Recent Change in Speed Dial Behavior

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Very recently, as in less than a month ago, I began to notice that the images for the sites that I have saved links to on my Speed Dial page have been . . . I dunno . . . slipping away?

Some, but not all, would revert to the default colored-rectangle-with-all-or-part-of-the-website-name-in-text version.

I could set them back and they'd stay that way for a little while and then they'd slip away again.

The length of time they'd remain was short and on occasion that wouldn't work at all.

Now, even the colored-rectangle-with-all-or-part-of-the-website-name-in-text version isn't reliably showing up. Occasionally, all I get are faintly outlined rectangles with nothing in them at all (not blank, just transparent rectangles showing the static artwork I chose to set as my Speed Dial background behind them).

I've tried "refreshing" Opera (the instructions on that are very misleading - I'm a 30-year IT pro and I STILL ended up wiping all my extensions, not disabling them as the instructions suggested would happen - different issue - I simply reinstalled them all - but PITA).

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Opera.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Opera on a different drive.

It feels very much as if a poorly implement change went in somewhere and it's completely horked up the Speed Dial page, not just the ability to select the image of choice from those available on the target website (very useful when you have, say, five Speed Dial entries for the same parent site, but you need to be able to visually distinguish the forums from the catalog from the order history from the . . . . ), but even the basic functionality of "show me SOMETHING for this particular Speed Dial entry.

I cannot find a comprehensive change log of what the INTENDED changes were in any of the recent updates.

If this was, in fact, a poorly implemented change, I really need it backed out until it's been more thoroughly tested.

If this is intended behavior, I'd like someone (other than a Forum FanBoy) to explain to me what the intent is. Why would a feature that worked this well be removed? Why would the default behavior not function correctly?

It would be a royal PITA to move my primary browser activity to Firefox, but I'm about this close (holds fingers very close together but not quite touching) to doing so. The Speed Dial features that have inexplicably disappeared or broken in the past three or four weeks are the primary benefit to using Opera for me (I have very, very good anti-virus and anti-malware protection from a paid service - I don't need or want VPN - and there isn't much else that differentiates Opera from every other browser out there (discounting the advertising delivery system disguised as a browser that is Chrome - I'd burn my computer to the ground before I relied on that POS).

Any guidance on what happened to break this and what is being done to fix it and what timeline I can expect for that fix would be very much appreciated.