The impending demise of Opera?

paspieproductions

paspieproductions

I don't like this attitude. I've been in and out of Opera since the 10.00 days, though I have been using it alot more heavily on my mobile devices. It is fantastic that they supported platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile right up until the very end. However, I can see why they're trimming down their product lineup and removing alot of the excess.

As for ditching Presto, yes it was a smooth engine while it was relevant, but the fact remains that web developers don't subsidise web standards these days. They make sure sites will run on Chrome, Firefox and IE, everything else is not mission-critical. I also wonder whether Presto development was hitting a brick wall, and that the developers weren't able to adapt new technologies to it.

I can definitely see a future when the desktop version of Opera will cease to exist as a fully-fledged browser. I can also see the canning of any other browser versions they maintain that are based on the Chromium engine. However, the technologies they maintain for Opera Mini compression remain a valuable asset, and I can see that product being the main focus going forward. One of Mini's strengths is that it is based on Java, and that means it can be adapted for a diverse range of operating systems (heck, I've even got it running on my PSP). I can see Opera Mini being adapted for the desktop, all the core mobile OSes, other obsolete and obscure tech, embedded systems...you name it.

Today I use Firefox on both my Linux desktop, and my Android phone. Given how extendible and flexible it is, even with the Gecko engine I can't justify using Opera with Presto today. There are too many compatibility issues that would persist even if development was continued. Yes Gecko is slower, but computers keep getting faster so I don't see it as a huge issue.

Those are just my thoughts on the matters...

shiranaihito

shiranaihito

Firefox + FireGestures + AdBlock + NoScript = Salvation.

Try that combination. It feels basically like browsing with Opera v12, once you set up your gestures right. Here's a script for FireGestures that enables you to open links in new tabs just like you want to:

"[Hybrid] Open Link in New Tab / Open New Tab"

try {
FireGestures._performAction(event, "FireGestures:OpenLinkInFgTab");
}
catch (ex) {
FireGestures._performAction(event, "cmd_newNavigatorTab");
}

stng

stng

pesala

I read that too, but assigning shortcuts and gestures is not what I call extensive customisation. It is a basic requirement.

No it's not. There is no other browsers (other than Opera/Presto) that gives such type of customizability, at least "out of box". Also:

An average user never customize browser's keyboard shortcuts and gestures.
Advanced settings (such as custom keyboard configuration) can frustrate an average user.
Customized shortcuts can cause conflicts with Google services.

shiranaihito

Firefox + FireGestures + AdBlock + NoScript = Salvation. Try that combination. It feels basically like browsing with Opera v12, once you set up your gestures right. Here's a script for FireGestures that enables you to open links in new tabs just like you want to:

I have Firefox with a 40+ extensions (in the role of secondary browser) but i am still missing a significant part of Opera 12's functionality/customizability that i need.

A Former User

There is no other browsers (other than Opera/Presto) that gives such type of customizability.

Which is the main reason I use Opera. That, and built-in email client.

So, as I said, assigning shortcuts is not what I call extensive customisation. Installing extensions just to view APNG or Exif data is what I call extensive customisation. Creating or modifying skins, hacking accounts ini to change the order of columns, hacking dialog.ini to change the appearance of dialogs, and many other tricks that Opera presto users have developed over the years are what I call extensive customisation.

lem729

lem729

On Opera's financial bottom line, discussed in this thread, it seems to have moved into Smart televisions.

http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2014/03/20/rca-to-launch-opera-powered-smart-tvs/

paspieproductions

paspieproductions

It's a free market, guys. If you don't like Opera post-version 12, don't use it. It's the exact same for any other commodity. I'm happy with Firefox, and if you aren't satisfied with anything else, try developing your own browser.

stng

stng

The most depressing thing is that there is simply no full-fledged equivalent of Opera Presto.

salahuddin1

salahuddin1

Opera's financial results are open to anyone since it's a publicly traded company. Take a look at the investor information linked at the bottom of this page. Opera is not struggling financially, and the new Opera for desktop is growing nicely.

You're right, but it would help to actually read the financial reports and verify your information before posting it as fact.

