Opera is not based on Chrome, Opera is based on Chromium and they aren't the same thing.

And as Leo has already informed you, it is NOT based on Chrome. If I wanted Chrome, I would download and use Chrome.

C'mon guys, this is a petty argument and on top of that it is hair-splitting just to get the last word in. Even on the Chromium Wiki ( https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome ), written by the guys who should know it after all, it is stated that "Google Chrome is the Chromium open source project built, packaged, and distributed by Google".

While it is technically correct to say that the new Opera is based on Chromium, you can't expect every Opera user out there to be that computer-savvy to know the difference between an open source project and the slightly edited version Google puts out. You're doing nobody any good with that, because this kind of behavior from some of the most active people on this forum, it can only lead to users deciding this place is too hostile for them to stay. If that's your intention however, you're certainly doing a fine job in mobbing the critics and driving them away from Opera forever.

Well, let me answer that point by point:

• Bookmarks: If you download the Opera Developer, which is currently at v25.0.1597.0, you will have the first implementation of a bookmarks management again. If you activate that in the flags however, your stash will disappear. It's not ready for productive use in my opinion and it is one missing feature among many, but at least on this one, Opera is going in the right direction.

• Session saving: Opera already saves and loads your current session, but you were probably thinking about the loading and saving of sessions like Opera did until version 12. In that case, you will definitely need an extension like OneTab, which can save all currently opened tabs of your window into one tab-group. Said tab-group can then be restored with a single click in the OneTab list, which you can call up with a custom shortcut (see the button at the bottom of the extensions page for that configuration).

• Advanced settings: That's one of the remaining weaknesses of Opera, unfortunately. There does exist an extension called "Site-specific Preferences" ( https://addons.opera.com/de/extensions/details/site-specific-preferences/?display=en ), but I haven't tested it yet. Looking at its screenshots, it doesn't appear to be nearly as extensive as the original feature of Opera 12.

In general, you have to view the current Opera as a Google Chrome browser with a touch of Opera. That may be cynical if you consider that the browser has been in development for more than a year by now, but feature-wise it is true nonetheless. Still, one can learn to live with it and there are certainly some extensions to make the browser useable, more for some people and less for others.

If you're looking to get back the majority of the old feature-set from version 12 or earlier, then you might never be satisfied with this browser again. With their move to Blink, Opera seems to have undergone a considerable change of direction for their browser development towards the casual user. This may not have been said this explicitly of course, but reading between the lines and looking closely at every single changelog from version 15 to 23 will tell you a lot.

On a personal note: there are a number of hopeful independent and open source developments going on, but they're nowhere near ready to replace Opera 12 yet. Otter Browser is planned as a full-out replacement with the WebKit engine (through QTWebEngine), while QupZilla is an interesting alternative with some similarities as well. Both are already closer to the often mentioned Opera 12 already than Opera 23, but I wouldn't use either of them productively for some time yet.

Well, there are three SlimJet features that neither Chrome nor Opera can offer satisfactory alternatives for. Lets make a list of them:

• Customizable toolbar. There's not even a tiny bit of re-arranging or hiding possible with Opera or Chrome. Why would I want that? For some reason, a number of extension icons keep switching places between browser sessions in Opera, which is really annoying.
• Form filler. While Opera and Chrome do at least offer to save the log-in data of websites, the SlimJet form-filler is very easy to access and looks quite a bit like the solution of AvantBrowser. Said form/log-in data handling is probably the most comfortable one I've seen thus far, so why not have access to it in a Chrome-like browser as well?
• URL alias. This looks quite interesting, because SlimJet apparently offers the use of some kind of commands here. In Opera or Chrome, it doesn't matter which, your input in the omnibar and the results aren't customizable a lot (or at all). The following only has to do with the aliases peripherically, but one of Opera's big upsets is the lock on its standard search engines. Because I don't want a third party to know all of my search queries, the new Opera isn't even in contention for being my primary browser.

