Best posts made by multitasker-5

I'm in complete agreement with None-now & Prizrat & others, posting here and several other places online. They have -- to put it quite simply -- murdered what had for years been my favorite browser. This new look is atrocious, like some psychedelic cotton candy mess that has melted across our screens. Otherwise, Opera One is bloatware -- full of features I never wanted, and would not use. For me, productivity is based upon simplicity and streamlined familiarity. (Plus good options for personalized customization, and without undesired changes that are rammed down your throat !) I don't give a damn about supposedly improved video performance: I have VLC and a bunch of other video tools for that. Bugfixes and security updates are one thing -- and necessary -- but "If it Ain't Broke and Was Working Just Fine, Don't Go and Reinvent It !"

Tomorrow I am going to revert this godawful mess back to version 99, buying time for exploring alternate browsers. I already had Vivaldi demonstrated as being the most functional browser for my phone. And I already had SeaMonkey (old school type suite, a la Netscape) and a couple others on the desktop computers, as backups. But I expect to be sampling Brave and LibreWolf., among possible primary replacements. Such a Crying Shame, What You Went & Did, Opera !

Fortunately, I managed to find a version 99 from last May that I had downloaded at the time and then forgot about. As "Opera One" has absolutely nothing new that is of any interest to me, and actually introduced major impediments, I have now used that aforementioned ver. 99 to back-level the browser, zapping all traces of Opera One. Good riddance ! In my case, I've always used the portable edition from Portableapps.com. The Updater in those portable editions proved broken and inoperable some time ago (like around ver. 87 or thereabouts ?), so I don't even have to worry about this back-level coming undone ! With some programs you periodically hear talk of security issues arising, but in my experience this is very overblown: I'm not concerned -- at least not for a good long while.

Some early reports had it that you could not find prior versions of Opera available for download. That turned out to be incorrect however, and here they are: https://get.opera.com/ftp/pub/opera/desktop/

Islands, Shmylands ! (I've got 25 tabs open as I type this. Substantially more than the usual, but they seem to be "organized" well enough, and are well behaved, not getting in each other's way.) I wouldn't touch ChatGPT or any AI insinuating its way into my browser, not with a 50 meter bargepole. And newsflash for y'all, the built-in Opera VPN is phony baloney, far from the real deal in that category ! Rely on it at your definite risk. I'll use an external VPN -- a carefully vetted one, -- when I feel there is a need for one. (I dropped a rather popular one, even with considerable subscription time left to run, after finding out that it had been bought out by a data-harvesting consortium.)

@jcmlny,

O.K. -- we shall see. I never do anything confidential like online banking. I assume that any email could be read off the server, should a hacker want to do so enough. (So, keep really confidential stuff out of email.) The only issue with Opera I can recall was a couple years ago, an annoying nuisance redirection popup that was extremely difficult to get rid of. It finally got blocked, and has not put in any appearance since.

If anything comes up that is even slightly of a confidential nature, there will be LibreWolf, or a non-Chromium browser.

@cdelsol,

There used to be a place in Settings where you could select the background wallpaper. Not sure whether that remains the case. (And that is only one part of the now quite bad visual UI.)

It looks like some form of the AI came in somewhere after v. 97, the one I first updated from in terms of this discussion. I say that because in the May release of v. 99, although it was for the most part a satisfactory looking and performing reversion, when I highlight something (in order to save it to the Win clipboard) that bunch of other, stupid context menu options like in v. 101 ('Make a Joke About', 'Rephrase Like Yoda') still comes up. I wiped out the entire \App tree when I reverted Opera versions, so I don't believe this could be a holdover from 101. [Just checked that again, and it is actually a different set of useless new context menu choices added, like "Write a Haiku."]

@jcmlny,
Regarding Vivaldi, it became the primary browser -- for some time now -- on my Android cell phone. That was because it proved more reliably functional there than a few others I had tried. Haven't used it on the desktop though. (It is also Chromium-based.) I was a FireFox user on the desktop & laptop for many years. It remains in place there, although I have not been a fan of several changes that began coming into FF a few years ago. Whenever a product is good the way that it is, it seems like developers just can't resist trying to "improve" it . . . which usually winds up leading to bloatware in the case of software, and a clear dis-improvement.

I just updated from an older Opera version (57 ?) to this current v. 60, which I see has a lot of changes and new features. This must be something simple in Settings that I haven't recognized yet, but when Opera is open (full screen), it covers and hides the Windows Quick Launch Taskbar on the bottom of the desktop screen. That was not the case with the earlier Opera version. How to restore the earlier default behavior ? This is in W7, in case that makes any difference.

My suggestion today may be of greater interest to power users, but I'd like to see a greater ability to edit single items within Opera -- in this case, to remove the display of individual items from the Downloads list, rather than clearing out the entire list in one go. I fondly recall having this pinpoint control over almost everything in legacy (5290) FireFox, which I still make some use of occasionally, even though it is supposedly very outdated.

I recently had a nearly disastrous outcome due to following the advice of AT&T Tech Support, a mistake that I won't make again. I had gotten temporarily locked out of my email accounts, with repeated, circular Login failures. (This happens from time to time, and is entirely caused by faults in their system.) Their advice was a standard one: first, clear the Cache & Cookies. However, their advice for doing this in Opera deleted not only all of that but also other things like the entire browsing History -- which I really wanted to retain for reference and the ability to retrace my steps for certain sites I had visited. That indeed proved to be "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." I managed to recover or reproduce some of what was lost in this process, but not the History. In the aforementioned Legacy FireFox, I had long had the ability to delete individual History items, edit or delete individual Cookies or groups of them, as well as individual items that would show in the Downloads list, without disturbing other items. You could put that degree of control somewhere under 'Advanced' Settings, leaving it for users seeking such more detailed options, without it getting in other user's way.

Fortunately, I have found and begun to explore some Opera extensions, including Cache Cleaner, Cookie Cleaner, and Cookie-Editor, which provide some of these controls. I've learned that individual History items can be deleted in Opera, in a straightforward manner. Still nothing for editing the Download List, though.

Another thing I really miss from the older FireFox was the ability to backup one's entire Profile, rather quickly and easily.

@redwolftrash

In case it was not previously posted here (I've lost track), a long history of Opera versions can be downloaded from https://get.opera.com/ftp/pub/opera/desktop/
(seems to take you to a Google link, but click on that)

I'm a major fan of the portable apps from Portableapps.com. Unfortunately, that extensive past version repository above does not apparently include those portable editions. I inquired about this at Portableapps, and was told that due to licensing issues they are not allowed to offer their versions prior to the current one. With considerable searching you might be able to find them on some third party sites, but then if you managed to do so you should then (for security reasons) also obtain the hash values of that release (CRC32, SHA-256) to confirm that they weren't tampered with. I would probably take the further step of running it by Virustotal.. Sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for this.

The Portableapps launcher is just a framework for consolidating a bunch of portable apps in what is supposed to be a more convenient structure. It is not required, any of those apps can be a la carte. (I've never bothered with their Launcher . . . but if I ever wanted to carry around a rather large collection of their portable apps on a flashdrive, I might look into it.) You just need to make a shortcut for the portable .Exe file on your Win desktop, and you're in business. As far as the Passwords / Logins are concerned, I think Opera made it super difficult -- if not quite impossible ? -- to migrate them to other Opera installations, unless you did some kind of a Cloud Sync deal, which is a category I am allergic to. NirSoft Utilities included a tool that was supposed to handle a migration like that, but it is quite old by now and may only pertain to Opera from quite a few years ago. I did have it in mind to test that at some point though.