@andrew84 : Yep, everyone has their own idea. One assumes the Opera design team is taking notes and will determine what changes, if any, are needed. The bigger elephant in the room are the untold scores of silent user actions revealed through telemetry. If that returns favorable results then the loud and proud enthusiast bark fest probably won't change the default presentation but may score a more transparent switch in settings.

BTW - how's that Vivaldi project going, ya know the one that has a switch for everything? Might be an option for those dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.

@slytzel : read up a few posts; there's a flag that will revert to previous UI (as least with respect to the feature you:re asking about)

@stolis : reread previous posts; no advocacy for turning a blind eye. That said, there is a bigger picture that ultimately drives difficult design choices. Moving on, not going to resolve anything by rehashing.

@andrew84 : Yep - I get that. I also suspect Opera has usage telemetry from millions of users that supported the decision. Moving/retiring functionality is never an easy choice; some portion of the population always feels burned.

@andrew84 : I did not forget but also didn't use the feature that often due to click path and count. That, of course, is a personal view albeit partially biased by a dislike of the quick search function as I tend to open a new tab. I am not here to argue for one option over the other. I am simply stating my satisfaction for the UX choices in O68.

As for multiple magnifying glass icons on the start page, yeah...there's an opportunity to clean that up. Does not bother me but I can see how it would put some folks nickers in a knot.

@rsa-vby : that certainly is an argument many are making in the comments. My own view is excess functionality gets in the way of usability. Cluttering the (arguably already busy) top bar with additional buttons will diminish the experience for some. Which buttons should be there and/or whether they should be user selectable is a choice the designers will have to access based on user feedback and whatever other criteria goes into the decision making process. My earlier comment was simply expressing a personal preference for what rolled out in O68.

I happen to like the 're-imagined' (constrained) space in the upper right corner. Being able to hone in on an already open tab via keyword is far more useful than scanning a lengthy list of entries that often needed to be scrolled and frequently jumbled up with recently closed tabs. Navigating to history in the side-bar to find the latter is both intuitive and consolidates similar functionality.

Not sure this will help but I always install the Chrome extension which has received multiple updates while the Opera one has languished for nearly 7 months. I'd rather use the native extension but got tired of chasing down weird bugs that are almost always resolved with the Chrome extension. Good luck.

Feel like an idiot for asking but can't seem to find the answer anywhere. Does the master 'data savings' option need to be enabled for video compression to work (assuming it is enabled in the data savings dialog)? I'd prefer video streams to be always be compressed but rarely enable the general data saving option as slows page load times and occasionally breaks elements.

Heres a thing to try: go into your profile folder (location can be found in the About Opera page) and deleted these files: session.db, session.dbak, and session.db-journal. Make sure the browser is closed when you do this. See if that helps and report back here.

Lag was driving me nutty. Disabled extensions and plugins; no impact. Deleting session.db (which had grown to over 200 MB) did the trick. Thank you!