Opera Releases Its First Chromium-Based Browser

hypnosec writes "Opera has released its first Chromium-based, completely re-engineered browser as a preview for Windows and Mac systems (download). The new browser has been given quite a makeover and comes with a refresh of Opera's 'Speed Dial' bookmarking feature. Users can now not only organize their shortcuts into folders, but also group them into folders automatically by simply dragging one bookmark over another. Opera has also included a faster bookmarking tool dubbed 'Stash,' allowing users to return to the links quickly. The new version has combined its search and address bars, allowing users to make searches directly via Amazon, Bing, Google and Wikipedia."

Comments

faster bookmarks

[vux984]

"Opera has also included a faster bookmarking tool dubbed 'Stash,' allowing users to return to the links quickly."

Was anyone complaining that bookmarks were too slow?

Re:faster bookmarks

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Beat me.

Someone forgot to sign the version too, playing havoc on my Mac with saved passwords in keychain, dialogue popup for every saved password, I have hundreds of them. A known Chrome bug that's now in Opera Next.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

"Opera has also included a faster bookmarking tool dubbed 'Stash,' allowing users to return to the links quickly."

Was anyone complaining that bookmarks were too slow?

You obviously haven't been around here when someone starts bitching about how Chrome or Firefox "mysteriously" eats through RAM when 500+ tabs are open at once (yes, these people openly admit to having literally over 500 tabs open at once as if they weren't just a bit loony-in-the-bad-sense) and were forced to justify this behavior to save face. Find one of those conversations, and I'll assure you you'll find a lot of... well, okay, you'll find very FEW people complaining that bookmarks are too slow for their workflow, but they're very very LOUD, and they seem to think that should count for bonus points, like penmanship or putting your name on top of the paper.

I didn't say anyone that mattered complained about it, just that they exist.

Re:faster bookmarks

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Opera has also included a faster bookmarking tool dubbed 'Stash,' allowing users to return to the links quickly."

That's fine, as long as the rest of you stays away from my stash.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it was the lack of mu that wrecked your joke.

Re:faster bookmarks

[spacefight]

A known Chrome bug that's now in Opera Next.
A known Chrome bug that's now in Opera. Next.

Fixed the punctuation for you...

Re:faster bookmarks

[Cinder6]

I'm posting from Opera Next now. Stash appears to be a better-looking version of Safari's "Reading List" feature. I actually like it. In fact, I like the browser in general. It has had a nice facelift, with Speed Dial getting new features, and Discover actually seems quite nice. Unfortunately, it also has some annoyances. It doesn't play nicely with some custom Windows color schemes; my black window chrome makes the New Tab button invisible and blends in with inactive tabs too much. It also seems like they've hidden or removed certain settings, which is rather obnoxious (I can't figure out how to get rid of the Google search on the Speed Dial. I already have an integrated address bar, so why do I need that?)

Re:faster bookmarks

[war4peace]

So... I just downloaded the thing, installed it, clicked on its shortcut... nothing.
Looking at Task manager, I see Opera.exe, then opera_crashreporter.exe, then opera_autoupdate.exe popping up. opera_autoupdate.exe stays in the list for a while, then it goes away.
That's ALL that happens.

Wow. This browser might be nice... if it only worked.

Re:faster bookmarks

[lipanitech]

I have not used opera since my old blackberry days. They were best browser for the BB and they do make a decent desktop browser they just need more publicity.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Except woosh.

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

Hell I don't get the whole switch...are they broke? Can they no longer afford to keep Presto, is that it? Because while I don't personally use Opera I have several family and customers that do and they were all quite happy with it, honestly the Opera users were some of the easiest to manage, Opera never broke, it never started acting up, it surfed the web and did that job VERY well.

So the only reason I can see for the switch is they are just too damned poor because it takes a hell of a lot less people to just reskin Chromium than it does to have an actual browser. I wonder how this is gonna affect their userbase as already 2 of my long time Opera users switched to Firefox, they didn't want anything to do with Chrome or Chromium.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Black LED]

I can say that I will be clinging on to the old Opera until I absolutely have to let go. There are too many features that I use on a daily basis missing in the new version.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Dixie_Flatline]

Actually, kind of.

The problem with bookmarks is that they don't work as well as the physical thing they're named after. Browser bookmarks are like tagging a bunch of books in a library that you want to read. If you want to bookmark a specific page, it's easy to add one, and you can go and delete older ones, but *updating* a bookmark is a bit hard.

Take webcomics, for instance. I usually keep a bookmark to the site so I can read the newest one every day. But if I'm reading through the archives, bookmarking where I left off either leaves me with lots of extra bookmarks that I'll eventually not want, or I manually edit the one I made for the site, etc.

