Opera still unusable for me

A Former User

I really want to like Opera but its still missing one or two minor features and it has some really irritating behaviours.

Ill start with irritating behaviours. I use http://separatethis.com bookmarks in order to separate my bookmarks into catagories on my bookmarks bar. However, every day Opera decides to delete these blank bookmarks. I guess Opera feel I shouldnt have duplicate bookmarks. This is very irritating as every day I have to re create them. There doesnt appear to be a feature I can disable in settings.

Addon shortcut reordering. Its been a while now since Opera went the chrome route and I really would have thought this would be built in by now. Its a real ballache to uninstall and reinstall the addons in the order you wish them to appear. Also it doesnt always work either. I have found one addon (I cant remember the name) whose icon kept being placed at the end no matter in which order it was installed.

The download button appearing at the end of the addons seems odd to me. Could there not be a more elegant solution for a download indicator. Ie the icon being with the other "control icons" (back forward home etc) But maybe changing when a download is in progress? Or at least a few options of how to handle download progress. Maybe even showing up in the info panel at the bottom?

Things I love. Offroad mode, A built in VPN, Built in adblocker (even if it isnt that great), The start screen,

OIpera is a nice looking browser with some great features but I would like it to have more customizability. Opera should also let me decide how many instances I have of a certain bookmark. No browser should ever delete bookmarks without my say so.

lando242

lando242

There are extensions that allow you to reorder your extension icons. As for separating your bookmarks, why don't you just make your own bookmark with a bunch of dashes in the description? You can make as many of those as you want, just give each one a different web address.

A Former User

Ive tried the extension that allows for reordering. Its not very straight forward and requires that you trawl through a huge text settings file and find the bit where the extensions are. I briefly looked at it but as that file is so large I couldnt even find the extensions bit.

Thanks for the bookmark tip. I use only icons for bookmarks so naming them with a dash wouldnt solve the problem for me. But that did give me a clue. I did change the url by adding a number. Hopefully this will fool Opera.

But really while I appreciate that there are workarounds but in my opinion these things should be standard. Opera used to be a very configurable browser. As for the bookmarks thing I dont think any program should police or janitor my actions unless I ask it to. I do sometimes have duplicate bookmarks in different folders. A browser (or any other app) should not be changing what I have deliberately set up unless that behaviour comes with an on/off switch.

Also Opera always used to be a power browser. It had features long before any other browser. It was the first browser with tabs for instance. These where all power features at the time. Now it feels like Opera is going for the dumbed down approach. There are alrready a number of leading browsers doing that. IE and Edge, Chrome strikes the middle ground. In my opinion what the browser market needs is a good power browser with lots of customization built in.

Opera currently has a good few unique features like a built in VPN and offroad browsing. But it lacks the customizability of even other browsers out there.

lando242

lando242

Now it feels like Opera is going for the dumbed down approach

It is. They tried to appeal to the power user and it got them bupkis for market share and was a bear to maintain. So they streamlined.

But it lacks the customizability of even other browsers out there.

It can;t be everything to everyone and still be maintainable. Maybe look into Vivaldi?

A Former User

I do agree. Its sad though as I like a lot of Opera there are only a few minor niggles. BTW re that shortcut tip It seems to be working so far. I havnt had any deleted bookmarks.

I am very much keeping an eye on Vivaldi but so far it has similar irritations as Opera has. Ie not being able to reorder Addon icons. I guess when they fix that then Vivaldi will be my main and Opera my off browser for VPN use.