I agree. It's one of my bugbears. A simple solution would be to do as Firefox does. E.g., have a blue bar at the top of the active tab.

Windows does similar with the active applications on the task bar.

My history with my default browser is that you eventually get to a point where some version is almost perfectly optimised to the way you like to browse, with or without supplementary extensions. Then new features get added that may be mildly annoying but you can tweak things a bit, then more features get added (that may included removing existing ones and/or making them worse), then you get sufficiently pissed off to give another browser a try. That browser is usually lacking with respect to some features you are used to. But you stick with it and over time it becomes optimal again. Then they start ruining the experience for you and the cycle starts again!

@atomicthumbs I fully agree! In fact one of the main reasons why I switched from Firefox to Opera after well over a decade with Firefox was precisely because of Opera's vertical tab cycler. I thought it was a near-perfect implementation with the previews. It just needed a tweak to stop accidental interference from the mouse.

I used to use Tab Mix Plus for this in Firefox Classic but when Quantum was released we had to settle for the horizontal tab cycler that is even worse than the current Opera implementation.

The flag to disable the horizontal cycler did work OK in 67 but is, as you say, broken in 68.

68 also broke my instant search customisation, where I had set it up to do tab search only, by default. I'd set this up as F2. Now I get both tabs and sites but I can live with that or possibly tweak it back again. I haven't tried. Plus I know you can get tab search through the new magnifying glass or Ctrl+Space.

I do wish devs would stop fixing what ain't broken. I don't mind if they add new features or even change defaults. But don't break previous behaviour unless you're sure that a replacement is superior.

It's not just Opera though. The whole industry is guilty - and I'm a dev myself!

Looks like I may have to implement your fix - although I also live with instant tab search. Yet another major reason why I switched from Firefox!

(Edit: I now have back my F2 which just does tab search, which is fine by me - and the old Ctrl+Tab. Thanks @atomicthumbs But I bet it gets broken again in 69!)

At the moment I have Opera as default and Vivaldi as No. 2 but I can easily see this being reversed given a few more "improvements."

@leocg it would be nice if you could do that. The old Opera was more flexible in this, although I was only a very occasional user of the old Opera.

I think the way Firefox works in full screen mode is the way to go, but the other browsers don't do it.

I.e., move mouse to the top of the screen and the address bar and tabs become available.

@stevencee moving the mouse over the magnifying glass lets you see the zoom level. Though it would be nice to be able to see at a glance what setting you're at.

You can also zoom in and out using one-click keyboard shortcuts. By default 0, 6, + and -. You have to enable one-click keyboard shortcuts first though.

Also Ctrl+ mouse wheel if on Windows.

The way to improve the visual tab cycler and make more tabs visible is to restore the vertical one!

Just tried. Oh man, that is bad. Must be a regression surely?

@yanta said in Microsoft switches to Chromium:

@coffeelover

I'm afraid Opera could lose market shares to Microsoft if MS should succeed in developing a browser with a nice UI and some useful additional features.

For myself it has proven quite hard to shift me from whatever has been my preferred browser. I was a Firefox user for well over a decade. I've now switched to Opera as default (although I still use Firefox). Edge will have to replicate the features of Opera that I've discovered to be compelling to get me to switch.

I should say though that I do not find any one browser to be superior to all other in all respects. Hence I have several installed and occasionally have a need to use one of the others - even Edge as it happens!

@tioosaminha if you don't care for specific features then don't use them and/or disable them. Don't assume other users have no use for them. We are all different.

@lucasnorthmi51959 I have several browsers installed too. Main reasons are 1 I'm curious to see what they have to offer that's different from their competitors 2 I find that no one browser is better than all others in every respect. So, depending on context, I sometimes switch for specific tasks.

@billoumi I agree. I've only tried workspace once and I actually expected opening in a new window to be the default and got a shock when that didn't happen. But I can see a reason for both scenarios, so an option would be nice.

@careware I like the sidebar but I also often want it hidden and I agree the software should honour the user's choices.

I agree with the general comments here that it should honour your settings both during normal use and through upgrades. This is one of the most annoying features of software in general, not just with Opera.

Personally, I do use the sidebar but I also hide it when I'm not interested in it. I then don't want it to reappear unless I choose to display it (and vice-versa).

Previously when you did Ctrl+H it would open a tab and set focus to the search box. Now it doesn't Is this a bug?

Is there a way of changing this to back to 'title only' rather than 'title and content?'

I never want the latter, so the list is too long and I have to type more letters to get to the tab I want.

Update: I can disable it in opera://flags - until the option gets removed in the next release!

It should be a top-level customisation imo.

@treego I actually preferred its original implementation. I was only really interested in incremental tab search on the titles of tabs, which I customised to F2. Now it returns too much information. For example I almost never want to search for content inside tabs other than the one I'm in.

In the original implementation I could spot the tab I was interested in very quickly. Now it can take several seconds or I have to type more characters to narrow it down. So it's a speed bump.

I don't mind when software vendors add new features. What's annoying is when they remove old ones - unless the new features offer more or more usable functionality. Often they don't.

Opera and Vivaldi are supposed to be about customisability - more so than the other Chromium browsers, so it's even worse when they remove behaviour.

I haven't got time to say all I want to say here right now, so will return.

I didn't use recently closed tabs feature often but there were scenarios where if I had two windows open and by accident shut down my main window first (containing zillions of tabs), I would lose the main window on restart. With that option I could easily restore it.

So I'm now using that extension that was mentioned. But just now I had a crash (or some sort of weird behaviour) and lost everything - pinned tabs and the lot, so back to a blank window essentially.

About two three months ago Opera was almost ideal for my workflow but this and two other changes have introduced serious usability regressions. Tab search is one of them. Despite what's mentioned above it is in principle an excellent feature. (Vivaldi has this as well.)

However, the current implementation is poor and is a speed bump.

My history with my default browser is that you eventually get to a point where some version is almost perfectly optimised to the way you like to browse, with or without supplementary extensions. Then new features get added that may be mildly annoying but you can tweak things a bit, then more features get added (that may included removing existing ones and/or making them worse), then you get sufficiently pissed off to give another browser a try. That browser is usually lacking with respect to some features you are used to. But you stick with it and over time it becomes optimal again. Then they start ruining the experience for you and the cycle starts again!

@leocg: I agree, but search for content in tabs makes for poor usability (the list becomes too big) or at least we should be able to turn it off.

@onekamel: I agree. They've ruined instant search. The initial version was fine.