A couple places save cookies so you can go away and come back where you left off. But if I have to manage things from in the browser, quick bookmarks that are quickly available to add and delete are ideal. This is the same thing I do with Apple's reading list functionality. When you go back to read something, opening it retires the link (non destructively--it's in another list that you can get back to if you need to) but adding a new item to read later doesn't clutter up your real bookmark list.

Re:faster bookmarks

[mwvdlee]

I wonder what your accent sounds like .

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh dude? Yeah just FYI but unless the new owners changed it you don't GET any karma from a funny post, so you not only deserve a whoosh but a "here's your sign" while we are at it.

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

Here is the thing that always got to me about that and I have yet to receive any kind of logical answer for it...why? Why would you WANT 500+ tabs open at the same damned time anyway? I mean I can see a half a dozen, hell maybe even a dozen if you are researching something, but 500? Why would you even do that?

I mean with anything else we would point out that this behavior is dumb and any problems were from them being a dumbass, to use the car analogy if someone said "I drive my car on the freeway in second gear and it overheats" everyone would say "Well take it out of second gear dumbass" but when someone posts they have a problem while having 500+ pages open people treat it as a legitimate problem...why? we don't treat anything else on the PC when its used so far out of bounds of its normal usage as anything but stupidity,nobody would say its a legitimate problem if the guy who takes a 3GHz CPU and doubles the clock has overheating issues or the guy that tries to run a dozen games at a time on his GPU suffers a meltdown, so why is it that browsers are supposed to work perfectly when they are pushed so far beyond what is a typical use case its not even funny?

Re:faster bookmarks

[Pseudonym Authority]

It will boost your karma from negative to neutral at least. I don't know if it can effect it after that.

Re:faster bookmarks

[pgpalmer]

I read a lot of webcomics, so I tend to check each one about once a month. For me I open the webcomic's bookmark, read through the archive until I read the present, then copy a permalink into the bookmarks' properties (I keep Firefox's Bookmarks window in the background).

For me, this is analogous to reading a physical book from a marked page, then before I put the book back I pull the bookmark from its previous location and replacing it where I'm currently up to.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Archenoth]

Here is the thing that always got to me about that and I have yet to receive any kind of logical answer for it...why? Why would you WANT 500+ tabs open at the same damned time anyway? I mean I can see a half a dozen, hell maybe even a dozen if you are researching something, but 500? Why would you even do that?

As a heavy browser, I keep many tabs open for a few reasons...

It may be weird for some people who don't think the same way I do, but it has always been much more efficient for me to keep hundreds of tabs open because I can keep my entire trains of thought on many topics in multiple tab stacks. That way I can forget about some topic for a few hours while looking at something else, and then switch back to the exact place I left off so I can get right back to my previous train of though.

I multitask in the stuff I am working on, the stuff I am researching, and the stuff I read for entertainment, and since I switch between these things at a moments notice, it is far quicker to just click the stack I want, or, since [Ctrl] + [Tab] is FIFO, cascade between many different things very quickly using that.

That's just me though, you browse differently obviously, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

But would you agree or disagree that the browser builders shouldn't be wasting resources on any problems you have when you are so obviously going so far beyond a typical use case its not even funny?

Again nobody would expect Intel or AMD to take the fact that some guy doubled his clock and the CPU melted as a legitimate problem, or the game designer to fix an issue when some guy tries to run a half a dozen instances of WoW on a single PC and it crashes and burns, so why should limited resources be dedicated to what is so obviously as opposite from typical use as one can get?

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

Last I checked it can't do a thing beyond neutral so karma whoring with funny would be completely pointless, not to mention if he wanted to karma whore he could get a LOT more points by simply going along with groupthink on one of the niche pages, talking up Linux or the Pi for instance.

Re:faster bookmarks

[hairyfeet]

That is the same thing my users that I've talked to has said, they will hang onto Opera while they try other browsers and see what fits best and then get the hell away from Opera, they are NOT happy about this crap.

BTW if that sounds like you I'd suggest some of the less famous browsers, plenty of smaller browsers that have nice features like Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF-ME (ultra low system reqs, it'll even run on win98), QTWeb (based on Webkit and QT and cross platform if that interests you) SWIron and Comodo Dragon (my current browser) which are also based on Chromium with different feature sets, Comodo IceDragon and Pale Moon (my current backup) both based on gecko, there are a ton of browsers out there if you don't mind trying a few to see what fits you best.

Re:faster bookmarks

[Fjandr]

Unless they re-add features such as per-website preferences and the ability to customize the UI in as many ways as Opera pre-Next, I won't be switching until the old Opera no longer works with new web tech.

Next is completely crippled compared to the previous version.

Re:faster bookmarks

[OptimalCynic]

Opera has had this great feature for a while that lets you save sets of tabs as a single group under a meaningful name and then load them up again when you want them. It's much better for that use case than keeping heaps of tabs open. No doubt that's been canned as well.