At the moment I'm in no particular hurry to switch back to Opera from Firefox, so I'm seeing the browser's continued development rather relaxed Still, what I wanted to express was, that the bookmark manager has a long way to go yet until it can compete with the old one from Opera's good old days. I hope it gets there one of these days.

christoph142,

Maybe you guys should have a look at Opera Dev 25 with its all-new opera://bookmarks.
Maybe this can brighten your day a bit

Finally Opera introduced this useful feature! Having said that, I was happy for all of five seconds, before I became deflated again. Yes they're definitely doing the right thing and working towards the right direction in terms of functionality and usability, but the new Bookmarks manager feels a little half-cooked to me.

If it were only the reason that you can't create nested folders, it would be the least of my problems. The fact of the matter is, that maintaining a bookmarks "database" filled with several hundred links is not possible without a proper structure. I know that, because I initially tried using my bookmarks with the Speed Dial in Opera 15 after I got them imported. It didn't work then and I can say with confidence, that it won't work now in their new iteration of bookmarks either.

Where Opera 25 really lets me down is the lack of management functionality. After I turned away from Opera 12 out of necessity, I found the Firefox Library just as good in practical use. The holy grail of bookmarks management needs to have some statistics (time of last visit, number of visits, time added, time last changed) and even some automation (ie http return code). Even worse for Opera 25, you can't use ANY kind of sorting on a larger list of bookmarks, except for moving them manually - one by one by one, you get the idea.

Not everybody requires a functionality like that, I understand that well enough. It is essential for me however and Opera has consistently disappointed me for the past year on that. Speed Dial, forget it. Stash, not even remotely possible. Bookmarks toolbar, nope. New Bookmarks manager, closer but no cigar. Some web-based bookmarks manager, maybe but I haven't found anything close to good enough (and I don't have the time or inclination to code something like that myself).

Since I haven't had any luck with the last alternative, namely Chrome extensions that offer an approximation of the old Opera bookmarks manager or the current Firefox one, I'm not using any WebKit/Blink-based browser at all. What I do however is keep an eye on QupZilla and Otter Browser for the future, because they're the only ones moving WebKit into the right direction.

On your substantive comments, we all realize must realize at this point that Opera Blink has had to be reprogrammed from scratch, and the change to Blink (to give us the faster browser, the one more capable of accessing a wider range of sites than the old Opera) is only about a year along.

I'm a developer myself although in a different field, so I understand the required time for a reboot like that perfectly well. That said, the time to familiarize oneself with a different code-base is usually a matter of weeks, especially if you're employed to do that stuff full-time. After that, you can start writing productive code.

Also, one must be fair and recall that the Opera developers only very recently decided that they needed to add the bookmarks bar. For quite a while they thought the Speed Dial with folders along with, I guess, Stash, could take the place of bookmarks. But receiving feedback from their users, they have moved in the right direction. It is clear that they will be adding more to support bookmarks in the future.

They were aware of it from the first day of the public beta. If you had read the shitstorm in the dozens of pages of the developer's blog back then, you would have instinctively taken cover to be safe from flying objects. I'm only half-kidding when I say this, because the devs acknowledged the discontent of many users even before Opera 15 was officially released. Someone from the company even offered in a post on his (personal) blog to create a list of the most important features the new browser was missing. The number of times bookmarks was mentioned surprised no-one.

Frankly, the response of the Opera development team has had me concerned for a while now. When they were first faced with the backlash against their removal of the bookmarks system, it took them a full 245 days from May 28th (Opera 15 Beta) to October 24th (Opera 19 Final) (149 days) to add back a feature, which had been present in Chromium/Blink already! This is a development speed, which can easily be matched and surpassed by non-profit, non-commercial and even hobby projects. I'm not only talking about Mozilla and its Firefox here, but also other browsers like [QupZilla](http://www.qupzilla.com/" target="_blank) or [Otter Browser](http://otter-browser.org/" target"_blank).

Even right now, I don't at all feel handicapped. With the right bookmark manager extension (and I listed a couple good ones, which give a nice vertical window to manage your bookmarks), and maybe something like the extension, Add Bookmark, one can do quite well in Opera 22.

I'm very glad for you. My parents and sister use Google Chrome and are very happy with it, so I'm sure they'd adore the new Opera as well. It isn't that the browser is bad, because even I find many things likeable about it, but it doesn't fit my requirements the way every Opera until version 12 did. The possibility to adapt it with extensions is too limited unfortunately. Yes I can have a bookmarks extension, but it is one more icon of many I need in the address bar and as soon as the dropdown-popup loses its focus, it disappears again. That is no way for me to work efficiently, not when I am constantly switching between tabs, while maintaining my bookmark collection.

