Broken dark mode and emoji pickers since 82.0.4227.33

[shani-ace 0]

shani-ace 0 last edited by shani-ace 0

Dear forum,

since v82.0.4227.33, Opera's built-in dark mode is completely broken. Multiple sites that previously worked fine with dark mode are now exhibiting issues.

On Youtube and other sites with videos (news sites for example), there is a weird white glow around the video as well as a darkened preview image. It only goes away once the cursor is removed from the video and comes back as soon as the cursor hovers over the video.

On SoundCloud, black coverart is displayed in white.

On multiple other sites, for example dittomusic.com or also Gmail, the styling is messed up in a way that elements are not readable or visible anymore - either because they're all black or all white.

Furthermore, emoji pickers - both those implemented on websites like Twitter as well as those served by browser extensions - are very slow and while they are loading, the entire page freezes.
I would attach a screen recording but apparently that's not permitted here.
Btw Windows' built-in emoji picker (activated via Win + .) doesn't exhibit this problem because it is not dependent on Opera.

None of these issues was present up until v 81.0.4196.60. I've already downgraded multiple times but despite the fact that I deactivated Opera's auto-updates via a Windows system environment variable as well as by passing an argument to the Opera shortcut, Opera still somehow manages to auto-update itself back to the broken version.

I've even tried Opera Beta (v83) and Opera Developer (v84) but both have the same issues as v82.

As someone who's been using Opera for about 2 decades and has been using dark mode for a long time - without any issues I might add - this is unacceptable. Opera has become unusable in its current form.

I don't understand how this regression could've slipped through, surely this is something the regression test suite of Opera's QA team should've caught?

I hope Opera will fix this asap so we can have a working version of Opera again.

In the meantime, can anyone tell me a reliable way to prevent Opera from auto-updating?

I've already downgraded to v81 numerous times which always leads to my cookies being deleted, so I had to re-login to a lot of pages countless times, which is incredibly time-consuming and frustrating.

Best regards

[shani-ace 0]

shani-ace 0 @shani-ace 0 last edited by

Well it seems I was finally able to stop the auto-updates for good, the issue was the autoupdater.exe in the Opera install folder.

Now Opera just needs to fix these new issues so I can eventually return to the normal pipeline and update to some newer version. Until then I'm gonna stick with v81.