That's a step in the right direction I guess lol.

Now please Opera, if you absolutely want to keep that look at least give us the option to choose between the old and the new design.

In case it was not previously posted here (I've lost track), a long history of Opera versions can be downloaded from https://get.opera.com/ftp/pub/opera/desktop/
(seems to take you to a Google link, but click on that)

I'm a major fan of the portable apps from Portableapps.com. Unfortunately, that extensive past version repository above does not apparently include those portable editions. I inquired about this at Portableapps, and was told that due to licensing issues they are not allowed to offer their versions prior to the current one. With considerable searching you might be able to find them on some third party sites, but then if you managed to do so you should then (for security reasons) also obtain the hash values of that release (CRC32, SHA-256) to confirm that they weren't tampered with. I would probably take the further step of running it by Virustotal.. Sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for this.

The Portableapps launcher is just a framework for consolidating a bunch of portable apps in what is supposed to be a more convenient structure. It is not required, any of those apps can be a la carte. (I've never bothered with their Launcher . . . but if I ever wanted to carry around a rather large collection of their portable apps on a flashdrive, I might look into it.) You just need to make a shortcut for the portable .Exe file on your Win desktop, and you're in business. As far as the Passwords / Logins are concerned, I think Opera made it super difficult -- if not quite impossible ? -- to migrate them to other Opera installations, unless you did some kind of a Cloud Sync deal, which is a category I am allergic to. NirSoft Utilities included a tool that was supposed to handle a migration like that, but it is quite old by now and may only pertain to Opera from quite a few years ago. I did have it in mind to test that at some point though.

also, would i be able to transfer my passwords between the opera one opera and the new copy of opera i'd be downloading, or would i have to write everything down before deleting opera one?

i don't know how much the opera streamlining stuff for gaming is supposed to help (or if it helps at all) since my computer's so awful i always get lag spikes regardless of what i'm playing, but the difference on vivaldi in regards to playing on roblox has been horrific.

250 ping, can't seem to be on call and play without lag every 5 seconds, and as a result i'm miserable during what should've been a fun play session with a friend. i'm trying to ask for help while my game's running smoothly and my mic ended up not working properly for god knows what reason (one of our mics always stops working during our calls), and once it got fixed and i could hear my friend, my game was so noticeably laggy that i had to turn on the profiler stats option in settings.

the lag made it so i couldn't run from any threats in the game, and i proceeded to lose hundreds of in-game dollars' worth of items to both antagonistic players and NPCs i was outrunning just fine beforehand.

at this point, i just want whatever will give me the least amount of headaches. i think i'm going to figure out how to get a version of pre-opera one opera with none of the stupid AI or bloatware features these newer versions have and the ability to update itself removed. vivaldi's nice, but i switched to opera in the first place solely because i couldn't play music and play a roblox game without the browser crashing, while i could on opera.

There used to be a place in Settings where you could select the background wallpaper. Not sure whether that remains the case. (And that is only one part of the now quite bad visual UI.)

It looks like some form of the AI came in somewhere after v. 97, the one I first updated from in terms of this discussion. I say that because in the May release of v. 99, although it was for the most part a satisfactory looking and performing reversion, when I highlight something (in order to save it to the Win clipboard) that bunch of other, stupid context menu options like in v. 101 ('Make a Joke About', 'Rephrase Like Yoda') still comes up. I wiped out the entire \App tree when I reverted Opera versions, so I don't believe this could be a holdover from 101. [Just checked that again, and it is actually a different set of useless new context menu choices added, like "Write a Haiku."]

@jcmlny,
Regarding Vivaldi, it became the primary browser -- for some time now -- on my Android cell phone. That was because it proved more reliably functional there than a few others I had tried. Haven't used it on the desktop though. (It is also Chromium-based.) I was a FireFox user on the desktop & laptop for many years. It remains in place there, although I have not been a fan of several changes that began coming into FF a few years ago. Whenever a product is good the way that it is, it seems like developers just can't resist trying to "improve" it . . . which usually winds up leading to bloatware in the case of software, and a clear dis-improvement.

If there are users who require what one reply described as cartoon colors, can you at least do those of us whose eyes are painfully bleeding the option to turn it off (or choose a tolerable color)?

I realize that introducing AI is a big thing and warrants a new release, but that's not a reason to ruin the rest of a browser that has so many devoted users. I was one of its greatest cheerleaders for many years (even bullying my husband into switching), but this new version is making my job more difficult -- the eye strain alone is reducing my productive hours -- and I regret to say I've started trying out alternatives.