Re:faster bookmarks

[war4peace]

Someone found the workaround.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1678612&t=1369864427&page=1#comment14298672
Apparently if you have a proxy script set up in IE, Opera won't start.
Even funnier, if you do set a proxy script in IE while Opera Next is open, Opera will crash instantly.
This is not by any means an obscure bug, it's something that IMO should never have passed even an alpha build.

The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the "old" Opera was only the bad JavaScript support. Taking that out and you would get a nice browser. I fear that the WebKit Opera would be just another WebKit browser instead of the ole good Opera we all know. Is there a way to somewhat merge the good features of the Opera and taking only the performance of Chromium there?

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I fear that the WebKit Opera would be just another WebKit browser instead of the ole good Opera we all know.

You don't have to fear that because Opera won't be using WebKit at all.

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

V8(the Chrome/Chromium javascript engine) is BSD, so there wouldn't have been a license issue with continuing to use Presto; but swapping out Carakan for V8.

That sort of thing probably isn't minor surgery, though, so you'd really want some kind of cool feature in Presto to go to all the trouble instead of just going more-or-less-stock-Chromium with UI tweaks...

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[JabberWokky]

I believe this initial release is still Webkit, and that they will move to Blink in future releases. Or so TFA says (could be wrong, of course).

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Blink is not supposed to be a fork for WebKit. Blink is supposed to be a rewritten layout engine that will offer higher performance for Javascript code by means of JITting DOM manipulation from the Javascript side, and taking advantage of V8 optimizations for doing so. You can't achieve that by "forking WebKit".

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[eric_brissette]

Odd, I was under the impression that Blink was, in fact, a fork of WebKit.

It's already available in Chrome's Canary builds. I thought I had read that it'd be in Chrome Stable by June or July.

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[Trax3001BBS]

I wish that were true, but they dropped presto for Webkit and this is the first build of the abomination. Instead of fully featured browser in a neat multilanguage package of about 15 mb, we now have an useless Chrome shell without side bar, M2, RSS client, Bookmarks, keyboard and mouse shortcuts and well.. without anything resembling Opera.

Haven't tried it yet but I fear the loss of my short-cuts, one built in is /. taking you to slashdot.org;
I have many more that I've used for ages.

Hopefully this upgrade will allow Opera to play well with all of the sites now, I'm just used to
getting "you need a modern browser to continue". I use Opera as my main browser but have
a secondary FireFox for the pages Oprea won't open or when I want to play Battlefield 3,
which is daily

Somewhere around version around 3.62 or so is when I started using Opera. That browser on a floppy
was one sweet deal, taking all my bookmarks with me as I visited was just handy.

I've been collecting my bookmarks since that time as well, nothing else imports them,
some have tried but but it doesn't work out for me. I'm sure this newest update will
let me keep them and hopefully creating a new bookmark folder won't take very many tries now;
actually creating one was mostly a matter of luck for me.

Opera has always had the latest and greatest features, I hope it isn't "improved" to where
I don't care for it as that would just suck.

The above sound rambling? Probably because I am afraid of what's become of Opera.

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They will be probably tracking the changes. I believe that Chromium/Chrome has been using WebKir in such an unusual way that a complete rewrite, if not guaranteed to happen, is highly desirable at least. (I.e., Chrome has its own multi-process architecture, its own security-by-isolation model, its own Javascript engine, its own notion of how the browser engine will be used to do the whole UI of the browser (Shadow DOM, HTML components etc.), virtually everything going against the grain of how WebKit was supposed to be used.)

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Perhaps it can be described as fork right now, but after the stuff that's going to happen to it, it will have as much common with Apple's WebKit as an frog has with a squirrel.

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[UltraZelda64]

I'm really astonished from the bad decisions they are making since Von Tetzchner left the company. They keep dropping useful features from the browsers and dumbing it down. If they keep the current trend chances it will be dead before release. You don;t need to be a genius to understand that if your users wants a Chrome shell, they'll be using ** Chrome in the first place.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the trend all the browser makers are following these days, and unfortunately neither Mozilla or Google is out of business or even hurting yet. And after all their fuck-ups, Mozilla should be hurting like a son of a bitch... but no, they're big and influential enough that they can fuck their long-time users over by dumbing it down endlessly, and it's just business as usual.

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Frogs and squirrels are pretty similar. They are both members of the subphyla Vertebrata. When you compare over the whole of biology, they are quite similar. There are minor differences that add up to the differences you see, but on the inside, they work mostly the same.

And so do Internet Explorers and Firefoxes. Both have a layout engine, both have a network library, both have a Javascript compiler, both have a memory manager... Your point?