Remember that the Speed Dial with folders is a huge, spectacular, quite attractive resource for saving bookmarks/favorites, and that feature is unique to Opera 22. Nothing closely resembling it was available in the old Opera, which has a much more primitive Speed Dial.

This was a great idea by Opera, no doubt about it. I began using it when it appeared in, I believe, Opera 9. But the fact of the matter is, that it has been available elsewhere for many years. I've been using the [Super Start](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/super-start/" target="_blank) extension for my Firefox, which mimics the Opera Speed Dial perfectly, but even before that I knew about Speed Dial clones for other browsers. The one thing Super Start doesn't support are the speed dial extensions Opera 12 once had, like unread mails in your GMail account for example, but I don't even know if they still work in Opera 15+.

And Stash is a nice feature in Opera 22 to save things too (that might not rise to the level of a bookmark, but are deserving of a later look -- also not available in the old Opera. So Opera 22 -- in its present state of becoming -- can IMHO still do quite well in comparison to Opera Presto when it comes to saving favorites.

I can agree on that, at least partially. For a casual user the different ways to bookmark web pages are great, but neither of the three systems offer much depth, which is definitely important if you're a power user.

The way I see it: Stash is for those websites you bookmark on a lark, either because they're interesting for a short while, or because you were interrupted before you could finish reading the page, or for many other reasons why a short-term save to an unsorted list is good enough. The Speed Dial is perfect for one or two dozen of the most used bookmarks, those pages of yours which you visit daily or even more often. The SD is a truly great concept, because you have a visual representation of the website or a logo thereof, and access to a website can be done in as little as two mouse clicks from anywhere in the browser.

But - and for me that's the essential part - both Stash and Speed Dial have huge drawbacks if you're dealing with a larger number of links. SD allows no nested folders, it doesn't support sorting of any kind and if you have more than 20 links in one folder, you already need to scroll. If you're an extensive bookmarks user like me, then the bookmarks bar is the only thing that works and even then, it's not a very good implementation. Both the bookmark managing and their display in the old Opera 12 was way superior to any alternative in any currently developed browser.

I kept using Opera 12 for a few weeks after the announcement of the switch to a Chromium/Blink base. After it became clear, that the old version wouldn't receive any bug-fixes anymore but would be limited to fixes for the most obvious security issues, I started looking for a proper alternative. I have grown used to Opera's wide array of features, having used a lot of them for several years, so I saw no sense in doing without most of these excellent features, just so I could keep using a browser with the Opera brand. If I had been happy with the new Opera 15, I would have already been using Chrome for months or years!

Waiting on Opera to get on top of their new code-base is a trying time for (formerly) loyal users like me. I have come to realize that the new Opera based on Google Chrome, like every other Chromium fork out there, has signaled the departure from the old "everything but the kitchen sink" Opera. With that realization came my acknowledgement, that it wouldn't fit my requirements anymore and that I would have to admit defeat sooner or later. Right now I'm still checking the developer version of Opera every few weeks or months, but there are too little changes, too few new features to make it worth my time.

What I'm missing in no particular order:

Bookmarks. While there is a bookmarks bar again, the functionality has been as basic as it gets for almost a year now. Even old pre-2000 browsers offered more in that regard. In short: it's a death-knell for anyone requiring a more elaborate bookmarks management, because my several hundred bookmarks require active administration and that's just not possible yet.

Sidebar. Just like any other Chromium-based browser, Opera 15+ has no side-bar. That's a real shame, because I have been using one for different purposes for as long as I have had a browser with that feature. Once I got my first wide-screen display, it has been active the whole time and even today the number of websites using a full wide-screen layout is small. Bookmarks, history, error console, news feed and whatever else you can think of, there is no place in the new Opera for it without the sidebar.

Per-site/domain settings. Although I believe this was promised to find its way back into the new Opera, this feature has been missing in action since version 12. The different settings per web page (respectively domain) have been one of the strongest features of the old Opera. I have been looking for an alternative ever since I stopped using Opera 12 and haven't found anything so far! An option like that would make Opera unique again.

