Let's stop this war
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Deleted User last edited by
I think in general terms the Widgets failed to gain traction and a mass following of development from the user base. I could of course be incorrect about the three features your mentioning as they were not features I used; however I believe that when they phased out Widgets they implemented extensions at about the same time. As for Unite I believe they only changed its name or Turbo or possibly Dragonfly ? As for voice I remember its addition but do not recall it being functional the few times I attempted to play with it.
Voice didn't work for me either when it was first released, but there was improvement and I actually had it read to me at least one full book length of text. I used it every once in a while.
Unite had nothing to do with Turbo or Dragonfly. Unite was a sharing server with the ability to connect peer to peer. It had a few apps inbuilt, and users quickly built and shared more apps.
Wiedgets did not fail in any way. They had a large following among the user base and their discontinuation was a sore disappointment. The developers of widgets were, again users themselves. Opera thrived on user activism. Userjs was developed and shared by users. Skins were also developed and shared by users. Version 12 broke skins too.
Version 12 was a humiliating punch in the face of widget, skin, and Unite developers - who were all users doing free work. The company turned its back to voluntary activists who had been the cream of web-browsing world. And they also deleted their work and the wealth of knowledge that was in the old forums, blogs, widget, skins, unite, setup and userjs sharing sites.
It takes a pretty profound lack of conscience to do that. This company managed to pull it off.
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linuxmint7 last edited by
my old Amiga 1200..
I still have mine... somewhere. I may still even have my A500plus too. My, those were the days...
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blackbird71 last edited by... Explain Chrome, MSIE, Firefox, UC Browser, Maxton, Dolphin then. Every browser is free, that's just the way it works. The fact that an organization has to find some way around it to make money, is hardly my problem. ...
Opera has created an adience of powerusers for itself, and by crippling the browser they've essentially said "bye bye" to their powerusers, because quite frankly Opera 13 and later are a ... disgrace to any poweruser. Opera might not realize that adding features doesn't inhibit the use by novice users, and Opera certainly doesn't realize that powerusers sometimes have an audience of their own to persuade into using Opera. This has stopped, of course.But the fact is that it is your problem. Those other browsers make their creators revenue off of either the enhancement they provide to other cash-generating services offered by the browser creators or directly via "rent" revenue from click-counts and favored browser placements... the greater the browser market share, the greater the revenue that comes in. And that broad market out there, quite frankly, doesn't in the main give a flying care about many of the "features" that expert/loyal users (myself included) want in a browser. That's the problem. The pie that browser creators must compete for to grow revenue is made up largely of unsophisticated users with few complex configurability or in-depth feature demands - they want it to be fast, pretty, and reliable with a few "clever" and "neat" features. But those of us who use browsers as a tool demand in-depth configurability and multiple accessible settings and features, and it costs browser makers money/resources to include the options to control those... money for things the mass market cares little about.
Put another way, as an example, it costs little or nothing up front to leave bookmarking out of a new browser design; on the other hand, it costs real money to reliably put a bookmarks manager, bookmarks display methodology, integration with browser control and operation philosophy, bookmark search capability, bookmark editing, etc into the browser. And that money must be spent even if the resulting feature is hidden behind an options button or buried within an options menu so as not to make the browser appear too complex to those in the mass market. What governs the business decision is whether the creators believe the revenue lost by alientating expert/loyal users from not including bookmarks will be far more made up by the new users (and revenue) gained from making the browser more appealing in other ways to the mass-market users out there who care little about bookmarks. My real point here is that decision is based on what the creators believe about the market, not whether or not that ends up being an accurate market assessment as events unfold.
For a long time, Opera focused on configurability, detailed features, and tons of settings, and we saw the results unfold in the marvelous tool that was Presto Opera. Yet Opera's desktop market share never "took off" and their revenue return was disappointing. There may have been many reasons for that, but Opera has come to believe they spent too much development time lost in the details and their own rendering engine instead of chasing the larger market and its user interests. Asking Opera to return to a Presto-style highly configurable browser, in their view, is asking them to be content to never move their market share above that represented by a handful of dedicated expert/loyal users.
Certainly, there are more factors in the Blink decision than just these elements, but as I stated earlier, I believe the business side of things has played a much larger role than we as expert/loyal users realize... and I feel it important to keep the business aspect clearly in sight. We may not like it, but we cannot ignore it.
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A Former User last edited by
Whilst Opera cannot be blamed for the demise of Voice, they can and should be blamed for withdrawing support for Widgets, Unite, and Skins. It was a huge slap in the face for those developers who spent hundreds or thousands of hours of their free time developing add-ons, blogs, and wiki threads, to improve the Opera experience.
