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Opera Releases a New Version For Linux
motang (1266566) writes "Opera released Opera 24 for Linux. Currently it is in testing (developer) mode, and only for 64-bit Ubuntu, but hey it's a start since everyone thought Linux support was abandoned. In my test it is pretty rough around the edges, only has ambiance theme as it has been hard coded, and all the window controls are on the right and not on the left like what Unity has. But it is a start."
Instead of having firefox which wants to be chrome, or running chrome directly... I can now run a wrapper around chrome!
I'm still running Opera 12 for Mac OS for precisely this reason. I had no clue about this retarded Opera gambit until I auto-upgraded to Opera 15 one day and suddenly found that all the Opera features I knew and loved were missing with no plans to port them.
What's with the state of the browser market? It seems to go through great cycles... there was a early burst of diversity in the mid 90's, but that zenith was supplanted by the nadir of the IE monoculture (we are still feeling the effects of IE 6). Early versions of Firefox represented a bloom of reinvigorated innovation (such a variety of add-ons!) but firefox was eventually slowed by bloat and the demons of its single-process paradigm. Chrome then seized the mantle of stability via its multi-process approach.
Now, "do-no-evil" Google has established another monoculture. I almost ragequit using Chrome last Friday when I learned it is now impossible to install any Chrome extensions on Windows Chrome without using a Google account. WTF?
These are bad times for browser users. I await the beginning of the next great cycle. I hope to be inspired by the next innovator. "Disruptive" is a cliched term, but god damn it, this monoculture needs to die.
"like what Unity has"
And... I stopped reading.
Honestly, as a life-long Opera user and supporter, Opera is dead on all platforms. They refuse to make it work like it used to (or are incapable of that), and there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff.
They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have. The coding team has changed. The company has changed. There is no interest in preserving users any more. Bug reports get answered with "We haven't got around to that yet" or "We never intend to put that functionality back in.
I was there in the pay-for days. I was there in the ad-supported days. I was there right up until last year, when the company that I defended against others changed and the software I used everyday became unusable. They removed every major feature that did something useful, so it's now a very, very poor Chrome clone.
Opera supporters will tell you to stay on the old codebase. We hoped the company would see sense and start re-using that codebase after they realised their catastrophic mistake. It never happened. The only patches they ever put out to the "real" Opera codebase broke it along the way, presumably because they just don't understand the code at all.
Save yourself the effort - find another browser. There's even a "Let's rebuild Opera as it was" open-source effort doing what Opera SHOULD have done if they wanted a Chrome renderer in there. But, sorry, despite my best attempts to resuscitate it and even exhume it, it's dead.