Tab bar. I'm sad to say, but Opera's current tab bar is just as bad as the ones in all other Chromium-based browsers. It's nice enough for a casual user, but once you start with a dozen or more tabs, the whole thing goes to hell. I'm aware that there are a few tab management extensions for Chrome, but they are rather primitive, cumbersome to use and can't hold a candle to what the old Opera could do in this regard or what Firefox (with Tab Mix Plus for example) is capable of. No multi-row tab bar, no tab grouping, no fixed width tabs, no visual indicator of an updated website in a background tab, no way to protect tabs (stop from closing accidentally), no list of previously closed tabs, no unloaded tabs (so they don't take CPU and memory resources). In short, it's the major reason why I'm not using Opera 15+ as my primary browser.

Dragonfly. The old Opera had been a favorite development tool for years, but the small market share of Opera and the limitations and incompatibilities of Presto always required a second or third browser. Despite all that, I liked Opera Dragonfly the best and would prefer it even today over the developer tools in Firefox or Chrome. The new Opera is a disappointment in that, because it only uses a copy of the Chrome tools. I remember reading about a job advert for a Dragonfly developer some time last year, but that has been a long time ago already and nothing has emerged so far in the browser.

To make a long story short: the new Opera is clearly geared towards a different kind of user. Some functions have equivalents in form of extensions, but there are also a number of things that are simply impossible to replicate. Although I'm not always happy with my Firefox - it's not nearly as responsive and doesn't feel as fast as Opera or Chrome for example - it has by far the best options for customization, both visual and functional. In the end I much prefer modifying Firefox to my needs, rather than re-learning everything and forgoing essential stuff with a Chrome-like browser I didn't want in the first place. This lets me get the most out of the browser, which is very important to me, because I actually have to work with it.

That's where I stand at the moment and it seems that other people must have similar opinions, or there wouldn't be threads like these. By the way, I found the market share analysis of Clicky Analytics ( http://clicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/opera/ ) very telling. If numbers are to be believed, there have been more people using Opera 12 than Opera 15+ until at least April of 2014, although the final version of the reinvented browser had already been available for around 10 months. Also, current numbers (0.19 percent using Opera 11, 0.25 Opera 12, 0.33 Opera 22) suggest that even as recently as June 2014, the old 11 and 12 versions of the browser remain rather popular compared to the current Opera in active development.

+1

This is a must. The worrying thing is, that I didn't even know about this feature in Opera 15+, since it wasn't mentioned anywhere during or after the installation of the application. While additional functions directly included in the application are always appreciated - and that's what drew me to the Opera browser many years ago in the first place - there must always be an option to disable them. The Opera help ( http://www.opera.com/help/tutorials/security/fraud/ ) states "By default, Opera Fraud and Malware Protection is enabled", which suggests that a way to disable it should exist; but there's no description for that, of course.

Each and every time the browser connects to a third party server, the user should be hit with a privacy warning he can then click away and ignore in the future. Many people don't care about their privacy and I have no issue with that, but others would like to know what the application they're working with is actually doing under the hood and others may even require it.

The information about this fraud protection appears very well hidden from most Opera users and one cannot even disable this feature without affecting the general network traffic by use of a firewall or a DNS override (ie. entry in the hosts file) for example.

You're a credit to this forum by being so helpful with content and links, lem729. Thanks for your efforts.

But I have to say that none of these bookmark extensions for Chrome-based browsers can even remotely compare to the ease of use of Opera's former bookmark handling. It's a totally different concept which does little for me. When I'm browsing I want a permanent side-bar - because so few websites even today offer a true wide-screen layout, so why should I waste space, when I can instead display useful information? When I'm managing my hundreds of bookmarks I want a dedicated window or tab instead of the small pop-up (which always closes itself when out of focus). I know that no Chromium-based browser has a sidebar, but if anyone knows about a full-page bookmark manager I would appreciate a mention.

In this I have found the Firefox browser a decent alternative to Opera 12, because it offers not only a sidebar (and some good extensions for that) but also a bookmarks library in a dedicated window.