Posts made by rs79

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.

Hey, when did Mozilla get fixed?

I haven't used it in ages because forms didn't work, just uninstalled it and installed the latest (25) tried it and it seems to work with forms just fine. I'll have to test it long term to see it never glitches ever, but it does appear to work now. Finally. At freaking last. Good job.

The reason this is important is, if you can't go back and have your form data preserved, then you cant use this to edit anything on the web.

Let me say that again: you can't use it to edit anything on the web.

Ie, you've broken a LOT of web apps. To be sure, sites that rely only on Ajax won't see this as a problem, and that's why Chrome has got away with it for a long time - most of Google's stuff is Ajax. So if you want a browser that works well in the Google ecosystem, use Chrome.

But if you want a browser that works with ANY web app, you have to use Opera. And, it appears, now you can use Mozilla as well.

You know, I can actually live without V8's superior performance. I can actually live without WebKit's better rendering.

But If forms don't work? I can't use it.

Sorry. I'd rather it looks shitty and be slow that not work at all.

Ok, so, the video to demonstrate this concept. It's really not hard and you could have cobbled up a test in 30 seconds, but ok, I'll explain this slowly.

Here's Opera 12 doing this flawlessly.

What you'll see it a bunch of check-boxes get ticked and text gets entered then the home button is clicked to go to a differrnt page.

Then go back.

You'll see everything is in the correct state.

Then "reset" is clicked and everything goes back to the way it was before, when the page was loaded as is proper.

Without these two properties, you're not a browser that can be used for serious work. You can *get by* without the second one, bu the first is a show stopper, it means you can't edit anything on the web. And that's kind of a big deal.

These are straight off my (experia) phone so some people may have codec problems an they're shaky as it's hard to hold the phone, read and type and click mice and there's a goodly portion of thumb in one, but you can get the point.

http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2013/Nov/5/op/opera12.mp4

Here's Opera 17 failing in the same way Chrome does.
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2013/Nov/5/op/opera17.mp4

Here's Chrome failing in the same way Opera 17 does. But at least Chrome has a home button.
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2013/Nov/5/op/opera12.mp4

Don't get me wrong, my preference is to use Opera, period. And I understand what a big deal swapping out presto and swapping in webkit is, but I think that's what has to be done to do this properly. Just recompiling Chrome and putting a red O on it means you inherit the Chrome bug-set. And these are non-trivial and profound: memory and spell-check for starters. Screw that noise, that's why I use Opera, cause stuff works.

Call the recompiled-chromium thing Opera Home and keep the legacy 12-branch Alive and phase WebKit in slowly and carefully. Strip it down to only the browser! No irc/torrent/unite/turbo - strip all that crap out - that just causes windows/osx/unix to swap-thrash anyway and stick to core browser functionality, do it right and call it Opera Pro.

I think you're going to find it would be easier to put webkit and v8 into 12 than to bring 17 up to date with 12's ergonomic features and get rid of the chrome bugs 12 doesn't have. While the legacy opera can be a petulant teenager, she is 15 but generally wall mannered and very stable now, but chrome is barely out of the terrible twos and still acts like it. Quite a contrast to the efficient and stable mature Norwegian codebase we've come to rely on.

1) Speed Dial/Home Page
"Yes indeed. AND it doesn't matter that YOU don't like Stash and Discover and yet it was YOU who raised the issue in the first place. I'm simply posting back to you that there are differences of opinion and yours should not trump anyone else's."

Ok, let's look at this carefully.

Used to be, you had an option of when a page starts to get:
a) A page you want (this has historically) been your home page[1]
b) Speed dial.

Now your options are:
a) Speed dial.

See the problem?

This shouldn't be about opinions, whether mine is right and you lose, or yours is right I and Lose. That's win/lose.

This is why we have "options". Options are good. This way we both win.

Used to be you could fire up a new instance of Opera and you'd get your home page. Then, somewhere around the time tabs and speed dial came in it stopped going to your home page automatically and went to speed dial. Ok, that's less convenient, I never use speed dial so I click home and get my home page back.

Now I can't click home.

Stop making this harder! It's a fundamental f'ing feature of a web browser!

Consumers. Like. Options.

2) Opera 12 gets work done faster than any other browser.

"I've probably been using Opera longer than you (since 1999)".

I've used Opera since Version 3 and used it as my "daily browser" since version 5. I used Netscape (0.99 the day it came out) before that and Mosaic before that and Lynx before that and comp.infosystems.www in the late 80s, cause, well, good friends of mine invented stuff like MIME and SGML and I've always had an interest in computer graphics and text layout since the bell labs/unix days in the 70s. I've spent the last 20 years working on a CMS package and understand the specs and standards of ALL this stuff pretty darned well and I'm telling you authoritatively Opera is the only damn browser that works, and that there are fewer mouse clicks and key-presses than with any other browser to do the same thing. This is not an opinion, this is a quantifiable metric.

The initial assumption that WebKit and V8 would be slipped into the V12 browser turned out to be specious, and that's an issue.

Let me take a video of the forms problem, there's no point in talking about it when it's so painfully easy to show.
[1] the page you go to when you click the home button that has everywhere you need to go to. These have been around since the 1980s, and refined over the years.

Note also the Cert stuff has changed rather drastically. I think this is a good thing. Pretty sure.

http://www.opera.com/docs/ca/

Yeah, that and right click --> "open image" has been replaced by Chrome's useless "Open image in new tab".

Again, more mouse clicks to do the same thing.

Image Properties was utterly invaluable too, as you point out.

I did submit a bug report on the broken forms though. No other missing feature will cost quite so much time lost/wasted as that one.

I'll file bug reports when I finish finding bugs! But they're not really bugs they're missing features.