Re:The problem with the "old" Opera was JS

[aiht]

fuzzyfuzzyfungus was talking about another possible option that Opera didn't choose, and why not. You don't need to tell them that it didn't happen.

Opera was once the best web brower

[Arker]

Back at version 3.62 it really was the best in a lot of ways. You could fit the entire binary on a 3.5" floppy disk, and it was fast even on the slowest machines. You could kill scripts and formatting and image loading (or enable them) on a window by window basis with a single click. If it had been Free Software it would have changed the world. Instead, it has only bloated with age. Knowing that the new version is based on Chrome I doubt I will even bother to try it.

Re:Opera was once the best web brower

[Nimey]

Absolutely. Opera 3.6 was outstandingly good in its day, fast, small, and did a pretty good job rendering most sites; it was ridiculously better than Nutscrape 4 and Intestinal Expander 4. I was disappointed that v4 concentrated on developing a mail client instead of further improving the browser and v5 on internationalization.

Re:Opera was once the best web brower

[UltraZelda64]

Absolutely. Opera 3.6 was outstandingly good in its day, fast, small, and did a pretty good job rendering most sites; it was ridiculously better than Nutscrape 4 and Intestinal Expander 4.

Where are mod points when you need 'em?! That was pretty damn funny.

Re:Opera was once the best web brower

[Antiocheian]

But it didn't know Unicode and it was talking the W3C specs too seriously.

Re:Opera was once the best web brower

[Antiocheian]

Yes, both Netscape and IE4.

What exactly is their business plan?

[nashv]

The 'Opera' button is a clone of the Firefoxish and Tab Layout is Chromesque. It seems that Opera Next is a Frankenchild of the two best. And now that it is Chrome based, and thus inheriting all the new-fangled speed advantages, it seems to be go the go to browser for power users and newbies alike.

I guess what Opera is lacking is the 2 reasons why people choose browsers these days : the eco-system of Google and fervent open-sourciness of Firefox. It seems that browsers have gotten to the point where in browser performance is essentially meaningless for user-choice because both of the popular browsers are so good already. And that used to be Opera's USP back in the day. Too bad for them..

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

FF also seems to still have the edge in plugins. Google has been pushing their 'apps' hard; but those still seem to mostly focus on 'here's a neat thing that you can implement in HTML/CSS/JS' rather than 'here's something that changes the browser's behavior in useful and powerful ways'.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[SJHillman]

Some people would say the Firefox button is Opera-ish (as the Big O had it first) and Chrome's tabs are Operaish (as the Big O had tabs first). They may have inherited some of the refinements the other browsers made, but it's only fair to point out that those browsers copied the features from Opera to begin with.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[gweilo8888]

Codswallop. Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively, and you'll find a vast selection of browser behavior-altering extensions here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions
http://www.chromeextensions.org/

Basically anything I used to do with Firefox, I do today with Chrome -- and more. And for an added bonus, it doesn't collapse to its knees if I go without a reboot or closing my browser for a few days, let alone having a few dozen windows and tabs open.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And if you use the Onetab extension, it all becomes a web paradise. :-)

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[InvisiBill]

Just looking at my 1GB-memory Firefox process with only simple two tabs makes me cry. I think they have a lot to improve.

Extensions and plugins? In Cyberfox (a 64-bit build of Firefox), I currently have 10 tabs open, 53 enabled extensions (26 more disabled), and pretty much all the standard content plugins other than Silverlight, even Flash and Java. On my 16GB system, Cyberfox is using 609MB. Try about:memory to see what's sucking up so much RAM.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[partyguerrilla]

The "Firefox-esque" Opera button was there before Firefox's.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[Hentes]

You are right in that Opera should focus on its strengths, but that's not speed anymore. Opera's main selling point today is the costumizability and the mountain of extra features built into the browser. Sure, you can have most of them using an extension on Firefox or Chrome, but extensions tend to be badly written. They are slow, bloated and unsecure. Trying to replicate the complete Opera experience in Firefox or Chrome with extension would eat up all memory, slow down the browser and make it crash every half hour.
Opera is a browser for users who know and require the hundreds of features they provide, which is why trying to follow the minimalist Chrome path is shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[Ksevio]

The Opera button was in place before firefox cloned it (available in a a weekly build).

The current version seems to be just the basics of getting webkit working in a browser - there aren't a lot of the features Opera is known for, but even this stripped down version could be useful for someone looking for a lightweight browser

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[devent]

> it doesn't collapse to its knees if I go without a reboot or closing my browser for a few days, let alone having a few dozen windows and tabs open.

I think that's a Windows issue. My laptop is now running for 12 days (with hibernate and suspend) and I never close Firefox. I have open 5 tabs minimum and sometimes more then 50.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[RR]

Some people would say the Firefox button is Opera-ish (as the Big O had it first) and Chrome's tabs are Operaish (as the Big O had tabs first).

