Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Btw, here's another hint that at least some people at Opera like plain-text configuration, just like me: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/themes-in-opera-18-and-higher

Why is 30. 'Portable installation' crossed out in Haavard's list?

Because he claims it's available as an option in the Chropera installer. Are you saying it's not?

I also misunderstood the meaning of crossed out items and therefore had to delete one of my above comments

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=15003162
Am I going too far too quickly? I'm just so damned tired of people excusing the inexcusable.

Quote from: blackbird71

But to attribute the statements of Opera developers, certain incongruous details within change logs, or "official" statements by Opera to a conscious process of lying, deliberate deception[snip]

That's not what I'm suggesting, so I probably expressed myself poorly.

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?

I regularly have more than 100 tabs on my tab bar in Opera 12.
This has been possible because Presto is an efficient little engine that handles these kinds of situations better than anything else.
In Opera 15, though, I have found that opening a lot of tabs makes for a rather poor browsing experience.
As a result, I have started adding pages to my Stash whenever there's something I'm not going to do right away or in the immediate future.

You are too modest. You retract and retreat too fast

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edit 10 July: we've announced that we're prioritising building bookmarks functionality after hearing your feedback.

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).

The way I read it: With Blink it won't work so use Stash as a workaround.

Proxy settings come to my mind. A browser that can't be configured to use a proxy which you can turn on and off on the fly is almost useless for me.

Wait—Opera 15+ does not have proxy settings? Are you serious?

I like having everything that doesn't require speed of native apps in the browser Also the advantages of web interface (access from any device with internet connection, no local space required, backups) are in my case more important than advantages of native clients (encryption, speed, offline access).

I'm too lazy person to rotate my HDDs I prefer not to touch the HW stuff if it is not necessary.

http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2013/11/opera-18-landed/#comment-1132645881

Quote from: Daniel Aleksandersen

Do not expect [the Linux version] for another three months at the earliest.

Meaning, in February or March the Linux version of Chropera might land on us. Does it really take so long for the company to get out of desktop browser business that they even dare to promise a Linux version? Well, I guess the credit they earned under Tetzchner is not so easily wasted after all.

Yet that browser hasn't landed either.

Of course, I wasn't impressed with Maxthon for Windows, so I'm not sure why I would be for the Linux version :p

For years, it cost money. They later gave you the choice to run it for "free" by being subjected to advertisements. Even so, I felt that it was superior to the rest in enough ways to use it. Even with the highly questionable default user interface setups and looks (that kept changing all the time), it was still the browser I preferred over the others. It was anything but perfect, but the miserable competition made it shine like a star. At least this is how I and quite a few others perceived it.

At some point, I guess they got sick of having such an extremely small (relatively) market share and changed their business model yet again... As I understand it, they had already for many years received money for their trashy default bookmarks. That'd be OK if it weren't for the fact that, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, it would sometimes add back the garbage bookmarks when you upgraded, mixed in with your existing bookmarks. Very annoying and an ominous sign of what to come.

I'm not saying that it became worse at rendering pages or noticeably slower than before, or that there weren't any welcome additions and improvements in its last years (because there certainly were) — it was just gradually made more and more obnoxious in a very disturbing manner... There really is no point in listing everything they did wrong. You get the picture. Toward the end, I really starting to dread each update of Opera instead of looking forward to them.

Summary of its death and aftermath

•    In early 2013, the Opera developers announced that they were dumping their own rendering and JavaScript engines in favour of WebKit and Chromium's V8. They assured everyone that nothing would change and that this would allow them to "focus on making the browser great".


•     A few months later, there was a new announcement revealing that the new Opera, 15 (they skipped generations 13 and 14), is in fact just a Chrome skin. With no bookmark support. Or mail. Or RSS. Or chat. Or any feature at all that Chrome doesn't already have. In other words, what they said earlier was a lie.


•     Only after countless useless, unbelievably arrogant blog posts with more bullshit and half-assed "damage control", did they sort of cave in and said they would bring back bookmarks "in some form". However, it's just too late.