Opera 17, pros and cons

rs79

rs79

"We all like options, but what you see is what you get. "

Errr, no. We wanted our computers to talk to each other. So we built the net.

IBM tried it your way. It was called X.25 and nobody used it.

mazzic

mazzic

Originally posted by Pesala:

Who are you going to negotiate with? Who is going to care if you stop using Opera?

Ah yes, always a good move for a company to ignore its customers (as if he's the only one complaining). Maybe huge companies like apple can afford to do this. Opera on the other hand...

I have yet to discover a single thread saying something positive about the new opera. Even a single one...

A Former User

Originally posted by mazzic:

Ah yes, always a good move for a company to ignore its customers

They don't ignore their customers, but rs79 is not the only pebble on the beach. Making demands won't wash with any developer who knows who pays the bills. Opera will prioritise feature requests and implement what makes economic sense, while postponing or not implementing those that don't.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Originally posted by mazzic:

I have yet to discover a single thread saying something positive about the new opera. Even a single one...

Then you haven't been looking very hard, have you? In general, when things are liked people don't bother posting (even though a few brave souls have posted positive threads). Those who generally start posts in the forums are seeking assistance and/or wanting to complain. Naturally that is what you are going to see most often. There is no way to gauge accurately the acceptance or rejection of the new browser at this time and certainly one would never base it upon a few thousand posts (many of which are made by the same posters) here in these forums.

The browser is faster now. The browser is more compatible now with sites such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, Facebook. The browser has the addition of several unique features such as Stash and Discover. Speed Dial can be optimized. QAB can be accessed in opera:flags and then enabling it in preferences. Features are being returned to Opera as was promised. I have no problem setting a Start Page with Opera 17 so I'm not sure what your problem is.

You are not in a position to dictate to Opera and furthermore, threats to abandon it will certainly not garner any attention. Advice has been given countless time now but evidently it bears repeating: if the new browser lacks features you consider essential then simply stay with the version you currently have (i.e. v.12.16). You might also consider installing alongside the older version a copy of the new browser so that you can better judge for yourself how it is changing.

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by Pesala:

Opera will prioritise feature requests and implement what makes economic sense, while postponing or not implementing those that don't.

We'll see it in next years annual report if they made the right assumptions about their users because this years report will be quite catastrophic for the desktop part.

I don't think they'll gain the about 4 million users of Opera desktop they lost until Q3 2013 in comparison to Q3 2012 until the end of the year with the new version. Interestingly, despite just alienating "a mere 7%" of their user base, they lost 25% of the income from desktop - which doesn't look like a good management decision. It seems that the users who switched to another browser were power surfers who generated a lot referral link income with their searches etc.:

Originally posted by Opera ASA Q3 financial report:

Revenue from Desktop decreased by 25% in 3Q13 versus 3Q12, due to a decrease in ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), primarily due to less search and license revenue and a user decline of 7% in 3Q13 versus 3Q12.

Source: http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/4580/153912/version/2/file/3Q13.pdf

BTW - the all time high in user numbers was reached with 11.64 which was the most feature complete version with the most options they ever build.

Originally posted by leushino:

You are not in a position to dictate to Opera and furthermore, threats to abandon it will certainly not garner any attention.

Your opinion in that matter is irrelevant - only the numbers count - and according to the numbers they should really start fighting for every user and not disregard those "threats" as empty.
Fact:
Opera ASA has lost about 10k desktop users per day since they decided to switch to chromium.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Statistics can be made to prove anything you want. Opera was never successful, period. They've gambled and time will tell the real story; not you, nor I. I believe in their new direction but I know that there will be a rough ride ahead to achieve their goal.

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by leushino:

Statistics can be made to prove anything you want.

You really don't get it, right?
That is not a mere statistic, that is from Opera ASAs own 2013 Quarter 3 report.
Those are the numbers the board and the CEO use to make their decisions.

As soon as desktop costs more than it earns it will be cut off, probably as soon as the tendency is clear, if they use the standard prediction models.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Originally posted by QuHno:

Originally posted by leushino:

Statistics can be made to prove anything you want.

You really don't get it, right?
That is not a mere statistic, that is from Opera ASAs own 2013 Quarter 3 report.
Those are the numbers the board and the CEO use to make their decisions.

As soon as desktop costs more than it earns it will be cut off, probably as soon as the tendency is clear, if they use the standard prediction models.

First off, don't demean me. Of course I "get it" as you put it. But I've been around long enough to know that numbers mean more than just one thing and you are using them to give one interpretation of the situation. And who are you to say that "as soon as the desktop costs more than it earn, it will be cut off"??? Says who? Many companies are willing to lose money initially in order to gain over the long run. MS is but one example of a company that practically gave away the X-box (below cost... losing money on every single box it sold) in order to establish itself. Opera will undoubtedly have a bad year, possibly two BUT if it is going to win over the long haul (and no doubt it has taken all of this into consideration), it must stay the course. It can't reverse itself now; there is too much invested in this changeover. And that is something that I doubt many users here really grasp. They keep believing that somehow with enough negative press, anger, complaining, even petitioning, they are going to get the company to reverse itself. I can guarantee that this will not happen. The company's desktop was never popular and in a sense, it has nothing to lose. So... they're willing to gamble and I believe they've chosen the right course of action. And if by some chance, the gamble does not pay off, then they simply jettison the desktop division... period. End of the Opera browser as we know it and they continue development of mobile and whatever other interests they have.