And yet Opera has always gone out of their way to violate Fitts' Law. It doesn't matter on Macs, where the top of the screen is reserved for the menu bar, but on Windows they keep putting space between the tab and the top of the screen.

Originally, the tab bar went under the menu bar, first in Opera and then Firefox and others. Then Google showed the world the menubar at the top, and Mozilla and Opera copied it. But while Google and Mozilla put the tab bar at the very top of the screen, Opera put a minuscule space in between. Furthermore, while Chrome and Firefox preserve the behavior of the minimize/maximize/close button cluster, Opera put a miniscule space between those and the top of the screen too. I know it's bad design, leave it to Microsoft to make a destructive action have the greatest Fitts Law area, but it's standard and Opera is non-standard.

So, I'm just checking out Opera Next, and at least the Firefox-like menu bar and the Windows minimize/maximize/close are at the very top of the window. However, despite being a customized version of Chrome, they still added a 1-pixel border above the tab bar. This is madness.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[SrLnclt]

This reminds me of Netscape near the end. It was still around for years after the masses stopped using it, but was essentially a rebreanded version of mozilla/firefox. The trouble is it took them a few months to put their touch on it.

I'm curious how this would work well for Opera, if their business plan involves always reacting to the work of others in a world of nearly continuous browser updates. Sounds a day late and a dollar short to me.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[drinkypoo]

Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively

this is what makes the majority of chrome addons piss me off. Most of them could be a user script, which would (as you say) work fine in Chrome. Instead, people often implement fixes for stupid website behavior (especially stupid Google website behavior) as a chrome extension and then I don't get to use it on firefox.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[nashv]

That's more of an issue with how developers choose to distribute their code. And that's more of a comparision with distribution systems. The Chrome Web Store is a lot more visible, convinient and trustworthy, compared to userscripts.org, unfortunately.
Everytime I install a userscript in Chrome, it shows up in the Extensions as 'wierd non-descriptive number.js'. I have to use Tampermonkey anyway to manage these decently.
Hell, userscripts.org doesn't even look proper on a 1920x1080 resolution screen. Wierd fonts, too small and condensed....not exactly a professional job, compared to the Web store anyway.

Re:What exactly is their business plan?

[gweilo8888]

That would still be a Firefox problem, not an OS problem. The app should be coded to work properly on every platform it is released on. If it can't be made stable on a platform, it shouldn't be released on it. That simple.

What is "Opera Next?"

[geminidomino]

Is this a different product than the mainline Opera browser, or are they going to be basing future versions on Chromium, and just decided to stop using the clear and understandable "beta?" It's not all that clear to me, but if the latter, at least it's one fewer browser I have to keep installed for testing.

Re:What is "Opera Next?"

[Anonymous Coward]

'Next' is the development/testing branch.

Re:What is "Opera Next?"

[Spudley]

Is this a different product than the mainline Opera browser, or are they going to be basing future versions on Chromium, and just decided to stop using the clear and understandable "beta?" It's not all that clear to me, but if the latter, at least it's one fewer browser I have to keep installed for testing.

Basically what happened is that everyone else decided that "Next" was a cool new way of saying "the version that's currently in development". So we have HTML.next and so on.

Opera decided that the only way forward was to copy everyone else and do the same thing.

Kinda like this whole "webkit, uh, blink" thing.

Re:What is "Opera Next?"

[geminidomino]

Thanks

Re:What is "Opera Next?"

[SJHillman]

"Next" just makes me think it's a newfangled cola. "Opera Next, now with real sugar and zero calories!"

Re:What is "Opera Next?"

[Ksevio]

The "Next" is just to distinguish it from the mainline. Versions of Opera Next include weeklies, alphas, betas, and RC builds, but they all install separately from a stable Opera installation.

It's basically a way for people to test a new version without breaking their current installation.

slower browsing

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I really can't find Turbo mode, the only feature I liked in Opera while using MiFi to save bandwidth and when out in the middle of nowhere with poor reception.

Re:slower browsing

[Cinder6]

From the linked download page, it looks like it's now called "Off-Road".

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Most importantly for us slashdot users....

[I-am-a-Banana]

the URL /. no longer works...

But will we be forced into it?

[justthinkit]

Will we be forced into Opera "next"? Opera.com article wasn't clear about it. I'd prefer a fork, i.e. choice. For one, to let the bugs shake out of the next great thing(tm).

Re:But will we be forced into it?

[SJHillman]

The current version of Opera asks me if I want to update. Even if the new version changes that, it's unlikely that you won't be able to turn it off.

Re:But will we be forced into it?

[SJHillman]

Apps for a specific services a little different from operating systems and web browsers, as they tend to be proprietary and the vendor doesn't have to worry about breaking compatibility with third-party products whereas the OS and web browser exist to work almost exclusively with third party content.

