Opera GX has recently become my preferred browser for productivity at work primarily because Speed Dial and the Workspaces in the sidebar are fantastic for simplifying access to services and making it easy to jump from one workflow to another. I've become extremely frustrated with GX in the latest updates and I finally figured out why.

Forgive me for being blunt, but F12 has had the standardized and well established behavior of bringing up the developer tools/inspector pane across multiple browsers for years. The fact that it now closes my multiple working windows without confirmation and brings up some random nonsense by default is absolutely unacceptable.

It's an infuriating slap in the face to power-users who rely on these tools, because it introduces completely unnecessary and avoidable friction by deviating from industry-standard behavior for what is effectively being marketed as a "hide-my-porn button." What's worse is that the decision to do this seems to imply that the powers that be at Opera have chosen to depart from the marketing that convinced me to switch; The genuinely useful QoL features such as resource management, workflow management, and easily-accessible widgets in the sidebar sold me, and I feel like I'm being set up for a bait-and-switch marketed toward people who can't keep it in their pants.

I want to give GX an honest chance. For the love of all that is holy, please make this an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out one. This is distasteful and frustrating, and I genuinely don't understand how this made it into production as-is.

Opera GX has recently become my preferred browser for productivity at work primarily because Speed Dial and the Workspaces in the sidebar are fantastic for simplifying access to services and making it easy to jump from one workflow to another. I've become extremely frustrated with GX in the latest updates and I finally figured out why.

Forgive me for being blunt, but F12 has had the standardized and well established behavior of bringing up the developer tools/inspector pane across multiple browsers for years. The fact that it now closes my multiple working windows without confirmation and brings up some random nonsense by default is absolutely unacceptable.

It's an infuriating slap in the face to power-users who rely on these tools, because it introduces completely unnecessary and avoidable friction by deviating from industry-standard behavior for what is effectively being marketed as a "hide-my-porn button." What's worse is that the decision to do this seems to imply that the powers that be at Opera have chosen to depart from the marketing that convinced me to switch; The genuinely useful QoL features such as resource management, workflow management, and easily-accessible widgets in the sidebar sold me, and I feel like I'm being set up for a bait-and-switch marketed toward people who can't keep it in their pants.

I want to give GX an honest chance. For the love of all that is holy, please make this an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out one. This is distasteful and frustrating, and I genuinely don't understand how this made it into production as-is.