why do you think that someone need a clone of Chrome?

We don't think, we know. The old rendering engine was falling behind technologically and the dev team felt their resources would be better utilized by adopting a renderer made by someone else and focusing on building a good UI for it instead of trying to compete with companies like Google and Microsoft. The old Opera UI was not compatible with the new renderer and it would have taken more work to adapt it then start from scratch. So, here we are.

When I installed Chrome, many times ago, it lasted not more than 20 minutes, then I removed.
Same for this Opera 26.
My question is: why do you think that someone need a clone of Chrome?

This thing will cause Opera to loose all its (few) old users without any reason to get new ones. The death of a software.

Small improvements on the version 12 would have been much more appreciated than a new Chrome.
Actually, firefox is more similar to the "Opera" we know and want than Opera 26.

Anyway, thank you for all your work on the releases until the 12.17. I'll be with that until I'll be forced to finally move to firefox or something else. Not chrome... for sure!

Google had downgraded half of their websites to older versions (image search, maps, etc) with less functionality.

Google provides a simplified and poorly functional contentet for Opera 12.
But it can be easily fixed with a User-Agent masking via override.ini.

P.S.: And Chropera still has a capability issies too..

But weirdly, things are actually better now than a couple of years ago. Google, Hotmail etc. started being troublesome for a while but work fine for me now. Images was never a problem, although I hated what they did with the pop-over image back then. It recently reverted back to a simple list of thumbnails, thank goodness... I thought it could be since Presto was "not modern" but I get the same old-style images page in IE as well.

Presto still has no problems with 99.99% of the internet I see

When I finally made the change I couldn't get and of my banking or credit card websites to load because of certificate issues. Outlook/Hotmail wouldn't log in. Gmail was spotty. Google had downgraded half of their websites to older versions (image search, maps, etc) with less functionality. Forums that I frequented that used Captchas had their layouts all messed up. Several websites had general display issues. I haven't used 12 since last year and I doubt its gotten any better with age.

Seems every time it is working fine and I get it configured the way I want it, there comes another upgrade and I start all over again.
So Opera 26 loaded yesterday.

So, wait. Every time you upgrade the change something, and you were using Opera 12... so you haven't upgraded in 2 years? Seriously? You've going to come here acting like it was some big recent change and you're complaining about something that started 2 years ago? Really? Check the news mate, they stopped supporting Opera 12 2 years ago. Outside of a minor patch to fix the heartbleed issue they haven't done anything to it. Support for Opera 12 went away quite awhile ago.

Presto still has no problems with 99.99% of the internet I see... (I just popped in to check if Chrome Opera has caught up with 12. Apparently not. See you next year. )

POCr@p!

Welp, can't say I'm sad to see the back of you.

That explains everything!

I blew off chrome a long time ago!

POCr@p!

MC

I do still have the passwords in the new version but I don't see anyway to use an auto login?

Go to a login page, your info will be automatically filled.

I tried clicking in the login box of a couple of sites .. I half expected a drop down menu to come up like lastpass but alas .. no.

Start typing your username/login or just click on the down arrow key.

Now some news sites are full of flashing animated banners and ads - stuff that can trigger epileptic fits and migraines in some of us.
In Opera 12 I had the facility to suppress unwanted content like that.

You can avoid flash based ads by setting plugins to "click to play". You can also use some extensions to block other pages' contents.

I hadn't even noticed the absence of the auto-login feature yet. That's a deal-breaker, too.

It's still there, just go to a login page.

Why in the world would they do away with the wand?

They didn't remove the wand, or the add blocker or any of the other features you are talking about. Opera 12 was the last version of that web browser. It used a rendering engine called Presto and it was too difficult to maintain and keep current with the limited resources of the dev team. So they made a brand new web browser from scratch that used the same rendering engine as Chrome. This required them to reprogram everything from scratch. So it wasn't removed, it just hasn't been re-added yet. It took 18 years to get the old Opera to where it was. the new Opera is less than 2 years old.

so stupid !!!!

Yep, just upgraded from 12 and yes, I still have that version.
(And looks like I'll be keeping it around)

Why in the world would they do away with the wand?

I do still have the passwords in the new version but I don't see anyway to use an auto login?

I tried clicking in the login box of a couple of sites .. I half expected a drop down menu to come up like lastpass but alas .. no. 8(

MC

I hadn't even noticed the absence of the auto-login feature yet. That's a deal-breaker, too.

Won't be using it. I can see no advantage to Opera 25 over 12, only disadvantages. In my opinion it's a downgrade, not an upgrade.

MC