Wait—Opera 15+ does not have proxy settings? Are you serious?
Oh, I see. It has the (rather limited) Windows proxy settings and lacks Opera's quick on/off switch. This is kind of like… well, like bookmarks really. Such a basic feature you never even give it any thought.
The way I read it: With Blink it won't work so use Stash as a workaround.
There's another aspect: Chromium doesn't have e.g. the window panel, vertical tabs, tabs on multiple lines, or Ctrl+Tab, so you can never really get an overview of what's going on if you open a little more than Gmail, Google+, and YouTube.
I personally suggest precisely this: They are deliberately deceiving and lying. And I effectively said so in my own post in the thread. No reason to put it in stronger words, I was blunt enough.
Nevertheless, I would think that more than lying it might just as well be mostly an unconscious form of coping. After all, you can't work very well on a product you don't like.
NB I do disagree with e.g. Blazej on many points.
I'll make a quick dissection of that vision post for future reference
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When we released our first browser in 1996, most web users were people who weren’t afraid to tinker, and who liked lots of options and configurability. Fast-forward 17 years, and the Web is everywhere. Speedy browsing and sites working properly is the most important thing to many, many people.
Yet Opera was always more for tinkerers, wasn't it?
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That leaves us with the riddle that every software developer faces at some point: how best to make a UI simple enough to be intuitive for a consumer who wants a solid, fast browser that just works, and yet is customizable and extensible so that power users can add the features they want?
It's not a riddle. I'd say the answer is staring us in the face in the form of roughly Opera 9-12. I've got a heavily customized menu.ini. Most people do not. The riddle I face is how do you convince devs not to remove features they've decided to hide by default because they're apparently too complicated.
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So, starting from this fresh base, we decided to carefully consider how to build up Opera again: over the years, Presto-based Opera had become overloaded with features, a number of them confusing rather than helping our users — you can’t imagine how many reports we’ve gotten from users telling us that their favorite site was broken, simply because they had turned on fit-to-width by accident, for instance.
Yet it would've taken literally about a minute to implement a little popup info (overlay?) bar or something, but instead opt to remove it? You can't imagine how many times I've used it to fix a broken fixed-width site, for instance.
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The answer is to build a strong, extensible foundation on which to innovate. Opera 15 is a fresh start, to which we will continue to add features.
I'd say that describes Opera and Firefox fairly well. With Chromium I have my doubts, and Chropera hasn't proved that it's significantly different from Chromium yet. These are probably weasel words to some extent because combined with the previous paragraph it suggests it's talking about extensibility for users, but the tiniest look at Opera 18/19 shows that it must rather be talking about the developers who have the source.
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The same was true for M2: adding it to Opera 15 would require rebuilding it from scratch, more to download for users and more UI for those who don’t use the feature. For that reason, we spun it out into a separate download.
Going from 30MB to 40MB is unthinkable, but going from 10MB to 30MB…
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At the same time, we also wanted to give Opera a more native look and feel. And hence, taking also into account that native toolkits have evolved over the last 10 years (especially on Mac), we decided to build the whole UI with native code: we stripped away Chromium’s UI layer, and built it piece by piece from scratch — a big undertaking, and what you see today is just the beginning.
Chropera is the least native looking browser I've ever seen besides Chromium and your average Apple POS. Also it doesn't work at all with e.g. the high contrast color scheme, which is just about the first check for nativeness I perform.
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We introduced the Speed Dial concept in 2007. When we extended it allow unlimited Speed Dial entries, we became aware that the conceptual difference between traditional bookmarks and Speed Dial was shrinking. Indeed, rather than browsing through a tree structure in a menu or panel, hunting for the right bookmark, users were relying on the address bar’s auto-complete, Speed Dial entries, or built-in search to get to their site of choice. That gave us the idea to move bookmarks right into the browser window where all the browsing happens. The addition of one level-deep folders with visual thumbnails and super-fast search allows you to find any favorite site in an instant.
Massive quantities of thumbnails and folders limited to one level only, so you use a shitload of extra memory to display about a dozen bookmarks at once instead of about 30-40. What could possibly go wrong?
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We found that modern browsers are hard to do research in. You open tab after tab (comparing different shopping items for instance), and after a while you can’t keep track of what’s where. Sessions and tab stacking attempted to help, but also confused a lot of users, adding extra UI complexity. So we came up with Stash, which is a vertical overview of items you’ve added with super-fast full-text search, so you can compare and filter. This limits the amount of tabs you need to have open, reducing the number of running processes.
