I take it back, Opera17 crashes more than Chrome and and have had to go back to Chrome for FB which is 10000% flakier than Opera12 under load it's not funny. I still develop under 12, it's still the only browser that works. Mozilla has fixed checkboxes but not textboxes and it still does not preserve that user-typed content, of all browsers made, only Opera 12 gets this right, and flawlessly so, as it it hasn't glitched once in over a decade.

Man, this was one very very expensive way to get WebKit+v8 support.

"My point here was that this problem did not constitute a "show stopper" for most users."

You think it's ok people can type into a form, hit a button by mistake, then be sent off to another page - oops - so they go back and OH LOOK all their typing is gone.

You don't think this is a problem? Really? Ok lemme change the question from "have you ever actually worked on the web?" to "Have you actually used the Internet?"

You're not sure "millions of people" have this problem. Not sure. And offer no proof.

OOOooooooooook...

There's a little company in California called Facebook who have a fairly popular website. They just added a javascript hack to prevent this problem from occurring for their over ONE BILLION users.

And that, spud, *is* "most people.

Most people really don't like when you delete what they spent time typing it. No, really. It's true. Because you see they have to type it again now and it's never going to get the same amount of effort put into and and congratulations a browser bug just contributed to a lessor output from humanity.

It's a bug, not a feature. No kidding.

You don't know what you're talking about. Literally.

@imm000 - there is an errant bot on this site, an experimental AI named "Pesala" - that does provide right answers but the truth value is 100% inverted, so read them all accordingly.

"Fixed in next release".

The problem with extensions is they all seem to end up being spyware.

If you've actually looked at the browser source code to handle EXIF you'd know it's stupid to argue against it. It's exactly the sort of trivial thing best done in the browser; the cutoff point would in my mind be if the overhead of being an extension is greater than the code to provide the functionality then leave it in the browser.

Anybody whose serious about photos or wants to know the real timestamp looks at the EXIF data. I've have to see proof "nobody uses it" to believe that because it's exactly the opposite of what I've seen.

Things seem a little one sided here, and I thought some praise is due where it is deserved.

The only reason I ever used any browser other than Opera was because it became too slow to use with Facebook. Here's why this happened:

Facebok began as a bunch of crappy php scripts and some javascript. Since they were to experience expoential growth forever, performance problems both on the servers and on the brower side began to suffer. To add to this there was a large influx of people that left Google and went to Facebook and with them they took the idea "hey, do it in javascript with ajax - way way better and hey, you know, the Google V8 Javascript engine is 10X faster so we can do ALL OF THE STUFF now. And right way non V8 browsers began to get slow. This was around 2009 when Facebook intriduced "auto page refresh" to compete with Twitter who had just added it. Things wend bad from that point and in only two years it was easy to get a browser that ends up in a state spending more time updating itself than letting the user actually do anything. But, there was Chrome, and if you switched to that, Facebook was fine. For a while. Now it's as bad as Opera was in 2010. FB is gonna have to do something, you shouldn't need a 6 core CPU and an 884 core GPU to run the moral equivalent of Usenet with pictures. Ahem.

Anyway, the point it, since I downloaded Opera 17 about a week and and got over the freakout of ALL OF THE FEATURES THAT MAKE IT OPERA ARE GONE I came to realize...

...i haven't needed to run Chrome in a week. Ok, that's pretty impressive. Opera was starting to fall behind even Mozilla, with no hope of matching Chrome's performance (but who cares, it crashes all the f'ing time and doesn't work with forms, it'd rather have slow but works than fast bu doesn't!) but has now leapfrogged past Mozilla and replaced the need to ever use Chrome again. Ok, that's a big deal and deserves recognition.

The other thing is the aesthetics. I will admit to the xmas tree effect in my own copy of 12 and the new one is so minimalist it's actually refreshing. I can understand why Opera wants to add things slowly are carefully. That's commendable. Also the look and feel of the browser and the better web pages has improved dramatically in the last 8-14 months, to be sure a lot of this was driven by phone, but none the less the progress is staggering and I'm impressed.

It's a tough decision but I think once we get past the short term pain there's long term gain to be had.

So... constructive criticism. I realize not there's tons of bulky Opera 12 features that aren't in 17 and I don't miss and I'm glad I'm not paying the storage and computational overhead for them: sync, unite, mail, irc, torrent... all that Swiss Army Knife stuff. So I'm glad that's gone and it would be nice that if they came back they came back as some sort of loadable (and unloadable!) module. I do want dragonfly but I never want it all the time and wouldn't even mind firing up a different version of Opera to get it. I can live with that even.