Here is a link to the 2013 4th quarter report: http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/4902/159080/version/2/file/4Q13.pdf

I quote "the number of Desktop users was approximately 51 million, down 7% versus 4Q12. Revenue was lower in 4Q13 compared to 4Q12 due to lower search revenue, which was partly offset by higher content and advertising revenue."

The majority of Opera's profits are in the Mobile domain, particularly through Mobile Publishers and Advertisers.

So there IS a problem with the desktop version of Opera and its pretty clear that they most of their energy is invested elsewhere.

lem729

lem729

Just a thought, but it seems to me as if Opera is taking a position -- sort of like Microsoft with Windows 8 -- and working for one across-the-board product. If you look at Opera browser for Android, it's pretty much along the lines of Desktop Opera 20. It offers the Discover feature as well as the ability to make folders of speed dial items. So I wouldn't say that Opera is giving the computer Desktop short shrift -- just that the focus is on a product that meets the needs of Android tablet-phone users AND Desktop users. (Of course Coast for Ipad is a bit of a different play. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if Opera ultimately introduced something like Opera browser for Android for the Ipad.). I mean the reality is that the Desktop market has been shrinking, so why not seek a product that meets Desktop and mobile device needs.

A Former User

@lem729

Just a thought, but it seems to me as if Opera is taking a position -- sort of like Microsoft with Windows 8 -- and working for one across-the-board product. If you look at Opera browser for Android, it's pretty much along the lines of Desktop Opera 20. (...) So I wouldn't say that Opera is giving the computer Desktop short shrift -- just that the focus is on a product that meets the needs of Android tablet-phone users AND Desktop users.
It could be, and it'd make a lot of sense for me. From the devs perspective sharing the most codebase as possible is good, from the users perspective who wouldn't want all the desktop features in a tablet and vice versa? But the fact is they're very different after you take away the major feature, and by saying that I mean the desktop version has much more settings and different behaviors than mobile (so I wouldn't say the mobile has more focus or this should be inverted shouldn't it?).

It offers the Discover feature as well as the ability to make folders of speed dial items.
Yes but it's just like offering Turbo (Off-road), or Speed Dial, or any other feature in various platforms. That also happened in the Presto versions. The features are welcome everywhere (Opera wants them available to users in these platforms), and how would sync work if the desktop version didn't support Speed Dial folders for example?

A Former User

@salahuddin1

Opera's financial results are open to anyone since it's a publicly traded company. Take a look at the investor information linked at the bottom of this page. Opera is not struggling financially, and the new Opera for desktop is growing nicely.
You're right, but it would help to actually read the financial reports and verify your information before posting it as fact.
Here is a link to the 2013 4th quarter report: http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/4902/159080/version/2/file/4Q13.pdf
I quote "the number of Desktop users was approximately 51 million, down 7% versus 4Q12. Revenue was lower in 4Q13 compared to 4Q12 due to lower search revenue, which was partly offset by higher content and advertising revenue."
1- Right, but in the context of this topic where Presto is considered the perfect product that was making Opera rocketing to success and would "save" Opera if brought back, well, just interpret this yourself:
There were 60 million desktop users in the 1st quarter of 2012 and 52 in 2nd quarter of 2013 - that was with Opera Presto, before 15 even existed. (You can check the source in the investor area.)

2- You don't know how much growth occurred up until now in this new quarter (January 2014 until now).

So there IS a problem with the desktop version of Opera and its pretty clear that they most of their energy is invested elsewhere.
Look my previous post.

lem729

lem729

Even though Opera Browser for Android and Desktop Opera are similar, the unique needs of the desktop browser can be enhanced and MOSTLY addressed (one hopes) through extensions (which are not available for Opera Browser for Android). Hopefully, the extensions will give some of the customization that longtime Opera users have come to expect (almost take for granted). I guess we have to wait a bit, hanging on for the ride.

staiger

staiger

The fundamental difficulty for me is that the Opera team have said quite explicitly that they will NOT implement features which were little used in V12.

I understand the logic, but the problem is that this policy will inevitably lead to a browser with much the same feature set as its competitors, because of course they all want to target the "low-hanging fruit".

