What's "that interface", then? When you start Opera for the first time it basically looks like any browser, doesn't it? Even though it has a mail client built in, all extras are hidden by default. Maybe you haven't tried the latest version yet, but only the old 7.x which did have lots of buttons by default?
Opera's failure to gain usage share dates back to 2002 when Mozilla 1.0 was released.
Wow, so a free program takes users from a program you have to pay for! What a surprise!
People who thought that Opera's status as adware/payware was holding them back claimed that Opera usage would soar quickly after removing the ad banner/making Opera free in 2005. Many people who made that claim have now realized it didn't happen. It looks like users really do prefer Mozilla browsers.
No, people simply follow the advertising, and Mozilla was clever enough to hire professional marketing people and take advantage of IE's security holes. Users don't "prefer Mozilla browsers", since most people don't even know about anything else. They know about IE and likely Mozilla/Netscape. That they choose Mozilla over IE is not exactly surprising.
Other than that, I don't understand what you are trying to say.
and then later actually outright calling me an idiot
I didn't. I wrote:
Thus, you may not be an idiot, but you certainly are clueless when it comes to Opera.
Things like SMTP authentication aren't feature requests, they are feature requirements.
You are missing the point, and ignoring the other examples.
No, my point isn't whether or not Opera gets changes at all, but, whether what users (and guess what the market is made up of, that's right, users) actually have any say whatsoever.
Of course they do. Opera even has a wishlist forum for feature requests. Users are invited to download early alpha versions and give their feedback. And so on.
The point remains that everything you can do with them you can do via bookmarks or external programs and it's less intrusive.
Bookmarks are cluttered, and external programs are a pain. There's a reason why people love Apple widgets, and why Microsoft is doing their own widgets with Vista.
And why do you keep saying that extentions have only had weeks?
I didn't.
The trouble is, anything you can do with widgets, you can do less intrusively without them.
Yeah, who needs web applications when you can just download programs instead? Gmail, etc. are just silly. Who needs webmail? Use Outlook Express or something instead.
Again, you are proving that you aren't getting it. Just because you don't see a use doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Oh, and Opera IS a web browser.
Yes, and a lot more. It has never been just a browser, as I pointed out.
Developer tools are a whole different matter entirely.
Such as? I'm not saying nothing gets added, I'm saying that it really feels like they aren't so much listening to requests as just adding what they think makes sense when they think of it.
Obviously. Software development is not a democratic process. You don't just add something because someone asked you to. But the market's rules applies. SMTP authentication was added for mail (ages ago), NTLM support, rich text editing, etc. You are just ignoring obvious examples because you have made up your mind already.
Maybe. Maybe extentions take more than a year because people have been calling for them for a very long time now, not just a matter of a few weeks.
A very long time? Maybe a year or two. That's not "a very long time" in software development. And it wasn't until Opera went free without ads that you noticed requests for extensions. And that's not even a year ago.
Tens of thousands? That's actually not very much when it comes to downloads.
It is when it's a single feature in a minority browser.
Something I'm not getting you say?
Yes.
Emulated? Extentions do things within the browser itself. Widgets are actually pretty much external.
Yes, but you can still get features that are available as extensions in Firefox. Whether they are external or not is irrelevant.
What web standards? It's an Opera API...
No it isn't. It's using web standards. Widgets are basically web pages without a browser UI.
Java apps will work in pretty much any browser, while Opera widgets will only work in, you guessed it, Opera. Plus Java isn't even limited to the browser and can be 100% external. It's also quite easy to program for as even I could do simple applications after only a couple of weeks or so of a low level OO class that focused on Java.
Java still requires more time and resources than web applications.
Name one well known popular widget.
I don't have to. But I can name plenty of web applications. Java is a programming language used to create programs. HTML, JS, etc. are the languages behind widgets. The same languages are used for normal web sites.
The flaw in this explanation is the fact that extentions have been a request for several major revisions.