But, despite the long list of things I'd like to have from 12 be new features in 15 there's really only one I can't actually live without and that's the ability to edit forms properly which currently doesn't work in Opera 17 or Chrome 30. The problem is if you half fill out a form then go to another page then go back - everything you typed in is gone now, and without this, you can't use a browser to edit some things, that it it, new Opera breaks some apps that work in old Opera.

Opera used to be the only browser that got this right (Mozilla fixed this and works now too) and got sold into a lot of installations that relied on accurate editing where only Opera worked. They can't upgrade, they have to switch to Mozilla now, or stay with Opera 12.

As a programmer, I don't even care all the -o- stuff is gone and the -webkit stuff is different, I can work around that, but I can't work around a browser that had a fundamental and essential property suddenly go away with no warning. So, if it were me, I'd fix this first. Because if this isn't fixed, than it does't really matter if anything else gets fixed because it can't be used.

It's taken 15 years too long to convince business and government to use http instead of paper and to suddenly go from 1 to 2 to 1 programs that can used for this is not progress though and would like to hear this is something that is fairly high up in the queue of things to do next.

Speaking of hearing things, is there some official channel to find out what future directions are in the short, medium and long terms? They only way I can see on the Opera site per se is the job ads which to indicate some direction but not as to the specifics of the future of the browser. Perhaps I missed it? Perhaps if one doesn't exist something like that could be created?

What exactly is gained by the move to webkit?

I don't see supporting obsolete commands do ages old Safari-only demos work as a plus.

Presto was a lot closer to being completely done that I thought when I actually poked around in it.

I don't see how the small gains from using WebKit is worth the price of ALL those Chrome bugs.

The more I look at it the more I think V8 was a good idea but I'm having a real problem understanding the move to WebKit. Sure the new Opera makes more old demos work an that's a plus but there were easier ways of supporting obsolete webkit prefix stuff.

Presto was a lot closer to webkit compatibility than I think Opera thought it was. You can sort of tell what happened and when by studying he behavior of all the prefixed stuff. It's really quite fascinating.

I'd be really interested in seeing Opera 12 with the V8 engine but no webkit. I'm not sure what was actually gained by the move to webkit, by that I mean the hours spend getting that to work if they'd been put into presto, I really think I've had tried that first. If nothing else it would have eliminated all the things people have complained about in the Chrome/Opera hybrid.

" that is most certainly not a "show-stopping bug". Nor is it clear to me that this problem "makes it impossible to use Chrome or Opera 17 to edit stuff on the web". Is there some reason that you cannot either open the page in a new tab or simply complete the process and then start the editing over again if necessary?"

Have you ever actually done any work on the web?

Edit, save, back, edit save back edit save back. That's what it looks like. No really. People do this 8 hours a day, 4 hours a week. Millions of them.

You not want to make their 8 hour day a 9.5 hour day because of an old chrome bug? (really old)

Opera forgetting about this sole feature that got their browser in the drivers seas *as the only one* that would work properly. But now Mozilla does and Opera doesn't.

Your utterly idiotic suggestion makes about as much sense as using crayons and poster paper. It may work for you but it's not what grownups do.

Why should Opera give 12 away? Well, crap, I dunno. Isn't that better than dong NOTHING with it or throwing it out? Was that a trick question?

I really shouldn't have to justify a browser not destroying hours of typed user data when it didn't used to and now does because of "improvements".

"You are not in a position to dictate to Opera and furthermore"

That was true when Opera was proprietory. Now it's an open source Javascript engine and an Open source rendering engine and all the things that made Opera opera are gone. It's just recompiled chrome with all the chrome bugs.

The barrier to somebody else reverse engineering Opera 12 with WebKit and V8 - what the world wanted and was suggested it was getting? The enthusiasm for this was very very high - people had been asking for it. That's a pretty good sign.

If we'd be told in the spring "How about recompiled Chrome instead" then people who know would have gone "but it doesn't work". Who'd want that?

I posted videos of Chrome and Opera 17 screwing up going back and losing a form full of data.

Does that now count as a show-stopping bug? Again, this makes it impossible to use Chrome or Opera 17 to edit stuff on the web.

Ie, all the weird little bugs Chrome had Opera now has. Without any of the cool features Opera had. How is this progress?

If 12 is dead then give away the source. If it's not then can we talk about plans for it? I think in a large sense some of the pushback for the Chrome version of Opera is that it was a surprise. That was not part of an ongoing dialogue between the company and it's base.

"We all like options, but what you see is what you get. "

Errr, no. We wanted our computers to talk to each other. So we built the net.

IBM tried it your way. It was called X.25 and nobody used it.