The entire ethos of Opera until recent times was to innovate NEW features which no-one had thought of before, and thus differentiate themselves from the competition. We all know that Opera succeeded in making many of these features so good that all the other browsers followed along.

But some of those features were less popular and only Opera offered them. BUT, even though they were less popular, some Opera users embraced them and loved them. They were what differentiated Opera from the rest of the crowd. If you want the 'right-click-Insert-personal' feature, ONLY Opera offers it (please, check for yourself: the only similar add-on for Chrome is so bug-ridden as to be unusable).

It is clear to me that by deliberately not implementing these "special" features, on the grounds that they were relatively little used, Opera are throwing away the one thing that differentiated them from the rest of the crowd. At the moment there is no reason to favour Opera over any other popular browser, and if Opera stick to their policy there never will be.

lem729

lem729

Innovations that distinguish -- Folders in a Speed Dial, Stash, Discover. Off-Road. Maybe you Don't like them, but others do, and they jump right out at you from the user interface. In the Ipad, there's Coast, a very innovative browser. There are things I prefer with Opera Browser for Android, but the interface of Coast is aesthetically very pleasing,. I think Opera still very much innovates. Go by its history, and give it time.

eyzndasky

eyzndasky

@haavard

Opera's financial results are open to anyone since it's a publicly traded company. Take a look at the investor information linked at the bottom of this page. Opera is not struggling financially, and the new Opera for desktop is growing nicely.

I didn't mean that Opera was struggling financially but that the browser is limping along, trying to become a legitimate entity instead of merely an inferior Chrome clone. As I said before... "Opera as we knew it is dead and the new Opera will struggle on for a few months but within 24 months will be absorbed by the Google team."

lem729

lem729

And there will be an American space colony on a planet circling Alpha Century in the next five years. ;)))))))))

A Former User

FWIW, the downturn that recent 15 and up critics have pointed to sounds pretty bad--a 7% loss in desktop users from Q4 2012. This has been bandied about as a response to O15 and the Blink engine. But this was a continuation of a decline that goes back to Q4 2011. 2011 saw an increase of desktop users over Q4 2010, but from Q4 2011 through Q4 2012, there was a 4% decline (followed by that 7% decline, from Q4 2012 through Q4 2013). And so the decline in desktop browser users starts from even before Opera 12 was released (assuming the decline started in the beginning of 2012). At any rate, with Opera 12 being released in mid-2012, it is an incredibly selective use of data to say that O15 caused the decline in desktop users, as O15 wasn't released until July 2013.

And, as someone who has used Chrome quite a bit since its release, I have to say that I'm looking forward to Opera's development and transition to Blink. I always told myself that if a browser vendor would ever market a version of Chrome, but support it (no, Google Groups don't count as support), like Opera has here with this user community, I'd switch. So I look forward to seeing this decline reversed, and seeing bigger and better things from Opera.

pjk0

pjk0

I love all these people who talk about being "longtime Opera users"... from version 8. :rotfl:

How about version 3, or earlier? That's me.

I have ALWAYS used Opera because it had unique and highly-configurable functionality that no other browser had, and instead of trying to push proprietary rendering quirks on the world by forcing it down people's throats en-masse with an OS (hello Microsoft, Apple) or via some other vast influential ecosystem (hello Google), it tried to maintain compatibility with INTERNET STANDARDS... you know, W3C / Tim Berners-Lee style. One of the top Opera staff was the INVENTOR of CSS, and so on. So yeah, Opera always had great CSS compatibility.

And Opera always took security much more seriously than most of their competitors, and that has always been important to me. With the advent of "Heartbleed", we can see just how important it is to fail to take these things seriously. Theo de Raadt has said that the OpenSSL team is irresponsible, and as much of a crank as I think he is a lot of the time, I think he is probably quite right about that this time. Now a bunch of Canadians have had their confidential income and tax information stolen from the national Canadian tax agency because they too relied on 'freebie' OpenSSL for citizen access to their confidential national tax accounts, and without any further testing or protections, apparently. (Hello two-factor authentication. SMDH.)

