It's said that their old UI toolkit called "Quick" is completely dependent on Presto so it's incompatible with Chromium.
That doesn't mean they can't reimplement the interface, which they obviously chose not to do.

Right now, Qt5/WebKit-based Otter Browser (still in alpha stage) looks more like old Opera than the new Opera after 5 major versions. And it's a 1-man hobby project.

By the time Otter is a year old (like new Opera next month) it will surely have more than half the features of old Opera.

Months ago I couldn't see any difference between new Opera and the oldest releases of Chrome. I still can't see any difference.

Nowadays I only visit these forums and the blogs for educational/entertainment purposes, especially now that they have dropped support for FreeBSD and it's become a dead end anyway.

@anunnaki2

The time when you could open that many tabs is gone forever. Only lightweight layout engines, such as Presto, were able to do that without using up all the available resources.

The browser's interface is peanuts. What really eats up resources is the layout engine.

Maxthon itself is most likely not the culprit here, but WebKit/Blink.

WebKit-based Chrome was like that and the current Blink-based Chrome is like that.

Blink-based Opera (if it's ever available on *nix systems in our lifetime) will definitely be the same.

If you're looking for lightweight alternatives, but are willing to bear having very approximate display of web content and no JavaScript support, then try NetSurf (http://www.netsurf-browser.org/) or Dillo (http://www.dillo.org/). These are only available for *nix systems, AFAIK.

If you want quality browsing for modern websites with heavy use of HTML5 and JavaScript contents, then use either a Gecko-based browser such as Firefox or SeaMonkey, or a WebKit-based browser.

For WebKit-based browsers, you have Midori (http://midori-browser.org/) if you want to use GTK. If you prefer Qt, then use QupZilla (http://www.qupzilla.com/) or wait for the Qt5 Opera-clone Otter (http://otter-browser.org/).

I voted "no", even though I use FreeBSD instead of Linux. As it is now (serious lack of features) I won't use it under Windows either. That will be the first time in over 13 years that I don't start using a certain version right away after its release.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

UIs in Windows and OSX are pretty simple as there's only one desktop while Linux and *BSD has dozens.

It's not the desktop environment, but the widget toolkit that matters (and there are just a few big players here). I doubt it represents such a big technical difficulty. There's already Webkit-GTK and Chromium actually depends on that so it's very likely Opera will be based on "Blink-GTK".
This is not new. In 12.15 you can choose between different toolkits: GTK, Qt or a native (much cleaner and lighter on resources) Xlib-based one. And in the past, Opera was Qt-based only.

It's just that Linux and Unix are tiny desktop markets compared to Windows and MacOS. Any company will prioritize, especially when it has relatively limited resources at its disposal.