What still bugs me in opera (on linux and in general)...

A Former User

Hello everyone

It has been a long time since I wanted to make a thread like this and express my opinions and complaints, so here it goes. The following list is at least a year old, so please bear with me if anything is already fixed. Plus, if something is fixed, it is mentioned.
So, leaving aside the most common issues of libffmpeg and the ugly csd, here I go! Please share your thoughts too.

- Disclaimer about codecs
Ok, there can not be h264 and other proprietary codec support anytime soon due to licencing issues. But please put a small note either on the browser's very first launch or after the package installation so that the end user knows what to expect and not spam the forum with stuff that has been discussed in every single way.

- Network hogging on first launch (fixed at v55 or so)
Every single time I launch opera after a fresh boot, opera eats all my bandwidth for 20-30 seconds. Other pages load slower than snails, my internet radio station skips and the iptv service on the other room stops completely! Ok, I understand that this is telemetry stuff that is sent back, but we are talking about 20MB of stuff (that is what my connection can send at 800kb/s for 30 sec)! And I do not use news on start page or my flow or something similar!
Luckily, this was addressed in v55 or so by disabling "Send news usage data to improve personalization", "Help improve Opera by sending feature usage information" and "Automatically send crash reports to Opera" under privacy and security.

- Old help pages
Please remove all the presto related help pages. Opera no longer supports npapi plugins, it does not have the f12 menu and many more. Nowadays, it is as obsolete as internet explorer 8. Plain and simple

- Slow history search
Searching opera's history from that search box on the top is slow, period. In fact, it is so slow that most of the time it is faster to go back to google, search again for the same thing, find it and visit it from there. On the same system, searching through firefox's and chromium's history is a lot faster.

- Search engines
Those are search engines on the right click menu.
First of all, I would love to remove the ones I do not use (all but google).
Second, I would like to be able to edit the default ones, because wikipedia points to the greek version of the site, which is poor compared to the english one.
Third, I would like to be able to re-order the ones I have added myself.
For all the above issues, there is a file you can edit (~/.config/opera/default_partner_content.json), but opera won't start after you edit it

- Documentation for chromium's command line switches
From time to time, someone asks about something that can only be resolved by using a command line switch on opera's shortcut. Instead of searching through chromium's countless command line switches and then testing which ones work with opera and which ones don't, please provide us with the ones that do. And no, the output of opera --help is not helpful.

- Extensions bar out of nowhere
From time to time, the extension bar pops up on the side of opera for no reason. I have no extensions that use the side bar, only ublock origin, so why does it pop up?

sgunhouse

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer

On that last one - perhaps there is a keyboard shortcut?

A Former User

There is, ctrl+shift+s, but I definitely don't press it accidentally.

sgunhouse

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer

Strange ... I haven't seen the extension sidebar mysteriously appear. I understand the regular sidebar can appear if you've enabled one of the chat apps and received a message in that app. You said you don't have any sidebar extensions - that implies you do have other extensions. Which ones?

(I fixed your typo, and hence deleted the comment about it.)

A Former User

I only have ublock origin (for obvious reasons), autoscroll (because chromium based browsers do NOT scroll the page when you click the middle mouse button) and gif jam (because I have to stop some animations on the smileys on a forum).

Oddly, only ublock origin appears in the extensions bar, which means it is "extetensions bar" capable. Upon clicking it, the usual logger of ublock comes up in the sidebar, so that's probably why.

netwiper

netwiper This post is deleted!

SilverFox66

SilverFox66 @Guest

@jimunderscorep said in What still bugs me in opera (on linux and in general)...:

- Extensions bar out of nowhere
From time to time, the extension bar pops up on the side of opera for no reason. I have no extensions that use the side bar, only ublock origin, so why does it pop up?

I have had this issue a few times, recently also. The extensions sidebar just appears for no reason.

A Former User

It closes Whatsapp web a few seconds when i Keep the session started. Fedora 29 GNOME.

A Former User

Let me add a couple more...

- Keeping up with chromium releases
As of today (March 22nd, 2019), opera stable is still based on chromium 71, which means it lags 2 major versions behind,
That delay became visible, again, yesterday that ubuntu upgraded chromium and chromium ffmpeg codecs to 73 and there are already THREE threads with the usual "vids are not playing today, but they did play yesterday" complaint. And all of them are from ubuntu (or ubuntu-based distro) users.
Its more than obvious that opera's 3 channels of development (stable, beta and developer) just can't keep up with chromium's 3 (stable, beta and dev). So why don't wou just drop one and keep stable and beta for instance, like you do on the for mobile opera and opera mini?
I hate to say it, but I assume you know which chromium based browser, and a good opera alternative (as considered by many people but not me) does that: vivaldi. (stable and snapshot versions).

- Stable releases tied to ubuntu's releases of chromium (?)
I am pretty sure the opera team is waiting for ubuntu to package the next version of chromium before releasing the next version in line for stable.
Of course this does not apply for the last 2 versions of chromium, because of the above reason.
So, although I can not recall the exact version or opera and chromium, I can recall at least one time that the slow pokes of ubuntu packaged chromium 3-4 WEEKS after its official release. And opera followed, relaasing the next version on stable channel a couple of days later. Needless to say that almost ALL distros had packaged chromium in the first 10 days or so.
Why should someone, regardless of distro, wait for ubuntu's maintainers in order to see an update for his/her main browser?