And I can actually understand how wearying it must have gotten to be for Opera after all these years, like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill for all eternity, fighting the puritanical "standards war" when the vast majority of the web and the browser vendors laugh at such things, and when it comes right down to it "money talks" and those with the money and influence will always set the DE-FACTO web standard.

So I actually don't blame them for giving up on Presto and Carakan, they got tired of always being called-out for making webpages look "wrong". "Wrong" of course only in comparison to the idiosyncracies of the currently popular browser-du-jour. And Google surely has vastly more engineering resources they can throw at optimizing a javascript engine compared to Opera, and that means a lot when it comes to maintaining state-of-the-art performance. I get that.

But Presto and Carakan are just a rendering engine and javascript engine. Those things (correct me if I'm wrong) have little or nothing to do with the UI of the browser itself.

Yet when Opera went to Opera Next, they abandoned a MASSIVE amount of UI features that made Opera much much better than ANY of the competition.

Bookmarks comes to mind first - I have a MASSIVE amount of bookmarks, and Opera went from the ABSOLUTE KING of bookmark functionality to the ABSOLUTE WORST - even worse than Internet Explorer, if that can be imagined.

Worse yet, they utterly bungled the transition. I had Opera for Android on my Android tablet, and made the mistake one day of "upgrading" Opera. Opera did not make it clear in their app description that the "upgrade" was a completely different, utterly stripped-down thing that bore almost NO resemblance to the app that "preceded" it. And when I made the mistake of installing it, not only did it NOT IMPORT ANY OF MY BOOKMARKS OR SETTINGS OR HISTORY, when I tried to re-install what they have later started referring-to as "Opera Classic" - ALL MY PREVIOUS BOOKMARKS AND SETTINGS WERE GONE - ERASED.

ARGGGHGHHHH!!

I don't want to write War and Peace here and thus will not go further into all the other missing functionality, but suffice to say I am heartbroken to admit I will have to abandon Opera on all platforms (I've used it on Windows, Linux, Mac, BlackBerry and Android), grit my teeth and learn to adapt to Firefox.

I will never use a Google browser because of their obnoxious privacy intrusions and because the day I saw how they had designed Chrome to circumvent typical organizational software restrictions by allowing people to install it into "user data folders" rather than normal application folders - something that really ticked me off as a system administrator responsible for maintaining the security of organizational and business computer systems - I vowed to never allow that virus on any system I have responsibility for.

Even Opera's former CEO has stated his disagreement with the direction the company is taking now with the browser.

That to me says it all. Truly a shame.

A Former User

But Presto and Carakan are just a rendering engine and javascript engine. Those things (correct me if I'm wrong) have little or nothing to do with the UI of the browser itself.
It's said that their old UI toolkit called "Quick" is completely dependent on Presto so it's incompatible with Chromium.

Opera for Android (...) did it NOT IMPORT ANY OF MY BOOKMARKS OR SETTINGS OR HISTORY
That didn't happen for me. It kept my data without problems.
It dropped all the bookmarks from the folders to a single Speed Dial folder which you'd have to reorganize manually though, which was and still is a terrible experience.

the day I saw how they had designed Chrome to circumvent typical organizational software restrictions by allowing people to install it into "user data folders" rather than normal application folders - something that really ticked me off as a system administrator responsible for maintaining the security of organizational and business computer systems - I vowed to never allow that virus on any system I have responsibility for.
So what do you have to say about Opera "standalone" install option and the USB/Portable versions?

beastie1

beastie1

It's said that their old UI toolkit called "Quick" is completely dependent on Presto so it's incompatible with Chromium.
That doesn't mean they can't reimplement the interface, which they obviously chose not to do.

Right now, Qt5/WebKit-based Otter Browser (still in alpha stage) looks more like old Opera than the new Opera after 5 major versions. And it's a 1-man hobby project.

By the time Otter is a year old (like new Opera next month) it will surely have more than half the features of old Opera.

Months ago I couldn't see any difference between new Opera and the oldest releases of Chrome. I still can't see any difference.

Nowadays I only visit these forums and the blogs for educational/entertainment purposes, especially now that they have dropped support for FreeBSD and it's become a dead end anyway.