Former Dev Gives Gloomy Outlook On Linux Support For the Opera Browser

An anonymous reader writes: "It doesn't take a Columbo to figure out that the 'previous employer, a small browser vendor that decided to abandon its own rendering engine and browser stack' is referring to Opera in this comment answering the question 'Do you actually use the product you are working on?' It appears to originate from Andreas Tolfsen, a former Opera developer who is now part of the Mozilla project. From releasing a unified architecture browser including Linux support since 2001, Opera decided to put Linux development on indefinite hold, communicated through blog comments, and focus on Windows and Mac for their browser rewrite centered around the Blink engine that had its first beta release last spring. The promise to bring back the Linux version in due time was met with growing skepticism as the months went by, and clear answers have been avoided in the developer blog. The uncertainty has spawned user projects such as Otter browser in an attempt to recreate the Opera UI in a free application. Tolfsen's statement seem to be in line with what users have suspected all along: Opera for Linux is not something for the near future."

Comments

OPERA!?

[agapeton]

The Opera Browser?? WHAT YEAR IS IT!? (Robbin Williams)

Re:OPERA!?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Reply hazy, ask again later.

Re:OPERA!?

[rosseloh]

I've got a lot of customers in town that use IE, and old versions at that, because they have crappy web-based applications that don't work with newer versions, or other browsers.

These are car dealerships, dentist's offices, etcetera. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I sure wish these nationwide companies would update their software...

Re:OPERA!?

[PRMan]

One time at a startup we were trying to figure out what e-mail system to use. I asked my boss what the Magic 8-Ball was (although I knew because I had one as a child). I asked it, "What e-mail system should we use?"

He said, "You can only ask it yes or no questions."

I got the answer: "Outlook good."

We ended up using Outlook.

Re:OPERA!?

[khellendros1984]

Of course, it all depends on whose stats you use...

Opera is dead.

[suss]

It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.
It died when they abandoned their own codebase.

Re:Opera is dead.

[Threni]

It died right at the start when it was `pay up for love the ads`...resuscitated briefly when it was the only decent browser for pre-smartphones, then got finished off when Safari and stock/Chrome was let free on smartphones/tablets.

Re:Opera is dead.

[theArtificial]

It's just a disfunctional Chrome with Opera branding now.

Chrome is just a dysfunctional Webkit, which is just a dysfunctional Khtml....

While losing Presto, which has been around since the early days, sucks it's not exactly cheap "me-tooing" the other guys. Besides, one of the reasons for the lack of popularity was the obscure rendering issues occasionally encountered with pages. "Whelp, my banking site just doesn't work, gotta switch browsers" type situations weren't exactly uncommon and arguably speak more about the markup than the engine itself but an end user might not be so understanding. Operas approach makes a lot of sense from a technical standpoint. One could dream about an opensource Presto but with the whole software patent blight I don't see that occurring any time soon.

It died when they abandoned their own codebase.

Seems more like a fork, doesn't it? Feature branch the engine, keep the UI. Granted it's still under heavy development, I'm excited about seeing it mature - I'd like to see how their development tools will be integrated (element inspection and whatnot) since the "old" Opera is known for having many useful features baked in. I'd like to see a webkit with some sweet extensible architecture so we might have Firefox level plugins, see Adblock. I realize this is available now but the effectiveness varies from Chrome to Firefox due to how webkit handles network requests, I'd like to think there is an opportunity here. If development time is ultimately saved as a result, hopefully additional features will once again be the focus instead of reinventing the wheel.

Opera was great... till v12

[diorcc]

Been an Opera user since '98. Not die hard, but I always had Opera running in conjunction with other browsers. For a time solo, and now back to using FF, and Chrome (which is what the new Opera really is, minus the extensions - so what's the point?). It was a great browser because it was like an swiss army knife - one that is highly configurable WITHOUT the need for any extensions. Couldn't agree more with the ex-Opera dev. Sadly, they've decided to kill it. I'll keep an eye on Otter browser and keep using v 12 as my research / search and rescue - browser.

Interesting

[squiggleslash]

So an obscure platform that only a small band of hardcore fans used was never ported to GNU/Linux?

Re:Interesting

[armanox]

Opera 10 still supported Solaris (Sparc and Intel) and Linux on PPC.

For Those Who Forgot about Opera

[jazman_777]

Opera users typically were hardcore about it, and would only let go when you pried their cold dead hand away from it. I've been a longtime Opera user...the new version is derisively called "Chropera" and I've dumped it. It's just bad, so many of the things that made Opera are gone, so why use this Chropera? It didn't even have a bookmark manager, just that stupid Speed Dial. And then there is the general evasiveness of the devs, especially about a Linux version. So if you've forgotten about it, consider it a mercy. For those of us who loved using Opera, it's very painful.

Yup, an epic management coup.

[game kid]

Yup, this was a glorious coup by company higher-ups.

Grats, Opera management. You managed to kick out a good founder, kick out a good engine, and kick out any certainty that you won't be sold out to Facebook (Facebook, ffs!). You even made me wonder, between Tolfsen's account and the second engine change (from WebKit to Blink), if Google has simply stuffed your ranks with their management just to Elop the place.

ggwp.

Sad

[pwileyii]

I had been an avid Opera fan since I first started using it quite a few years ago. I used it when it was the only browser that had tabbed browsing. A feature that is now part of every browser out there. The folks behind the Opera browser were innovators. They had tabs, the speed dial, Opera link (which would sync bookmarks and other items between your browsers), and gestures years before other browsers and they fully believed in being standards compliant. When I heard they were moving away from being a browser developer to being a browser repackager, I stopped using it. They went from innovating to tagging along for a ride. I recently fired up the new version of Opera to be very, very disappointed because it was simply a repacked version of Chrome. Most of the features that I had grown to love were gone and I found no reason to continue using it.