Translation: Chromium sucks and can't cope with more than a couple dozen pages open at once. Oh, and we forgot to mention, Chromium's page/window/tab management sucks too.
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Now the Web is everywhere, it’s very common to be lounging on a sofa, or waiting at a bus stop, entertaining yourself with a notebook, tablet or phone. But with a world of content out there, where to start? Discover is a feature that brings pre-selected content, in a range of languages and subjects, straight to your brain.
Are they making money off the redirects? (Which wouldn't be a bad thing, but not mentioning it is a bit iffy.)
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Not everyone is on a fast connection all the time. Opera 10 introduced Opera Turbo to render pages faster on slow connections, which was subsequently improved by compressing images into WebP format in Opera 11.10. Off-road mode in Opera 15 adds SPDY to the mix so that your pages render even faster.
Nope.
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It’s no coincidence that Opera 15 was released on the same day as our rapid release cycle began. You’ll soon see what’s on the table for future versions. At the moment, we’re looking at themes, syncing between devices and improving tab handling.
None of which are functional yet, half a year later. That is, I don't think BS-Harou's extension written in his spare time counts as Opera improving tab handling.
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If you’re a power-user (and if you’re reading this, you almost certainly are) and you find that Opera 15 doesn’t have a feature you depend upon, first check the growing list of extensions. You may find our basic bookmarks manager extension fits the bill — or you may find the cottonTracks extension is an innovative way to solve a problem. If you miss Notes, try the Evernote extension.
No. If I must use extensions, Firefox extensions are generally of higher quality.
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Edit 10 July: we've announced that we're prioritising building bookmarks functionality after hearing your feedback.
Still waiting. QAB is still indistinguishable from the Chromium bookmarks bar, and as I keep repeating, even IE3 had better bookmarks than Chromium.
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We’re looking at your comments and feedback (as we have for 17 years!). Please send us bug reports if you find mistakes. Inside the company, we all have our own personal wish-lists (Bruce keeps harping on about ctrl+enter and Turkish Discover; Andreas harasses us about Extension APIs and bookmarks).
No, you told me to report bugs to the Chromium bug tracker because Blink is not Opera's purview.
I also misunderstood the meaning of crossed out items and therefore had to delete one of my above comments
It made perfect sense to me under the assumption that you meant some of his crossed out items were a bit overreaching, or that you considered many of them insufficient. For instance, is tab stashing truly equivalent to having many dozens of pages open? It is for some uses, possibly for most uses, but certainly not for all uses. Back in high school I wrote a paper about fractals. I had over a hundred pages with background information and nicely rendered fractals open.* Stashing them would've just forced me to perform more actions with the same result.
Even right now I have 50 pages open for some light browsing. Chromium would be unbearably slow, as well as using up all of my RAM. Could I stash a bunch? Sure! But it'd still be more work on my part…
What I don't understand is why speed dial isn't crossed out. Admittedly I hardly care for the thing, but it was just about the only feature Opera 15 launched with.
* Incidentally, this was on a computer with something like 512MB RAM.
I'll switch font sizing to rem, but as a quick fix I switched it to "smaller". rem works in Fx 3.6+, IE9+, Opera 11.60+, and allegedly also in Chromium, so I figure that should be alright.
Why rem hasn't been in CSS since about the beginning is another one of those great mysteries.
Alright, if you refresh you'll find that I changed the default size to pixels, for I think it's better to be honest about it if we don't quite respect the user's settings than to back-handedly set the text at 80% of the user's preferred font size.
The bookmarklet in the post above this one is now also functional.
If I'm gonna adjust the font size, that would affect all other pages.
That's kind of the point.
I recognize that many sites are broken and for some bizarre reason think they should display text in roughly 78%-80% of a user's chosen font size (Wikipedia goes for 0.8 ). Despite this blatant disrespect for the user, if it's widespread enough I suppose you might argue it becomes "broken" to do the right thing. However, many sites do the right thing, so I don't think that argument quite holds its ground.
At the same time, I like a slightly larger font size. You say it's hard to read sitting close to the screen; I say a smaller font size is harder to read leaning back. But of it depends on the monitor in question.
JoshL actually requested I stick a quick font size adjuster in the top right or something. That'd be easy. I could attach some localStorage to something like this:
I am a strong proponent of user choice, and I practice what I preach. I changed the stylesheet so that it better takes the user's font preferences into account. If you think it's too large or too small you can adjust it in Preferences > Web pages > Normal font (assuming Opera/Presto).