O.K. -- we shall see. I never do anything confidential like online banking. I assume that any email could be read off the server, should a hacker want to do so enough. (So, keep really confidential stuff out of email.) The only issue with Opera I can recall was a couple years ago, an annoying nuisance redirection popup that was extremely difficult to get rid of. It finally got blocked, and has not put in any appearance since.

If anything comes up that is even slightly of a confidential nature, there will be LibreWolf, or a non-Chromium browser.

Some early reports had it that you could not find prior versions of Opera available for download. That turned out to be incorrect however, and here they are: https://get.opera.com/ftp/pub/opera/desktop/

Islands, Shmylands ! (I've got 25 tabs open as I type this. Substantially more than the usual, but they seem to be "organized" well enough, and are well behaved, not getting in each other's way.) I wouldn't touch ChatGPT or any AI insinuating its way into my browser, not with a 50 meter bargepole. And newsflash for y'all, the built-in Opera VPN is phony baloney, far from the real deal in that category ! Rely on it at your definite risk. I'll use an external VPN -- a carefully vetted one, -- when I feel there is a need for one. (I dropped a rather popular one, even with considerable subscription time left to run, after finding out that it had been bought out by a data-harvesting consortium.)

Aside from the islands though....I stand by what I said and what the others are saying. It's an eyesore. I hate the popup sound, I hate the colors, I hate the bubbles. No no no.

Tomorrow I am going to revert this godawful mess back to version 99, buying time for exploring alternate browsers. I already had Vivaldi demonstrated as being the most functional browser for my phone. And I already had SeaMonkey (old school type suite, a la Netscape) and a couple others on the desktop computers, as backups. But I expect to be sampling Brave and LibreWolf., among possible primary replacements. Such a Crying Shame, What You Went & Did, Opera !

to say the homogenous, "sleek" (in the company's attempt to look futuristic they instead look cheap and unoriginal like the countless companies that have tried to rebrand from "design everyone was fine with" to "disgusting clunky mess with boxes and curved corners around everything"), soulless corporatization of all website UI into godawful spacing, unused empty space because "why not", and unnecessary sectioning and boxes around literally everything is a plague on the internet is the understatement of the century.

also, that startup window and noise is so corny. i thought we left that concept behind with windows XP? i never close the browser anyway, so it seems useless to add something a majority of users won't see unless they decide "hey, let me give my poor computer a break".

nobody asked for this UI redesign. in general, there seems to be this misconception at companies that people somehow appreciate having a website or browser or app they have no issues using (and by extension, no issues with the appearance of) being altered with no warning or requests for feedback or alterations beforehand, especially when this change doesn't appear to be reversible for people who -- shocker -- don't like this repulsive design.

if you want to roll out new features, it's infinitely easier to make them experimental and then add them as fully fledged options once they've been finalized (see: all the financial things i disabled because i'd never trust a browser with my financial information and all the crypto things i disabled because it's crypto).

i also love how they finally added tab grouping, but only for tabs that are opened from one another (and of course the browser was too stupid to determine whether i had any tabs that would fit this criteria). i don't use the workspace feature because to be frank i forget it exists 9 times out of 10. the forgettability of this feature once led me to believing i had accidentally wiped out all of my pinned and open tabs in a session, so i started anew, only to find my original workspace later on.

i'm going to hope someone releases some sort of extension on tampermonkey or the extensions market to rectify the multiple awful, desultory looking design choices like people did when tumblr tried to twittify their dashboard.

unfortunately, i don't know if i can ever find another browser that'll satisfy my requirements for one other than opera (i only switched to opera in the first place because its coding is based off of chrome's, so i knew i'd be familiar with it, and chrome was so ridiculously laggy i couldn't even play music and play a video game at the same time with the youtube tab playing music being the only tab open).

Everything everyone said in this thread is correct. I didn't even update it on purpose because I'd seen how it looked updated and decided I didn't like it, but it updated on its own and it's just a massive disappointment and frustration.

At the very least, I just want the option to return to the old browser layout. I really enjoyed what Opera brought to the table before this update and made it my primary browser because of it. I'm fully prepared to drop it if this is the new normal.

What's really annoying since the redesign is the placement of the mute button in the tabs bar.
I have many tabs open and hit in 4/5 times the mute button instead of navigating to the tab.
The placement in the old design was much more intuitive with less precise clicking, especially with a touchpad. Can you have a look at this?

PS: I use Opera as my main browser since 2001.
The tab grouping feature is pretty cool, btw. Thumbs up for that.

1. Set back the Old look and feel (No curved boundaries)
2. Font brightness is very low. Redesigned to Set it Good Brightness.
3. Title bar and address bar height is more compared to old version.
4. Remove the Flash startup animation.
5. Frequently occurring Browser Memory Issue. Then, needs to restart the web page.