Enforced automatic updates ?

A Former User

First, I made a quick search in this forum and since I did not find any one discussing this, I started this discussion.

I am on Opera version+build 23.0.1522.60, on Win7 Home Premium 32bit SP1. And yesterday I noticed something in the address bar; the former two icons for speed dial and stash are now unified where a click on it triggers a popup to add page to speed dial, stash, or bookmarks bar. This told me that Opera had auto-updated, so I went to settings to set back to user decided update, but could not find any option.

So, does Opera only update automatically from now on ? Sorry if there happens to be info regarding this somewhere on the page that I missed.

A Former User

It does automatically update now, there was been a lot of complaints about this on the developer blogs, but it doesn't look as if it's changing anytime soon.
You can stop this by adding a switch to the startup shortcut, but this disables all updates, even manual ones.
Unless you use a USB install, you will probably find a task in the Windows Task Scheduler which handles the updating, disabling this may well stop it too, but I haven't personally tried this as I use a USB install anyway, which only updates manually.

blackbird71

blackbird71

...
So, does Opera only update automatically from now on ? Sorry if there happens to be info regarding this somewhere on the page that I missed.

Correct. Updates to the Blink Opera versions are designed to occur automatically, and there is currently no user setting to block it from occurring. One can manually delete or rename Opera's updater file to achieve auto-update blocking (see http://www.iterative.info/2014/01/disable-auto-update-on-opera.html), but that isn't a fully permanent solution (Opera will replace the file with a working copy at the next install, however that install is made to occur). Also, deleting/renaming the updater file blocks the manual latest-version check from within Opera.

One can also use this command to manually start Opera: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera\launcher.exe" --disable-update . Alternatively, as @davehawley has noted, if you start Opera from a shortcut (as most users do), you can: right-click the Opera shortcut > Properties > in the "Target" box, alter the command to include the --disable-update text as shown above (with one space before the --) > OK. However, note that this disabling method only works for those specific Opera instances started by either that special command line or via altered shortcuts. If Opera is ever started in any other way (including by clicking on a URL hot-link in a document while Opera is not open), a "normal" instance of Opera will be started and will, of course auto-update itself. So this --disable-update technique is far from air-tight if a user wishes to be sure his Opera version does not auto-update.

There are indeed multiple threads buried somewhere within these forums about this, but the forum search capability... uhmm... leaves a lot to be desired in retrieving relevant topics. The better approach if the forum search fails to achieve results is to use a good Internet search engine.

A Former User

@davehawley, @blackbird71, Thanks you both for the detaled explanations.