Opera 17, pros and cons

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.

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by QuHno:

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.

Everyone knows Gecko's typographical performance is far superior to any other graphical browser's (if we don't count Prince). Opera has some odd issues with changing characters to a different font following a font substitution on Windows (not on Linux!), so I can understand why some might disprefer it. However, Chrome is at least as buggy as IE in font choices…

rs79

rs79

" that is most certainly not a "show-stopping bug". Nor is it clear to me that this problem "makes it impossible to use Chrome or Opera 17 to edit stuff on the web". 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?"

Have you ever actually done any work on the web?

Edit, save, back, edit save back edit save back. That's what it looks like. No really. People do this 8 hours a day, 4 hours a week. Millions of them.

You not want to make their 8 hour day a 9.5 hour day because of an old chrome bug? (really old)

Opera forgetting about this sole feature that got their browser in the drivers seas *as the only one* that would work properly. But now Mozilla does and Opera doesn't.

Your utterly idiotic suggestion makes about as much sense as using crayons and poster paper. It may work for you but it's not what grownups do.

Why should Opera give 12 away? Well, crap, I dunno. Isn't that better than dong NOTHING with it or throwing it out? Was that a trick question?

I really shouldn't have to justify a browser not destroying hours of typed user data when it didn't used to and now does because of "improvements".

rs79

rs79

The more I look at it the more I think V8 was a good idea but I'm having a real problem understanding the move to WebKit. Sure the new Opera makes more old demos work an that's a plus but there were easier ways of supporting obsolete webkit prefix stuff.

Presto was a lot closer to webkit compatibility than I think Opera thought it was. You can sort of tell what happened and when by studying he behavior of all the prefixed stuff. It's really quite fascinating.

I'd be really interested in seeing Opera 12 with the V8 engine but no webkit. I'm not sure what was actually gained by the move to webkit, by that I mean the hours spend getting that to work if they'd been put into presto, I really think I've had tried that first. If nothing else it would have eliminated all the things people have complained about in the Chrome/Opera hybrid.

cogitosum

cogitosum

Originally posted by leushino:

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.

Everyone here has a critical comment. RS79 was accurate, I bitched about 2 removals from Opera12. Every other criticism ought to be considered. It doesn't matter that the Opera development team "think" they've got it right, they haven't. Instead of defending a defective product, consider what's been said here and try to address the issues. And by the way, yes, I have been a devotee of Opera since way back when I had to pay for it. Then, it was worth it, But now.....

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by rs79:

I haven't used it in ages because forms didn't work, just uninstalled it and installed the latest (25) tried it and it seems to work with forms just fine. I'll have to test it long term to see it never glitches ever, but it does appear to work now. Finally. At freaking last. Good job.

Like I said, I believe the fix landed with Firefox 23 (but I could be wrong). Also note that Firefox has certain useful extensions. (Not sure if that's the best or anything.)

zogoibi

zogoibi

Originally posted by Pesala:

Originally posted by rs79:

Forms have been destroyed.

The best thing to do about that is to submit" target="_blank">https://bugs.opera.com/wizarddesktop/]submit a bug report. Ranting here won't help.

Totally disagree. Ranting here can, in a given case, help much more than filing bug reports, because every profane like me can and will read this forums, Opera devs and staff included; rants here can be (and are) quoted in professional reviews, understood and supported by so many people; all of which can somehow influence the path to be taken by the product responsibles. And, in any case, ranting here helps more than rudely trying to "kick out" of Opera to whomever disagrees with the new approach. The "you're free to take it or leave it" philosophy only leads to isolation and, eventually, failure.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Ranting never accomplishes anything other than stirring up strife and causing trouble. If you have specific features you miss, post them in the appropriate forum for desktop wishes. If you want to make a point about something specific, post that in the dev forums where they will be more likely to be seen and possibly addressed. Complaining and ranting here will do nothing positive other than provide a means of venting. If that's what you need to do - vent - fine. Bottom line however is that Opera will not be resurrecting Presto but will continue to develop Blink so deal with it.

A Former User

Originally posted by zogoibi:

And, in any case, ranting here helps more than rudely trying to "kick out" of Opera to whomever disagrees with the new approach.

You won't find anyone rudely trying to kick out those who disagree with the new approach. I disagree with the new approach in that they offer Opera 17 as the default download instead of Opera 12.16. They should have waited until it was ready for real use before promoting it so strongly. Release it as soon as it's stable by all means, but announce it as Opera Next, or as "Something new to try," not as the latest and recommended version of Opera.

Even now, Opera 12.16 won't find Opera 17 if you check for updates, but most would completely miss the link for Opera 12 on the download page.

What people should get kicked out for is attacks on Opera employees, or repeated trolling of the forums with negative comments. This forums are provided by Opera ASA, and active support is provided by other Opera users. There's no point at all in ranting at other users, who might actually be able to help you find a workaround. The devs rarely visit these forums, nor should they.