Sites like this: http://home.wanadoo.nl/sipke.reina/opera/images.html
for example, were developed for the benefit of skin developers, and Tomu laboriously maintained the documentation of skin changes for each update as well as developing numerous beautiful skins. This Opera Wiki page gives an idea of how much work was involved.
http://operawiki.info/AdvancedSkinGuide
I only use one widget, an Analogue Clock, but it's useful and still runs even if Opera is not running.
Unite was also a useful way to share files, though I manage OK with Wikisend, which is a good substitute for most of what I did with Opera Unite.
To rub salt into the wound, most of the useful threads on MyOpera were not transferred to this new forum, and the valuable information is now hard to find by trawling web archives. This current forum is ruined by spam and weak moderation. Not that the old one was much better in the latter months, after the announcement to close it, but it used to be much better a year or so back.
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lem729 last edited by
I'm with you absolutely. I remember the forum from quite a few years ago. And the forum was so good it was one of the draws of using Opera. You got help on features! It's not anywhere near what it was. There are aspects now very frustrating. You can't communicate with people individually through a personal note, the spam is awful, the personal attacks are bad (no dobt discouraging newbies to try or to stay with Opera), the search vehicle is very weak, getting an icon for your avatar is complicated -- who wants to register at another website. You ought to be able to just drag an icon that you like to your profile. I think with icons people might be more human, and not as dismissive-insulting to others.
On Opera Voice, it was always terribly rudimentary. It wasn't worth playing with. I used to use Dragon Naturally Speaking. Now I find microsoft Speech recognition with (added to it a third party App called Voice finger quite good -- at least for browsing when the spirit moves me not to type. And it can be entertaining. I can even do hands free browsing on Opera 20 if I chose. (Still I use it more for entertainment, sometimes to rest my hands from overuse). Opera was in way over their head with their voice feature. The old Opera had a lot of nice stuff. But there are still pluses and minuses to the change, and life goes on. Opera 20 has some very unique, quite good stuff
The New opera Opera can still be a fine browser, and maybe even there can be an educational and fun community/forum here that Opera will decide to grow again into something better -- though if they follow the squabbles, personal attacks, war -- Prestoists versus Blinkists -- in the forum, they may think it's not worth the money and energy. Just close it down!. -
DarthMordred last edited by
I really think that everyone has the right to come here in this forum and report their dissatisfaction with the sudden technological change OPERA ASA, which has damaged many loyal users, and now deals with the following situation: Deal with it or let us .
It is very painful to read that after a decade using opera.
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leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by
I really think that everyone has the right to come here in this forum and report their dissatisfaction with the sudden technological change OPERA ASA, which has damaged many loyal users, and now deals with the following situation: Deal with it or let us .
The point is how this is done. It's everyone's right to not like something and to express it, but when someone starts to act like a child, to rant everywhere and everytime, to repeat the same mimini al over around including hijackling topics for it then this person is just trolling.
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DarthMordred last edited by
I really think that everyone has the right to come here in this forum and report their dissatisfaction with the sudden technological change OPERA ASA, which has damaged many loyal users, and now deals with the following situation: Deal with it or let us .
The point is how this is done. It's everyone's right to not like something and to express it, but when someone starts to act like a child, to rant everywhere and everytime, to repeat the same mimini al over around including hijackling topics for it then this person is just trolling.
In this case, it creates a thread with the subject, and any similar topic and merged it would be fixed in this section.
Would be even better organized, as we could see in one place the criticism and ponderings about the change of engine browser. -
blackbird71 last edited by
I really think that everyone has the right to come here in this forum and report their dissatisfaction with the sudden technological change OPERA ASA, which has damaged many loyal users, and now deals with the following situation: Deal with it or let us .
The point is how this is done. It's everyone's right to not like something and to express it, but when someone starts to act like a child, to rant everywhere and everytime, to repeat the same mimini al over around including hijackling topics for it then this person is just trolling.
In this case, it creates a thread with the subject, and any similar topic and merged it would be fixed in this section.
Would be even better organized, as we could see in one place the criticism and ponderings about the change of engine browser.But the problem is, as those who have frequented the old My Opera forums as well as the current ones know all too well, angry users simply won't accept confining their outbursts to a single topic or section. The intensity of their anger impels them to post the same thing that's been said a hundred times before in some new, rant-laced thread or inject/twist their expressions into entirely unrelated threads. As @leocg has noted, that is acting like a child and ranting everywhere, everytime, and hijacking topics.
There are those who possess reasoned, rational complaints about Blink Opera and how it has supplanted Presto Opera, but the logic that applies to how best to organize their justifiable expressions of those utterly fails when confronted with immature posters who spray vitriol and flame in every direction, in as many threads as possible.
A further problem with organizing complaint (or any other frequently-raised subject) posts into a single thread is that such a thread quickly becomes too long and unwieldy for both readers and posters. Most posters instinctively recognize that after a single page of posts, few readers will come along and read the whole thing - hence, the later posters feel their comments are diluted or weakened thereby. If the topic is something they feel intensely about, this effect is further amplified.
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