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by leushino:

Opera will undoubtedly have a bad year, possibly two BUT if it is going to win over the long haul (and no doubt it has taken all of this into consideration), it must stay the course.

The company? I totally agree as a shareholder.

Originally posted by leushino:

So... they're willing to gamble and I believe they've chosen the right course of action. And if by some chance, the gamble does not pay off, then they simply jettison the desktop division... period.

Exactly what I say. As soon as the desktop browser costs more as it earns it is dead and they will not shed any tear about it. Probably they will even kill it up a bit before it actually starts loosing money.

btw: The comparison with MS is not quite fitting - they had and still have money they could burn to brute force a wedge in a market with strong competitors. Opera is not (yet) in a position that comfortable, but mediaworks shapes up quite nicely ...

rs79

rs79

"You are not in a position to dictate to Opera and furthermore"

That was true when Opera was proprietory. Now it's an open source Javascript engine and an Open source rendering engine and all the things that made Opera opera are gone. It's just recompiled chrome with all the chrome bugs.

The barrier to somebody else reverse engineering Opera 12 with WebKit and V8 - what the world wanted and was suggested it was getting? The enthusiasm for this was very very high - people had been asking for it. That's a pretty good sign.

If we'd be told in the spring "How about recompiled Chrome instead" then people who know would have gone "but it doesn't work". Who'd want that?

I posted videos of Chrome and Opera 17 screwing up going back and losing a form full of data.

Does that now count as a show-stopping bug? Again, this makes it impossible to use Chrome or Opera 17 to edit stuff on the web.

Ie, all the weird little bugs Chrome had Opera now has. Without any of the cool features Opera had. How is this progress?

If 12 is dead then give away the source. If it's not then can we talk about plans for it? I think in a large sense some of the pushback for the Chrome version of Opera is that it was a surprise. That was not part of an ongoing dialogue between the company and it's base.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Opera 12 is their property. Why should they "give it away"? Besides, it still has an application in the standalone email client (although my gut tells me that this will likely be cut loose as well).

You want the new browser to have all the features of the old. Perhaps over time it will have nearly all of this plus other unique features but it's going to take more time. V. 17 which I am currently using, is a far-sight better than v. 15 and I expect that v. 19 will have even more. Just give it some time... please. Don't be too critical at such an earlier juncture. Give it time.

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by leushino:

Just give it some time... please. Don't be too critical at such an earlier juncture. Give it time.

I can't. I have to do my work, and on pages that don't want to work with Opera I use another browser that works. After some time I find my way around the minor quirks (minor in comparison to 15++) of the other browsers and then I don't need Opera any more because it just doesn't offer enough. I am not interested in some promised paradise, I live here and now. I need my tools now and that's it.

Originally posted by scratchspace:

Is there some reason that you cannot either open the page in a new tab or simply complete the process and then start the editing over again if necessary?

Multi page forms.
You can't simply open the next part in a second tab, that would mess with the consistency of the data. Especially annoying if you do your tax and can not review what you have written because as soon as you switch back, everything you entered is gone - and believe me, nobody willingly wants to enter all that crap again just because of a shitty behavior of the browser. In the end you use a browser that can do it right and then stick to it. Sadly that is not the recent Opera any more ...

blueboyns

blueboyns

Originally posted by rs79:

If 12 is dead then give away the source. If it's not then can we talk about plans for it? I think in a large sense some of the pushback for the Chrome version of Opera is that it was a surprise. That was not part of an ongoing dialogue between the company and it's base.

Dude don't argue with basement dwelling fanboys, they live for pointless arguments like this.
We've been given Chrome clone with more bugs and less features than actual Chrome, anyone sane can't like that. You know it, I know it but you can't reason with fanboy.

New Chropera is targeted toward smart phone users who use Opera Mobile and Mini and want sync option with desktop version that is simple and compatible. That's it. Advanced users are discarded as nonprofitable and that wont change.

A Former User

Originally posted by Blueboyns:

Dude don't argue with basement dwelling fanboys,

The trolls need the fanboys to justify their continued visits to these forums. Since the trolls hate Opera Blink so much, I wonder why they don't just use older version or other browsers?

Those who have been using Opera as their primary browser since 2002 should know the score by now don't you think?

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by Pesala:

Since the trolls hate Opera Blink so much, I wonder why they don't just use older version or other browsers?

You mean like the troll with the skull and crossed bones as avatar does if he isn't testing but doing serious work? :p

But that troll doesn't hate blink or any other rendering engine - he just doesn't like what was made from it by Opera and still hopes that something decent will come out of this mess. As it is, it simply does not work in his work environment while the other major browsers do. No day with at least 4 or 5 crashes of the new "Opera", heck until todays 18 next update he couldn't even open up Photoshop without crashing the browser. Not even the daily 1 to 4 snapshots of Chromium (the original) are *that* instable.