Re:Sad

[Barsteward]

yep, i started with opera 5 which i think is where the tabs were introduced and it was so much faster and bullet proof compared to anything else.

Re:Not sure what we should do now.

[TeXMaster]

You can still download Opera 12 for Linux. And that's actually a good thing, since Presto is still the least buggy engine when it comes to SVG and, as far as my experience is concerned, MathML.

Another webkit is irrelevent

[linebackn]

One of the strengths (and simultaneous weakens) of Opera was that it used it's own unique rendering engine. That gave it an advantage in specialized situations where others would not quite fit.

Since they changed to using webkit, they are, in my opinion, basically irrelevant now. They might have well just become another one of those circa 2000 Microsoft Internet Explorer shells.

Say what you will about Presto not working on site x, y, or z, more diversity is good, and it helps keep real standard in check. There were once too many sites that were only viewable in IE, I do not look forward to a future internet that is only viewable in Google Chome.

Is there any hope at all that they might open source the Presto Rendering engine?

Re:Another webkit is irrelevent

[adiposity]

While as a developer, I appreciated the diversity in rendering engines Opera brought to the table, as a user, I don't think I would care. If Opera was better than Chrome with Presto, it could be better with Blink--with the added benefit of lots of obscure sites actually working.

How many Opera users actually celebrated that Opera worked on less websites than Chrome as a good thing?

Now, if Presto was faster (which it could be, at times), then that's another argument. But diversity wasn't what made them fans, IMO.

Re:No Market Impact Expected, but Short it anyway

[TeXMaster]

There are only two rendering engines for Linux, and they are Gecko and Webkit, both of which have horrible support for a lot of advanced web standards such as SVG and MathML, because the focus today is on who makes the fanciest sliding div effect rather than on actually properly implementing existing stuff. The loss of Presto and the reduction of alternatives is a very sad day for the web.

Re:Can't really fault them.

[armanox]

Except you can't write a full feature browser using ModernUI - it's not allowed. Opera used to support a lot of platforms (Solaris comes to mind) that they dropped. Has nothing to do with free platforms.

I use Opera...wait stop laughing!

[yoshi_mon]

So I actually have been actively using Opera for a while now. As well as it having a place in my history as my primary browser back in the day. And by now you might have then inferred that while I use Opera it is not my primary browser. Let me explain.

Since, at least as far as I'm aware, you still can't give a command line options to any Windows browser to tell it where/what size to open it has been convenient for me to use Firefox on my main monitor for my primary browser and then a 2nd browser that opens up on my 2nd monitor. Further it is nice having my 2nd monitor browser be different since then I can keep 2 effective sets of bookmarks. Since my 2nd monitor browser is in effect more a media device than my primary browser.

And for that Opera has worked great. In fact it still is working right now on my 2nd monitor where a YouTube video is playing right now. The UI was decent, it did not eat up a ton of resources, and overall did exactly what I wanted it to do and did it pretty well.

Well just a week ago I wanted to do a reinstall and so I packed up all my programs config/data files and did the deed. Opera's data files sit in:

C:\Users\$UserName\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera x64

Notice that last bit...my archive said just Opera not Opera x64 which I thought was a little odd since Opera kept auto updating for me so I thought I was running exactly the same thing that I had been not 45m prior. But whatever, I could see why that could happen between version installs but not updates. I was wrong.

I had been running Opera 12.x. I did not really keep track of it since all the dev's lost their heads and went for version number bloat and all that. So when I hit Opera's download site I just grabbed the latest version, installed, turned it on once, killed it, replaced the default config files with mine, and turned it back on and...

It was like installing Win8. Total UI change for the worse. (This was now Opera 19 btw.) No way to even put up a button for bookmarks. Everything had to go though a "quickdial" type page. Options were dumbed down. Just bad bad bad. It took me to realize that I was running what amounted to a whole new Opera and not the old one that had served me well.

Here: http://www.opera.com/download/...

You can see where the change was. The old Opera, which they appear to still be doing some updates to, stops at 12.x and then the reboot starts at 15 and is up to 19, lol, now. That version is something that again I liken to a Win8 version of Opera. I did not use it long enough, the new version of Opera, to give it any sort of proper review. All I know is that it was bad for me, reeked of some sort of desire to force tablet UI on desktop computers, and dumbed down everything as if I was using some Apple OS/app.

I am not opposed to change but where Opera is going now will not have me as a follower.

Re:No Market Impact Expected, but Short it anyway

[tibit]

A web rendering engine in source code form is pretty much cross-platform by definition, so I don't see what's so Linuxy about gecko or webkit.

What comes after Opera?

[DNS-and-BIND]

I've been a loyal Opera user since version 3. It was awesome using tabbed browsing on dialup. I'd click to open windows in the background and finish reading the page I was on, and then close it and go on to the already-loaded page. I remember all the brouhaha about IE's slow page loading, and wonder what all the fuss was about. But, now that Opera is over (don't even talk to me about the "new Opera", a dysfunctional skin of Chrome), I'm wondering what to do next. The last version of Opera will last another 6-12 months, I think, before it stops working with new websites. What browser is for me?

Chrome? Nope. I don't like it, plus Google's gone evil.

IE? Nope.

Firefox? Well, I'd really prefer a different answer. I hate adding plugin after plugin, only to have them all go incompatible when FF does an upgrade. Opera just worked and had every feature I wanted. Plus, FF is just sluggish on my system, a laptop from 2012.

What else is out there that a diehard Opera user will love?