The default style actually did a similar thing of sorts, but it redeclared fonts too many times for no good reason, which would make user stylesheets harder to write. Also, it went with merely 78% of the user's choice. On most browsers with default settings that'd be 78% * 16px = 12px, but I strongly believe that setting the font size to 78% of the user's preferred font size is Wrong™. Incidentally, the 78% thing is also the reason fonts are often inexplicably smaller in Firefox on other platforms (Mac, Linux) because of rounding differences. Don't believe those who would tell you that it's a safe value to use.
I realize that if you set your font-size to 12px, that might have unwelcome consequences on sites that use this 78% trick. To avoid that there's the minimum font size setting in Preferences > Advanced > Fonts, although I recommend copious ignoring of idiot designer's styles, whether with Opera or a textual browser like Links 2.
A sign of a well-written stylesheet is also that one tiny CSS rule will do to override all font sizes on the page:
Note that although I opened with a clip from Sesame Street, I didn't mean your favorite American television series. For instance, I also liked Calimero (Italian; link to the Dutch dub I would've watched).
It was present in an earlier version of CSS3, but it was dropped. I'm sure they had good reasons. Then again, I never understood why they chose the box model they did.
In any case, I think this sounds more like a job for Javascript than for CSS. Why shouldn't an event.preventDefault() or two do the trick? It seems to have worked just fine on, say, Google Maps for the past 10 years.
On the other hand, I can see how something like the quote display on this forum could be implemented in pure CSS as opposed to an image with generated, but then the “ quotation mark would become selectable. For such decorative elements, user-select:none might be useful. Of course, presently it's decidedly untrustworthy and not useful at all precisely because of the lack of a spec.
My stance is that browsers without a titlebar are somewhat broken. *grins*
I made a small change in the code; do you think it could work for you this way? (You might have to switch over to the DnD theme if you're using another.) The specific style of the text is a slightly different matter that'll have to be adjusted.
Color coding the parameters could be a nice optional feature to enhance the readability of extremely long query strings. I might use it. It's just like syntax highlighting and immediately recognizable. Just like graying, it should be optional.
Extra padding around elements of the URL is not so good because it looks like spaces, which aren't really there. And if the field is no longer a line of text, that could decrease its rendering speed (however slightly) or cause clipping or overlapping of each padded element if the program is run under a strange UI theme.
Actually, you made me remember that I'd originally experimented padding and removed it again for that very reason.
And the best brains in the industry have been struggling with this problem for a while, and eventually came up with the solution: highlight the most important part of the URL, hide parts that regular end users typically don’t understand – all to help users figure out that all-important “what site is this really?” question.
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I’m sorry to hear that you don’t like the result. Many of us don’t exactly love it either. But I do disagree with your insinuation that it is a bug – that wording is, to be frank, a bit of an insult. The new address bar is a feature we’ve thought long and hard about and spent man hours implementing. Because it’s an important safety feature for regular users.
I realize my anecdotal evidence is far from a usability study, but every user I've seen trying to use Opera 11+ was disturbed by the fact that it wasn't loading the page requested properly. On sites with large headers, or forum threads with a reasonably-sized OP, you'd just be seeing the same thing show up without any indication that you didn't merely refresh. Even I have on occasion been confused by this behavior if I forgot to turn it off. The thing is, no matter how "average" the user, just about everyone's been using the Internet for a decade.
Anyhoo, it's obviously not a bug, but it's definitely buggy. It doesn't work with different color schemes, most importantly perhaps high contrast. Besides which, even on a white background my parents don't exactly have the easiest time reading the grayed out text. "Just select the addressbar," I say. "That doesn't make any sense," they'll reply. Indeed, it doesn't. Color contrast checking seems like a pretty basic thing one should perform on a feature such as this, as does testing some of Windows' built-in accessibility features.
This might sound a bit harsh, but thanks to Ruari I found out that BS-Harou* is single-handedly pushing Opera 15+ into usable territory using nothing but extensions.
It doesn't work with different color schemes, most importantly perhaps high contrast. Besides which, even on a white background my parents don't exactly have the easiest time reading the grayed out text. "Just select the addressbar," I say. "That doesn't make any sense," they'll reply. Indeed, it doesn't. Color contrast checking seems like a pretty basic thing one should perform on a feature such as this, as does testing some of Windows' built-in accessibility features.