Speed dial is really cool and I can see the merit of providing the alternative world behind web pages it provides and this is thoughtfully done in both design and aesthetics. But if you don't need it it's a huge price to pay for losing fundamental and essential features.

I'm not really sure why it's not an add on.

It may in turn not be possible to satisfy both goals: making it the simplest possible user interface reflecting modern design directions and be the full featured noble workhorse of a tool is used to be in the same package. Having a "Home" and "Pro" version of the browser is one possible solution. MS legitimize this really well with XP I thought.

Also I notice it has the same minor quirks that Chrome does in it's behavior. I'm guessing this isn't Opera code with WebKit and V8 added to it, just a stripped down re-branded version of chrome and now the decisions have to be made what gets put back in.

Not sure why the home button was taken out though.

OOOOOooooooook, this is worse and an even worse show stopper. Forms have been destroyed. They don't work at all any more and only Opera got this right, ever.

Here's the scenario: have a complex form, with maybe 50+ fields. Maybe you don't want to fill them all out and fill out a few and click the submit button, see if they look ok, then go back, add a few more, or correct them if they weren't, click submit, go back and keep dong this till they're all done.

This relies on the property that when you go back to a form it's ALL STILL THERE. Not a blank form, but everything you typed before, all of it, every letter, is all there. Opera was the only browser this was every true in and I've been screaming this for years to people - if you use complex forms you have to use Opera because only it gets these right, they're pretty much unusable otherwise.

This was true from at least version 7 or 8 to 12. It's not true in 17 which looks and acts like Chrome - this is actually handy as it serves as a warning and now I know I have to use old Opera to do any real editing.

Hopefully this is one of the first things to get fixed. This was really really important. This is like taking the correction ribbon off a typewriter an saying this is the new improved model.

It doesn't matter if you like stash and discovery or not, that's nothing to do with anything. However the automatic presumption everyone will like them is flawed; they should be options.

Opera built a reputation on a browser that let you work better, smarter and faster. You could get more things done with the Opera browser in a given period of time than with any other browse, and this wasn't one thing it was a combination of a bunch of little things. Over time the ability to work on the web got better, not only for Opera users, but for the rest of the web with things like tabs and css coming from Opera.

So, as time goes on it would be reasonable to expect it gets even easier to work on the web because of more innovations from Opera and switching to V8 and WebKit were done for this reason. You can get more stuff done, faster.

Taking away functionality is not a step forward.

We can argue about stylistic things like the lack of a Home button - that only costs me an extra click (some of us use a Home Page the way it was intended to be which you can read about in comp.sys.infosystems.www from 1989 or so, and already have our own "speed dial" and now have to get to it from some other index page. This is what the home button was *for*! I can understand if full tool-bar functionality can't be rolled out in this new version, but at least a home button. Please.) but when you take away some area of functionality and you can't even do something any more that's an enormous step backwards. That's not just adding one mouse click to one simple task (and never mind I do that hundreds of times a day) this is adding a lot more steps than just one extra mouse click. Suddenly a whole large number of things either take more actions to do the same thing as in the case of one extra mouse click to get to my (local) home page but other things like the lack of a clone button means the steps to replace that lack of functionality are manifold. Stuff now takes longer. This is the opposite direction what you want to happen!

Bookmarks are portable via import and export and interoperability of data is important. I can understand not everyone wants to use them and I hope the new browser just isn't finished yet, to drop these is patently absurd.

The lack of a view source helper app is equally absurd. This slows down the development process the very thing that drives the popularity of opera. You really don't want to do that. I use dragonfly maybe a couple of times a month. Maybe. I use view source every day, being forced to give up the tools one uses to write and work with this stuff that they've carried around for 30 years and ported to every platform and you're prevented from using it so it can look more like a Windows phone? That's a non-starter too.

I'm sure they'll finish the browser soon and will put these things back in. Until then we'll have to work with 12 which only renders half the new stuff correctly but at least it's usable, then check it with 17 or chrome to make sure it looks right. This is a good example of that: http://rs79.vrx.net/interests/computers/sw/js/roundup/sliders/

I'm guessing a lot of the cool features were intimately tied internally to presto so no so easily portable to the WebKit version. I understand how that works. Hopefully Opera will do as they say and look at user feedback. Perhaps it would be good to keep track of these, maybe even prioritize them. Some are show stoppers, some are just inconvenient. Even a binary mode switch "expert mode / regular mode" to switch between interfaces would be fine. But I don't see throwing away 15 years worth of refinements in one go like this. It just makes no sense.

I *thought* i kept up to date, I've used Opera since version 3 and 3 weeks ago removed all browsers and data and downloaded new ones (Chrome, Opera) and got version 12 somehow.

Today I looked and we're at version 17. I knew about the V8 and WebKit upgrades - long awaited - so this wasn't a total shock.

Pros:
V8. This along makes it *work*. Finally. WebKit - this alone makes it pretty. Now stuff works.

Cons:
Too much was thrown away to simplify to look "like the windows 8 experience".

Specifically in my case:
a) bookmarks are gone. We've spent over a decade using these. We import them and export them as use opera to manage them. They are an integral part of any browser. They have to come back.

b) external source viewer. I use vi. I've used vi since the 1970s. I'm not going to change now and unless I have the functionality of vi at least in a source viewer even if it's not vi, then Opera is now dramatically less useful than it was before. Your source viewer doesn't even have a "select all". Guys, this is useless. And it's real real important.

These have to come back, and this is not negotiable. If Opera won't do this, then please consider releasing the source to people can fix it.

"Stash" is a cute idea. Some people may want it. Make it optional. Why should those of us who don't want it, pay for the code overhead to have at as well as losing functionality we depended on?

"Discovery" is horrific. Please just stop. Make it an option, but default it to off. Some of that stuff is pretty tawdry.