It's funny to see Leushino making the rounds still having lots of time to ensure no criticism of Opera new version goes unpunished...

It would be interesting to analyze the many posts he makes daily: it seems astounding and let me tell you I moderate a forum that's into Alexa's top 1000 for the last 10 years, so I know users.

I rate him with legendary fans like the guy that offered the actor that plays Draco Malfoy to adopt him and take him to live in a mansion he had designed for "Draco", called "Malfoy Manor" (and I'm not making this up: http://www.realbollywood.com/2010/09/hardcore-fan-spooks-harry-potter-star-tom-felton-adoption-scheme-home.html ).

Am I exaggerating? I don't think so: when fans are involved nothing is too extreme. I can remember the guy that threatened his parents with self immolation if he could not watch in person all the cricket India's team matches (yeah, since 2003, he has gone to all of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudhir_Kumar_Chaudhary).

So, I say, let's leushino show all of us how you can be in love... with a browser.

Hey, I have nothing against Leushino: this is a free world (I hope) and I'm in favor of any kind of marriage, even if you marry with a browser. Actually, I only oppose heterosexual marriage, it's the doom of most men. However, I digress.

I think Leushino is kind of entertaining, at least to me: he seems a certified retired guy that has no other thing in life to do, with all due respect, which is not a lot of respect, having seen how he treats users.

He (and now Mr. Lem729) is the worst "new Opera" public relations "official", if you follow my drift.

That's a lot to be said, given the fact that Opera has made a terrible work of explaining to customers what are its goals, or better yet, has ignored them insistently.

I guess that's what characterizes teachers that do not work in research: they love theory and abhors deviations from official positions.

Anyway, I just checked Opera 26, it's still not there and, I believe, for at least half the users of Old Opera will never be: we are waiting for something else.

I guess that's why so many times we read a guy that claims that "BrowserSoft 3.1" is the best thing he has found: we are still waiting for a new "Messiah", like the Chosen People do.

Why?

Well, if you want to keep reading (which I doubt... :)), Opera is a niche browser, the only deal they made was for Nintendo, so it is the browser of the 2%.

The new browser has split the community: I'd say power users (1%?) are still attached to the features they needed for work and learned to rely on security provided by an obscure and very well protected engine.

Users that used Opera just for the bling changed happily to a non secure engine, surely they do not have the tools or the knowledge to realize what has happened to their computers: they claim Opera is better than Chrome and shares its characteristics.

In that, they're right. They do not need secure environments (I fail to see how a person that requires security would use Blink) and they have plenty of time in their hands to spend clicking around and downloading link by link, as the time they have spent in these threads show.

So, Opera achieved its goal: they renounced to create a quality browser (they did not have the market share because they never played the market, like Firefox tried or Chrome, IE and Safari achieved) and they are chugging along, happy with users like Leushino, that make enough noise so there is no consensus on what is needed for quality, so their transferred to their browser and allowed the company to halve the number of workers.

It's exactly like Social Security.

Happy New Year, people, I resume my search for Opera 12.17 and let you enjoy Opera 26 or whatever is the number of the iteration that still tries to catch Chrome (hahaha, nice one).

This is a customer support site here, so it's also the place for functionnal and technical regression alerts !

Are the following features available in Opera 23 that are in the 12.17:

1. content blocking
2. Ability to view the "alt" tag when images fail to load
3. Ability to get a menu bar back
4. Changing look and feel to dialog based from browser based like Chrome
5. use of proxy server separate from the Windows proxy
   It seems like the 12 is better than the 23 since it has all the features I use.

... Why did you break the only complete browser available? The Opera 24 now on my work machine is comprehensively broken, just like Internet Explorer ... No I'm not going to search around for extensions, I'm not going to introduce more risk on my work machine by installing third party applications, ... I can't believe this decision was made, I've defended my use of Opera to everyone, promoted it, and now I'm in mourning for a very beloved friend .

The Opera desktop browser was redesigned with the idea of reducing development/maintenance costs to Opera ASA. Continuing with the old Presto Opera codebase was deemed too cumbersome, in terms of keeping it current with the multitude of changing Internet protocols and provisioning the browser interfaces for the new features constantly evolving on websites. By going to the Blink codebase, originally developed for Chrome/Chromium, much of the cost/effort for maintaining the core of the browser could be off-loaded to the Blink/chromium community, and Opera's developer efforts could be focused on developing the user interfaces and tweaking "performance" of the various browsers it makes.

With a decision to redesign also came the opportunity to direct the new design toward attracting a broader user-base in the marketplace by aiming the browser appearance and feature-set in a direction that would presumably appeal to the range of user tastes theorized for the new user-base. The "demographics" and supposed usage-modes of that broader base implied a minimalistic browser appearance with greatly consolidated features and controls, and with most detailed adjustments or features exported to 3rd-party "extensions". Only time and the marketplace will determine whether Opera's decision was a good one.

The downside of all this has had its greatest negative impact on users in the workplace/enterprise/technical environment, who had come to rely on the countless built-in configurability and flexibility aspects of Presto Opera for their workflow. Most of that suddenly evaporated, with only some of it being available via extensions, and even those operated in unfamiliar and often-inferior ways to the features included in the old Presto versions. They also place different hardware demands and interfacing/updating/security issues that can conflict in a workplace or technical environment.

