Well, I also tried to upgrade to Opera 12.17 and fell into this page.
It's funny to see Leushino making the rounds still having lots of time to ensure no criticism of Opera new version goes unpunished... 🙂
It would be interesting to analyze the many posts he makes daily: it seems astounding and let me tell you I moderate a forum that's into Alexa's top 1000 for the last 10 years, so I know users.
I rate him with legendary fans like the guy that offered the actor that plays Draco Malfoy to adopt him and take him to live in a mansion he had designed for "Draco", called "Malfoy Manor" (and I'm not making this up: http://www.realbollywood.com/2010/09/hardcore-fan-spooks-harry-potter-star-tom-felton-adoption-scheme-home.html ).
Am I exaggerating? I don't think so: when fans are involved nothing is too extreme. I can remember the guy that threatened his parents with self immolation if he could not watch in person all the cricket India's team matches (yeah, since 2003, he has gone to all of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudhir_Kumar_Chaudhary).
So, I say, let's leushino show all of us how you can be in love... with a browser.
Hey, I have nothing against Leushino: this is a free world (I hope) and I'm in favor of any kind of marriage, even if you marry with a browser. Actually, I only oppose heterosexual marriage, it's the doom of most men. However, I digress.
I think Leushino is kind of entertaining, at least to me: he seems a certified retired guy that has no other thing in life to do, with all due respect, which is not a lot of respect, having seen how he treats users.
He (and now Mr. Lem729) is the worst "new Opera" public relations "official", if you follow my drift.
That's a lot to be said, given the fact that Opera has made a terrible work of explaining to customers what are its goals, or better yet, has ignored them insistently.
I guess that's what characterizes teachers that do not work in research: they love theory and abhors deviations from official positions.
Anyway, I just checked Opera 26, it's still not there and, I believe, for at least half the users of Old Opera will never be: we are waiting for something else.
I guess that's why so many times we read a guy that claims that "BrowserSoft 3.1" is the best thing he has found: we are still waiting for a new "Messiah", like the Chosen People do.
Why?
Well, if you want to keep reading (which I doubt... :)), Opera is a niche browser, the only deal they made was for Nintendo, so it is the browser of the 2%.
The new browser has split the community: I'd say power users (1%?) are still attached to the features they needed for work and learned to rely on security provided by an obscure and very well protected engine.
Users that used Opera just for the bling changed happily to a non secure engine, surely they do not have the tools or the knowledge to realize what has happened to their computers: they claim Opera is better than Chrome and shares its characteristics.
In that, they're right. They do not need secure environments (I fail to see how a person that requires security would use Blink) and they have plenty of time in their hands to spend clicking around and downloading link by link, as the time they have spent in these threads show.
So, Opera achieved its goal: they renounced to create a quality browser (they did not have the market share because they never played the market, like Firefox tried or Chrome, IE and Safari achieved) and they are chugging along, happy with users like Leushino, that make enough noise so there is no consensus on what is needed for quality, so their transferred to their browser and allowed the company to halve the number of workers.
It's exactly like Social Security.
Happy New Year, people, I resume my search for Opera 12.17 and let you enjoy Opera 26 or whatever is the number of the iteration that still tries to catch Chrome (hahaha, nice one).