At the moment he is a happy camper with 9.27 (real MDI, sometimes he needs that) 11.64 (rock solid and he still can and does use Widgets and Unite) and 12.16 x64 (rock solid too and M2 is still integrated). He never saw a reason to use Mail 1.0. Yes, he downloaded it, installed it and then deleted it - it is basically a crippled 12.16 and has no advantages over the integrated solution, not even in size. For special cases he uses the latest Firefox, Chromium and Internet Explorer, but not Opera 17++, because Opera 17++ causes more problems than it solves. Yes, until recently he wrote bug reports, but somehow he got discouraged ...

... oh, and don't feed him, he is perfectly capable of hunting for himself.

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by QuHno:

But that troll doesn't hate blink or any other rendering engine - he just doesn't like what was made from it by Opera and still hopes that something decent will come out of this mess. As it is, it simply does not work in his work environment while the other major browsers do. No day with at least 4 or 5 crashes of the new "Opera", heck until todays 18 next update he couldn't even open up Photoshop without crashing the browser. Not even the daily 1 to 4 snapshots of Chromium (the original) are *that* instable.

+1

Originally posted by QuHno:

Yes, until recently he wrote bug reports, but somehow he got discouraged ...

Me too. What's the point if these bugs have already been in the Webkit bug tracker for a decade? I thought Opera might care a bit more about the major regressions that come with Blink.

As it happens this one bug I reported was actually taken up by someone at Intel, which pleasantly surprised me, but unfortunately it now seems to be in some kind of bug fixing limbo. I'd just like to emphasize this is something Presto has done right for years.

blackbird71

blackbird71

Originally posted by QuHno:

... Interestingly, despite just alienating "a mere 7%" of their user base, they lost 25% of the income from desktop - which doesn't look like a good management decision. It seems that the users who switched to another browser were power surfers who generated a lot referral link income with their searches etc.:

Originally posted by Opera ASA Q3 financial report:

Revenue from Desktop decreased by 25% in 3Q13 versus 3Q12, due to a decrease in ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), primarily due to less search and license revenue and a user decline of 7% in 3Q13 versus 3Q12.

Source: http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/4580/153912/version/2/file/3Q13.pdf ... Opera ASA has lost about 10k desktop users per day since they decided to switch to chromium.

It should prove interesting whether the declining stats become an ultimate rationale for Opera departing entirely from the desktop scene. After all, desktop systems are supposedly going extinct under the mobile-device onslaught, according to the prophets of desktop doom. These stats could readily be cited as simply unfolding proof of all that, by those whose minds are already made up. There's an old saying: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail." Opera (and a lot of the digital trend-riders) are now enamored of mobile everything... and therefore, they have a built-in tendency to view all things through 'mobile' lenses. Which, I believe, explains a lot of things with regard to the nature of Blink Opera's desktop browser... especially the dismissiveness with which many user complaints have been handled.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Originally posted by QuHno:

But that troll doesn't hate blink or any other rendering engine - he just doesn't like what was made from it by Opera and still hopes that something decent will come out of this mess.

Hope dies last but keep in mind please that nothing lasts forever

Originally posted by Frenzie:

What's the point if these bugs have already been in the Webkit bug tracker for a decade? I thought Opera might care a bit more about the major regressions that come with Blink.

They seem to be overextended with building a shell for Blink and you want them to fix the new engine? You must be kidding

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by Krake:

They seem to be overextended with building a shell for Blink and you want them to fix the new engine? You must be kidding

As it happens they've got people working on the engine separately from people working on the chrome. One of them is working on fixing Blink's broken video APIs, which may technically be fixing regressions compared to Presto. But the thing is, I want to report these regressions to Opera because they're only regressions for Opera. In Blink, it's all just bugs that've been there since Apple forked KHTML, with corresponding unfixed Webkit bug reports to boot.

quhno

quhno

Originally posted by Frenzie:

In Blink, it's all just bugs that've been there since Apple forked KHTML, with corresponding unfixed Webkit bug reports to boot.

That hits the point. If Google or Apple as main contributors did not use it on their websites, it was of no bigger interest and you could wait until the sun explodes, e.g. I still wait for a fix about font—or, better—character replacement. Opera 12 did a great job with it.

Explanation for all who want to know what that means:
If some character was not in the CSS defined or replaced fonts, it used the character from the most similar font you had installed. In doubt it used even a fonts that did not look similar if the character was in there—on my system it even used the Unicode BMP Fallback Font if nothing else worked out for really esoteric characters, which was still better than displaying ???? instead of foreign characters like the whole Chromium bunch does.

I am really waiting for that bug to get fixed. At the moment Opera is worse than Chromium when it comes to charsets and font replacement as I noticed in DNA-13074 where Chromium had no problem with it and Opera 17 -19 displayed ??? instead of the Big5 Chinese character set.