimalism, fuck functionality.

        • by dragonquest ( 1003473 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:52AM (#47303807)
          Have you tried Seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org]? It feels a lot like Firefox classic.
        • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

          I'd change browsers if there was something to change to

          There's Seamonkey, and there's Pale Moon. Make the effort to switch. Vote with your feet; it's the only possible way to force Firefox to actually start listening to users.

        • by xfizik ( 3491039 )
          Not only have I seen the last few releases, I have been using Firefox since version 2 and my primary browser on Linux and Windows. And I am generally happy with it. If you don't like the UI/UX, you have multiple options starting from countless addons that can customize just about every pixel of Firefox. And as others mentioned, there are other builds of Firefox for people just like yourself who are not happy with the default UI.
    • by hkmwbz ( 531650 )
      Not Chrome. Chromium. Which Opera is a major contributor to.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Just yesterday I decided to abandom Opera after about 15 years of exclusively using it (trying out Firefox for now). Been using opera 12 up until now, but can't stay on an unmaintained platform forever. And Opera's google-based versions after that smell badly. They've completely lost their reason to exist when they just clone the other browsers and remove all the features that made them the most user-friendly browser out there.
    So long Opera, and thanks for all the fish.

    • I did this a few months ago. Went to firefox with TreeStyleTabs, which is not a bad combination. I miss Opera Link (Firefox has similar but it's not as good), but otherwise most things have worked ok.

      The 1 really annoying thing that there doesn't seem to be a plugin for, is that if a website in the background does a javascript.alert(), firefox will change to that tab. In (old) Opera, it would just make it flash on the tab bar, but leave it in the background. And there's a site I have open in the backgro

  • Opera (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @01:52AM (#47303987) Homepage

    "like what Unity has"

    And... I stopped reading.

    Honestly, as a life-long Opera user and supporter, Opera is dead on all platforms. They refuse to make it work like it used to (or are incapable of that), and there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff.

    They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have. The coding team has changed. The company has changed. There is no interest in preserving users any more. Bug reports get answered with "We haven't got around to that yet" or "We never intend to put that functionality back in.

    I was there in the pay-for days. I was there in the ad-supported days. I was there right up until last year, when the company that I defended against others changed and the software I used everyday became unusable. They removed every major feature that did something useful, so it's now a very, very poor Chrome clone.

    Opera supporters will tell you to stay on the old codebase. We hoped the company would see sense and start re-using that codebase after they realised their catastrophic mistake. It never happened. The only patches they ever put out to the "real" Opera codebase broke it along the way, presumably because they just don't understand the code at all.

    Save yourself the effort - find another browser. There's even a "Let's rebuild Opera as it was" open-source effort doing what Opera SHOULD have done if they wanted a Chrome renderer in there. But, sorry, despite my best attempts to resuscitate it and even exhume it, it's dead.

    • There's even a "Let's rebuild Opera as it was" open-source effort doing what Opera SHOULD have done if they wanted a Chrome renderer in there.

      Link, please?

    • It also bears mentioning that Opera inexplicably deleted everything on their forums during the November 2013 makeover, removing lots of useful information in the process. I supposed they thought all the spam on the new forum would adequately fill the void.

      A literal scorched policy with regards to everything they had done before.

      • by hkmwbz ( 531650 )
        They did not delete everything. They migrated lots of threads and posts from the old forum to the new one. Check the facts before making silly claims like that.
    • Re:Opera (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheP4st ( 1164315 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @04:12AM (#47304365)

      There's even a "Let's rebuild Opera as it was" open-source effort

      http://otter-browser.org/ [otter-browser.org]

    • by richlv ( 778496 )

      i'm considering a move to firefox, but it just does not work as nicely as opera with lots of tabs and needs 10 extensions for features opera had/has out of the box, like mouse gestures... it will be a complicated move for me.

    • Are you me? Because I could have written exactly the same thing. I was also there from 4.x, it's one of the few bits of software I ever paid for as a penniless uni student. So disappointing to be abandoned like that.
    • by hkmwbz ( 531650 )

      there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff

      What stuff was broken with updates after 15?

      They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have.

      If they hadn't changed, they would have lagged more and more behind. At least now they get the latest web tech.

      The coding team has changed. The company has changed.

      The coding team hasn't changed more than a team normally changes in a couple of years according

      • by ledow ( 319597 )

        - Cookies aren't remembered properly.
        - The font cache corrupts and requires restart of the browser at regular interval (unless you like Chinese Unicode squiggles taking the place of your normal page text).

        The original coding team were ditched, the replacements were all new - the forums/blogs describing this were purged but you can still find them if you try really hard.

        People who start on new versions? If there are less of those than your ENTIRE existing customer base, you're losing out. See replies to th

        • by hkmwbz ( 531650 )

          - Cookies aren't remembered properly.
          - The font cache corrupts and requires restart of the browser at regular interval (unless you like Chinese Unicode squiggles taking the place of your normal page text).

          Works fine here, and I haven't seen anyone else with these problems.

          The original coding team were ditched, the replacements were all new - the forums/blogs describing this were purged but you can still find them if you try really hard.

          No, the original coding team is still there. There were several hundr

    • There are old Opera users who agree with your opinion. From what I can see, most don't. Then there's the vast majority of the potential market who don't.

      You won't agree with this but with the limited resources from Opera Software and the web again diverging from WWW standards, there was no real alternative.

      What all the moaning is about is the slow pace of development. Time lacking features (O15+) goes slower than time where those features were introduced (O10-O12).

      What I greatly regret is the end of work

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Like every cool app there, themes are at the top of the list. Fuck the rest of the functionality. Fuck that I want to use the app for its core function. Themes is what I _need_ man... Without themes, I'll give your app a rating of one, and moan about it.

    Fuck the themes. Make the app do what I need, and let me run a bare metal version of it if I want. I don't want any fucking bells and whistles!

  • awesome! but does it have bookmarks? I.E. a bookmark menu. not a bookmark bar.

  • It's a pity that I completely uninstalled Opera some months ago, after waiting several months with vague promises and excuses about a coming release. It was mostly a secondary browser for me, so I didn't lose much sleep purging it. It also has lost a lot of the features that enticed me in the first place.

    Now that it's finally here, I'm not sure I can muster up the effort to install it. Maybe I'll wait a year... or maybe longer.

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