For such users, and I'm one of them, the first recourse was to cling to the old Presto Opera versions. But those browsers are conceptually and functionally at least 2 years old (probably more, if one accounts for typical developer lead-time for incorporating improvements and needed updates); the Presto browsers are now showing their age in accelerating incompatibility ways. The next recourse of such users has been to find an alternative browser that allows that browser to be configured for use as similarly as possible to Presto Opera, and that quest has led many to Firefox plus a handful of extensions. Unfortunately, Firefox itself is evolving in a direction away from the workplace/technical user, and its current 'equivalence' to Presto Opera is only so-so. Hence much of the technical-user angst that has emerged in forum posts over the past year or two.

At the end of the day, things in the browser world are what they are. Users in the technical/workplace world are simply going to have to deal with it as it now is and adapt as best they can, while constantly remaining on lookout for signs that a browser brand somewhere has made a move to return to providing built-in configuability and rich feature-sets. Whether that will eventually be Opera or some other perhaps as-yet-unknown brand remains to be seen...

No more. Why? Why did you break the only complete browser available? The Opera 24 now on my work machine is comprehensively broken, just like Internet Explorer, I can't set the proxy, because it tells me to talk to my system administrator as it's using the Internet Explorer settings (which is actually me, I can get at it if I log on as an admin, but it's a pain to switch users to do it). The only browser I've got now, which will obey me, is Firefox! Congratulations, your browser is now a clone of all the others, with less functionality.

No I'm not going to search around for extensions, I'm not going to introduce more risk on my work machine by installing third party applications, Opera at work, for me, sadly, is now in the past.

I can't believe this decision was made, I've defended my use of Opera to everyone, promoted it, and now I'm in mourning for a very beloved friend :(.

If you like the Old Opera and absolutely hate the new Opera, try the New Chromium Blink based Slimjet Browser

Please stop the spam.

Look... why are you here? If YOU don't like the new Opera, then go enjoy your Slimjet and be happy. But stop trying to stir up trouble here. You can be thankful I'm not a moderator or I would ban you outright. The forum exists to help users with issues with the browser...not whiners and malcontents.

Pleasant surprise meeting you here again Leushino, hope everything is going well

There are different things to consider:

• technical things: the browser must be up-to date and presto was not.
• I guess many IE users were happy for an alternative
• I suppose there were too few "powerusers" who liked the timesaving features in Presto very much. And Opera's Mangement didn't care. They went for the money.
• I encounter this behaviour everywhere: People go for looks and shinyness, funny gadgets and stuff like that. Just look at all the people who open two seperat Windows-explorer-windows to copy folders with their mouse. I guess only 1% uses a "Norton Commander"- like prog that sports two panes like xplorer² ( http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm ). There is so much time to be saved in a day at office and few realize how it can be done.

It's no doubt that presto was too old. I stopped using ver. 12.17 when I got too many faults in page display etc. Companywise it may have been a wise decision to switch to a new kernel and discontinue presto. But the old users want their features back! And someone like lem729 who admits "I used some of the features in Presto. I didn't use a lot of them. Still, I generally enjoyed the browser. I liked the skins and colors..." is not the person to judge this. He does simply not know what others are talking about. What he says about the new Opera is right so far, but he does not know what powerusers are missing. E. g: " I think it's great how you can -- among other ways to add art to it -- simply right click on a jpg on the internet, and instantly have it saved as wallpaper for the Speed Dial." - now that's childish feature... it's like a wallpaper on the desktop. I see my desktop only for some seconds afer a reboot the same goes for wallpapers for the Speed Dial.
I tried Chrookmarks. It is nearly no improvement compared with the plain Opera25. But it always collapses my folders! That's timeconsuming.
We had "Turbo mode" before. And SpeedDial. Ok, stash is new... nice, but not a big thing.
But what has gone:

Bookmarks with the functionality as they used to be,
panels
right-klick email from page
right-klick image and mark it as advertisement and block it (so beautiful)
auto fill in forms
stack tabs easily
accessable buttons to enable: javascript, sound in webpage, plugins, etc.
email!

We had a all-in-one browser! No need to look for "extensions". What do you guess how much time did I waste browsing through extensions?! 1001 useless things! It's a drag looking for the useful one in all the rubbish. I did that with Firefox which I must use at work.
What comes next: You must update all these extensions seperately. Some years ago I would compare Opera against FF with my friends: They would say: "You can have that in FF if you install these 10-20 extensions!" I would say: "Thank you very much!" Today I must do the same...

Can you explain to me why Chrome is the most used browser if it did not have all features Presto had?

I tried Chrookmarks. It is nearly no improvement compared with the plain Opera25. But it always collapses my folders! That's timeconsuming.

We had "Turbo mode" before. And SpeedDial. Ok, stash is new... nice, but not a big thing.

But what has gone:

• Bookmarks with the functionality as they used to be,
• panels
• right-klick email from page
• right-klick image and mark it as advertisement and block it (so beautiful)
• auto fill in forms
• stack tabs easily
• accessable buttons to enable: javascript, sound in webpage, plugins, etc.
• email!

We had a all-in-one browser! No need to look for "extensions". What do you guess how much time did I waste browsing through extensions?! 1001 useless things! It's a drag looking for the useful one in all the rubbish. I did that with Firefox which I must use at work.
What comes next: You must update all these extensions seperately. Some years ago I would compare Opera against FF with my friends: They would say: "You can have that in FF if you install these 10-20 extensions!" I would say: "Thank you very much!" Today I must do the same...