Re:But will we be forced into it?

[TangoMargarine]

New features isn't the only reason you stay on an active project...especially important for web browsers due to their ubiquity, you need continuing bug fixes.

I clung on to Firefox 3.6 for awhile, but eventually you have to give up and continue forward or you're exposing yourself to security holes.

goodbye development tools

[Duncecap]

As a long time opera user who works in web development I am mostly going to miss the dragonfly development tools. They were much cleaner and easier to use than firebug and the development tools built into chrome. Not really sure Opera serves any purpose at all other than being another option any more. Long gone are the times they would implement new features and other browsers would copy them months later. Can't even figure out how to use mouse gestures now.

Re:So...

[SJHillman]

You do realize that most of the UI features are a revamp of what they already had, right? Tabs, speed dial, etc... Opera came up with it first and welcomed Firefox, Chrome, etc years later when they finally caught up.

Re:Bookmarks are...

[kubajz]

That, and also two more things. First, when I bookmark I tend to add keywords that will help me find the content when I cannot rely on Google keywords (e.g. I read an interesting article about flying robots somewhere but I would not be able to find it using Google - too many false positives). Second, I'd really like to preserve the bookmarked pages as they are today, since they tend to disappear after a time. However, I cannot seem to find a suitable Firefox plugin that is going to save my bookmarks as either HTML archives or PDF files... has anyone had the same problem?

R.I.P.

[jazman_777]

Just a flimsy skin on WebKit now. Starting from scratch they have a long long way to go to get to current Opera feature state. And the new Android version is a dead shadow of its former self. I'm now trying to get used to Firefox.

Re:R.I.P.

[nashv]

A sincere question out of curiosity : Why not Chrome?

Re:R.I.P.

[Anonymous Coward]

I made a mistake and manually updated my nook color (running jellybean) to the new opera. Resource hog, non responsive and slow as molasses. I've been too lazy to copy the apk from the old opera back over and install it. Definitely the new one is really really bad.

Re:R.I.P.

[jazman_777]

When I tried Chrome, I just didn't like it. I hated the bookmarks management. I like the customizability of the interface of Opera, so Chrome (and FF as it imitates Chrome) really chapped my butt. I had been a sorta-Firefox user (for sites that Opera choked on) and the rest of the family was using Firefox. But then FF went spasdic with its updates and breaking addons, and I just moved everyone to Opera, mostly. But I might take a look at Chrome again.

Re:R.I.P.

[jazman_777]

Trying Chrome. It's OK, as good as Firefox at least for me. I'll stick with it for a while to see if I can deal with it long term.

Re:R.I.P.

[shutdown -p now]

Just a flimsy skin on WebKit now. Starting from scratch they have a long long way to go to get to current Opera feature state.

It's not just that. There has been a long-winded discussion in the comments section of the Russian equivalent of Slashdot (seeing how Eastern European, and particularly ex-USSR countries have always formed the bulk of Opera user base), which involved their official community representative. When people started asking questions like "When are bookmarks going to be implemented?" and "When will UI customization be brought back to the original level?" and "When will we be able to dock the tab bar vertically again?", the answer to all of those was that they do not even intend to implement any of that - Opera is officially all about "UI simplification" now. Why anyone would bother using it instead of Chrome for this purpose, though, is not clear.

The only two original features that are planned are Opera Link and Dragonfly...

Re:R.I.P.

[cerberusss]

the answer to all of those was that they do not even intend to implement any of that - Opera is officially all about "UI simplification" now

Oh, that's a damn shame. I bet a lot of people really liked Opera for its customization preferences.

I guess you'd use Opera instead of Chrome, if you don't trust Google.

Whiners

[eric_brissette]

I find it funny that when you look at the comments on the Blink articles, there are tons of people upset about Google creating yet another rendering engine, and they're worried about standards compliance issues and having another target to design for.

And then you read the comments in the Opera-switching-to-Blink articles, and everyone is upset about losing diversity in the web ecosystem.

Are these two different groups of people commenting, or is it just one big group of whiners?

Re:Whiners

[labawi]

I would agree with both of the complaints simultaneously, without considering it contradictory, as Opera is a minority, mostly standards-conforming browser, while Chrome is a majority, "innovating" browser.

Because of this, old Opera would and could not create a new development target, while being useful for testing standards conformance of sites, while Chrome has a both the power and tendency [insert links here] to create an alternate web ecosystem.

Re:Whiners

[shutdown -p now]

It's because when Opera has originally announced the switch to WebKit (and later Blink), they said that they're just switching the engine, and will keep their UI. Now, the main reason why anyone was using Opera in the first place in the last few years was their UI - it was extremely customizable without plugins, toolbars and shortcuts and mouse gestures all. Historically they also held the performance crown, but that wasn't true ever since all other browsers added JIT-compiling JS engines and hardware acceleration (and Opera lagged on both).