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

Each version of Opera is based on a version of Chromium. So when a new stable version is released, a newer version of Chromium will be there.

A Former User

You are totally wrong on that, and here is the proof. Opera 58 is based on chromium 71 and that chromium version was released 3 months ago

https://help.opera.com/en/opera-version-history/

Opera 59 (chromium 72 based) is not in beta anymore, while opera 60 (chromium 73 based) is on both beta and developer channels. In fact, given the existing mess, I would not be suprised if opera stable skipped 59 completely and went straight to 60. That would be the best solution imho.

On top of that, let me make an example of how chromium's versioning works in relation to time, and compare it to how opera's versioning does.

Today, chromium 73 is in stable, 74 is in beta and 75 is in dev. The day that 74 reaches stable, 75 will become beta and 76 will become dev. On the very same day, without any delay.
The same happens in firefox too, but firefox is a different story, not related to ours.
In opera though, things are different. I will use a different set of version numbers because today's is messed up with opera stable being on 58 and both beta and developer being at 60, Let's say opera stable is at 58, opera beta is at 59 and opera developer is at 60 today, so that the number "match".
If opera 59 becomes stable tomorrow, opera beta will stay at 59 and developer will stay at 60 for some time When will they be updated? Sometime in the following days and not on the same day again, because there is no real schedule about it!

And that is what bugs me above when I say that 3 branches are too much for the devs to handle.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

And what it has to do with what I said?

Opera 58 is based on Chromium 71, Opera 59 would be based on 72 and 60 is based on 73, that's what I said.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

I guess that because of Reborn 3 there was a delay in Opera releases and that's why they are so behind in what regards to Chromium versions.

A Former User

The schedule example? It has nothing to do with what you said.
I was just pointing out that today's opera stable is not based on today's (or even the previous) version of chromium but on an even older one. You said that there is one stable version of opera for each stable version of chromium and I proved you wrong.

And you are probably right about the delay due to reborn 3, but try explaining that to a simple user like the ones that started the 3 threads yesterday. All with a different subject/issue yet all pointing to the same problem.
For most of us, regular functionality is more important than a redesign.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

You didn't prove anything. What I said was that each version of Opera is based on a version of Chromium and that's correct.

A Former User

Since my other thread about csd was locked without any notification or explanation, even with a pm, I add the bad csd as another annoyance.

- Ugly csd that can not be removed
https://forums.opera.com/topic/28146/opera-55-getting-rid-of-that-ugly-csd/

p.s. If there is any mod that knows the reason it was locked, please pm me.

A Former User

Lets add one more.

- Removal of opera and opera-next from the deb repo
They both are on v12.16, the last one using presto as the rendering engine, and they must have been there since 2014 or so.
Today, they are not even installable, due to the prehistoric dependencies they want

$ sudo apt-get install opera
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 opera : Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>= 0.10.16) but it is not installable
         Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.15) but it is not installable
         Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

$ sudo apt-get install opera-next 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 opera-next : Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>= 0.10.16) but it is not installable
              Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.15) but it is not installable
              Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

So please remove them

Luckily, the yum (rpm) side of the repo contains only the latest packages.

A Former User

There is a chromium based browser that I refused to use because it was based on electron, or actually a fork of it. When I discovered that it is no longer based on it, I installed it so as to check how it compares to opera, especially on the issues I mention on this thread.
So, after a month of usage, here it goes.

Codecs
It is built so as to the system's ffmpeg libraries, so its h264 (and other html5 codec) support is on par with the other browsers on the system.
In fact, I wanted to confirm it that much, that I asked the devs themselves on the project's page on github and they provided all the info.
I learned that the build flag
USE_SYSTEM_FFMPEG=true or false
that I had mentioned months ago no longer exists and now the same thing is done via 2 build flags
proprietary_codecs = true
and
ffmpeg_branding = "Chrome"
I checked them on chromium's build options on debian and arch and they are the same.

Search engines
Although there is no way to select the search engine when you right click on some highlighted text, because it defaults to google (or the one you select as default in options), you can delete the search engines you do not use.

Keeping up with chromium releases
I have to admit that its devs are doing a great work on that. There is a new release every time a new chromium release comes out from upstream.
Not even the chromium maintainers from my distro are that fast!
And for that reason, their releases are not tied to ubuntu's releases

Csd
Although the browser does come with its own csd, it can be disabled through its options menu.

These are my findings so far. There are also some other, less important (to me at least), e.g. the compatibility with extensions from the chrome store.
I won't be leaving opera anytime soon, but I think that if the devs of a lesser known browser can do all that, I am sure that the opera ones can too.

A Former User

Asking for a friend: what is the name of the browser?

A Former User

Let me add one more.

- Removal of the 32bit packages of chromium-based opera.
Since opera has dropped support for 32bit 2+years ago, please remove the 32bit packages from both the deb and the rpm repo.
Assuming that someone is advanced enough to first install opera's repo and then the browser from it, he can install opera's 32 bit version because the packages are still there! And this leads to more issues, like the one described here
https://forums.opera.com/topic/30291/www-lloydsbank-com-crashes-opera/