Now, they release the preview version, and it turns out that they didn't just switch the engine - they literally made a reskin of Chromium. All their customizability, gone. All their unique UI features, gone. Heck, they've even stripped features from Chromium - they don't have bookmarks! (there is a purported "smart" replacement, which does not support e.g. nested folders...).

like google chrome but...better?

[Cyko_01]

Awesome! Now opera is just like chrome, but without that annoying....uhhhh -- it just like chrome, but with way better....uhhh....hmmmmm. Ok, I guess opera is dead then.

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[iggymanz]

despite all of opera's hype about a claimed 100+ million users, the real stats from any huge website will tell a different tale: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari dominate the hits, while opera is something like 0.5% That's still impressive, to be there at all, but it's kind of like a Linux desktop. small pressence in the world of webdom

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[H0p313ss]

despite all of opera's hype about a claimed 100+ million users, the real stats from any huge website will tell a different tale: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari dominate the hits, while opera is something like 0.5% That's still impressive, to be there at all, but it's kind of like a Linux desktop. small pressence in the world of webdom

Usage share of operating systems

Heavens only knows how accurate that is, but that tells me that Opera isn't even close to the same level of penetration as Linux in the desktop market. There are more Vista users out there than bloody Opera.

Opera users are like Amiga fans, there's only a handful of them, but they're very very loud.

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[H0p313ss]

despite all of opera's hype about a claimed 100+ million users, the real stats from any huge website will tell a different tale: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari dominate the hits, while opera is something like 0.5% That's still impressive, to be there at all, but it's kind of like a Linux desktop. small pressence in the world of webdom

Usage share of operating systems

Heavens only knows how accurate that is, but that tells me that Opera isn't even close to the same level of penetration as Linux in the desktop market. There are more Vista users out there than bloody Opera.

Opera users are like Amiga fans, there's only a handful of them, but they're very very loud.

However, this page says that the Opera market share is much higher than 0.5, putting it firmly in the desktop Linux range.... and still only a fraction of Vista.

Not exactly a great selling point "My product is even less popular than Windows Vista"

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[msauve]

Based on what? User agent strings, which an Opera user may have set to "mask as IE" so they can navigate web sites created by brain dead developers who insist on checking user agent strings?

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[shutdown -p now]

Opera is now Chrome without bookmarks. I'm serious, go read their feature list.

Re:like google chrome but...better?

[shutdown -p now]

Opera did indeed have many millions users (though probably not 100M, unless you count their embedded versions), but they were mostly geographically concentrated in Eastern Europe, especially Russia. It used to top the Russian browser market share at 40% at its peak, and that alone is something like 20 million people.

Re:Why would I use this?

[Cinder6]

Opera has been free for a long time now. Youtube has HTML 5 support.

Re:Why would I use this?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Opera has been free in price since 2000 and ad-free since 2005.

Quick notes

[partyguerrilla]

This is sort of a deal breaker for me. Can anyone see the quick notes anywhere? Chrome extensions seem to work fine with this build. They should've just open sourced presto if they were going this way.

Re:So...

[UltraZelda64]

Eh... you do know that Opera has been the pioneer of web browsing for many years, right? Everyone else--while more popular and claiming all the fame for "their" inventions in the first place as a result--was always scrambling to catch up with them. Unfortunately, Opera rarely received the credit they deserved. I'm not sure about their status the last few years since to be honest I think web browsers have turned to shit with all the dumbing down and I no longer care, but many of what you'd consider a major "modern" feature in Firefox or whatever else was probably a part of Opera in some way first. Fuck, even tabs started in some form with Opera as a complete and fully-configrable multiple-document interface.

No WebRTC?

[canowhoopass.com]

The previous version of Opera supported the new getUserMedia tag to support cameras and microphones. I had hoped with the move to chromium they'd piggyback off the efforts Google has put in to also add peer connections but instead it appears they've dropped support completely.

hope there is a Linux port soon

[FudRucker]

i wont switch OSs for a browser

NetCaptor and IBrowse

[tepples]

Fuck, even tabs started in some form with Opera as a complete and fully-configrable multiple-document interface.

I thought the use of workbook-style MDI in a web browser started in NetCaptor, an IE wrapper, and IBrowse, an Amiga browser, before it landed in Opera.

Re:NetCaptor and IBrowse

[UltraZelda64]

Given the fact that I never heard of either one of those, I doubt that a whole lot of other people have either.

I don't know anyone who's ever used an Amiga and MyIE or whatever it was is the first Trident shell I recall hearing about.

Either my point was meant to be that Firefox has not been the leader in web browsers. That's all.

Okay, I'll bite

[Arancaytar]

Why should you install a Chromium-based browser when you already have Chromium? (Or Google Chrome, as the case may be.)

(Not even going into the issue of why developers would take an engine that already natively runs on Linux and then not make it run on Linux.)

Re:I'm fine with it...

[DragonWriter]

Well you won't be fine with it since the mail client has already been taken out

Has it been "taken out" or "not yet ported to the new Chromium-based system"? I mean, I would suspect that early releases of Chromium-based Opera Next are going to be missing features that are both in the current stable Opera and planned for inclusion in the stable release of Opera Next.

Idle FF thought

[rueger]

The new version has combined its search and address bars, allowing users to make searches directly via Amazon, Bing, Google and Wikipedia.

A few times lately I've found myself using Firefox, and have been gobsmacked that you still have to type searches into a separate box instead of the usual URL bar. How many years has it been since Chrome added their one box for everything?

Re:Idle FF thought

[shutdown -p now]

In original Opera, this was implemented as it should - the address bar also works as a search bar if you use it that way, but the separate search bar lets you e.g. paste-and-search things with various search engines more conveniently. And, of course, you could always hide the dedicated search field with its UI customization capabilities.

missing features

[locopuyo]

It is missing a ton of features from regular Opera which is the reason I use Opera over Chrome. Even the features they have right now are buggy and incomplete. For example mouse gestures do not work right and aren't customizable through the interface. There isn't even an option to import bookmarks or other settings.
The chrome development tools are also inferior to Opera Dragonfly, which is another reason I use Opera. Hopefully they make them more Opera Dragonfly like before they are finished.

I'll be waiting for a more complete version before I switch over.

Looking forward to downloading the WebKit version

[file_reaper]

I use Opera everyday at work.

I've become quite used to its UI, I hope they don't change that.

From the old Presto based Opera, one of the most frustruating aspects was searching for text, especially in very large auto-generated webpages (ie webpages which contain output of test runs, etc...) Opera's search there was painfully slow compared to Chrome/Firefox/etc...

There were also compatibility issues with a couple of sites, but this was just minor stuff I'd ignore. The UI with Bookmarks sidepanel/RSS/Integrated Downloads manager (with torrents)/SpeedDial/ was what sold Opera over the rest. Another feature was the password manager, I have to sign on to dozens of internal sites, reauthenticating at every access, so if you open up a dozen links to the same portal, in Firefox each prompted for a password, but in Opera, enter a password for one of them and they all just unlocked, it was lovely. This isn't the kind of stuff to put on banners, but man it made me happy and productive. The little things.

I hope they haven't removed any of what I like, it'll be quite sad.

Cheers.

Since everything is chrome now

[Osgeld]

can someone recommend me a web-browser that isnt firechrome, operachrome, IEchrome or just plain chrome

I hate that everytime firechrome updates I have to go digging to see what door they hid even more shit behind and yet there is no real improvements

no bookmark import or sync

[ucity]

the introduction of a new experience that does not yet work is one long time feature of opera products.

Re:So...

[shutdown -p now]

No, it is the reverse. They've dropped numerous unique features and customization hooks that they've had that actually made Opera stand out, and turned it into a dumbed-down UI very similar to Chrome.

Re:Looking forward to downloading the WebKit versi

[shutdown -p now]

I''ve become quite used to its UI, I hope they don't change that.

They didn't just change it, they rewrote it from scratch, ditching most of the features. The result looks mostly like Chrome. According to their community representatives, this is by design.

. The UI with Bookmarks sidepanel/RSS/Integrated Downloads manager (with torrents)/SpeedDial/ was what sold Opera over the rest.

This is all gone. Bookmarks, in particular, are gone entirely, replaced by "Stash", which is basically castrated bookmarks with no ability to nest folders. Speed Dial is the only thing remaining here.

Another feature was the password manager

Gone.

Re:Bookmarks are...

[jones_supa]

that thing that we used before we could go to Google and efficiently search for anything, right? Just so I'm on the same page.

What if you don't remember what to search? For example, you find some random page with some interesting topic, but you never remember to get back to it. Bookmarks can be handy for that.

Re:Why would I use this?

[jones_supa]

Opera has been free for a long time now. Youtube has HTML 5 support.

YouTube offers only a portion of their videos in HTML5.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Does "Opera" still have any relevance?

[Fjandr]

With the change to a Chromium base, it no longer has any relevance.

I'm a long-time Opera user, and this change saddens me a great deal. There will now no longer be a browser that integrates so many things without relying on plugins. All the standard usability plugins for Chrome and Firefox are native features of Opera pre-Next. Their relevance used to be the enhancements that everyone else copied. Now they'll just be playing catch-up.

Banned for criticizing

[lksd2]

Been member of Opera community for years and got banned for criticizing Opera 15.