No, they have not.
By now they could have worked in whatever might have been needed had they wanted.
You are assuming that things are done in a week.
Opera is a web browser.
Opera has never been just a web browser. Even the first public version had a newsreader and could send mail.
Actually, the facts speak for themselves. If anyone doubts even for a moment, then the word "obvious" does not apply.
No, you are being irrational and illogical again. If something obvious isn't obvious to someone, they may just be an idiot.
Clearly there is something that makes it less than obvious that it is not a publicity stunt or I never even would have said this since it would be obvious to me that it is not true.
But then again, you obviously haven't paid attention to Opera or what it does or how it works. Thus, you may not be an idiot, but you certainly are clueless when it comes to Opera.
-Fix the mail client so it separates by REAL folders.
No!
The "view filter" idea is great but doesn't work with 5000+ messages.
Sure it does. Views are far more flexible than folders, and this comes in handy with thousands of messages. 5000?! That's all? Try 500K, which is what I deal with.
Not at all. Everything is disabled and/or hidden by default, so if you don't want to use those features just don't activate them.
What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed
Opera is already lighter and faster than the competitors, and your request is rather useless. What features should be removed? Bookmarks? Bookmark nicknames? Everything except back, forward, reload and the address field?
or at least scalability in the full version.
Yes, and that's what Opera does today: It starts off as a plain and simple browser, but you can activate stuff if you want to.
Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top.
It's extremely easy to remove buttons in Opera, and to turn toolbars on and off. But Opera has far fewer buttons visible by default than IE anyway, so...
There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but your post is misinformed and your arguments are illogical or simply wrong.
Firefox's success has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Firefox had a major marketing push, as a completely free browser. Opera could obviously never reach as many users as Firefox since it was adware/payware.
Opera's mistake is not the UI at all. Rather, it is the failure to do a major marketing push when everyone was looking at an alternative to IE, and while Firefox wasn't finished yet. Firefox came almost exactly at the right time: While everyone was focusing on IE's shortcomings, especially regarding security.
In both browsers, if I enter "vmware", for example, I see a drop down list of all the pages I have viewed recently at www.vmware.com. But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse.
Not at all. Simply press the down key on the keyboard. So, wrong.
Opera shows how mis-management can reduce the profit of a software company.
Huh? Opera is making more money than ever! Most of Opera's income has come from mobile phones and devices for several years now anyway. So, wrong.
Opera cost $30 previously. That's an amount I would easily pay, if there were advantages instead of disadvantages in the user interface. I spend a lot of time with a browser, and $30 would be a tiny amount of money per hour.
It was $39, and you are just one single person. Most people do not want to pay for a browser.
The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways, in my opinion: First, Opera failed to recognize that the user interface design of a successful product is a huge intellectual challenge, and that, when competing products work fairly well, the user interface determines which will be most popular.
This is vague nonsense. I've already demonstrated that you are wrong about why Firefox is more popular than Opera, and shown that you are not representative of most users.
Second, Opera, like all software companies of which I am aware, thinks of product support as a very low-level job, and assigns it to people with a teenage sense of responsibility.
Wrong, and also irrelevant. Firefox doesn't even have any tech support (unless you pay $50 or so per incident), and yet it's more popular than Opera. So, you are contradicting yourself.
For example, someone who seemed that she was only working until she could find a man to marry and have babies answered my suggestion about tab-key autocompletion with nonsense.
Well, I've shown how you are the one talking nonsense:)
Third, Opera, like most software companies, has poor marketing.
Yes, Opera has poor marketing.
Good marketing requires someone who is very skilled at communication and who is also willing to understand how to structure product support so that it is both efficient and useful in guiding the development of the product. At Opera apparently there has always been a lack of understanding of communication, and a lack of connection of the communication with the technical details of the product. There have been many subtle and not-so-subtle mistakes.
This is yet more vague and irrelevant nonsense.
There are other unfortunate choices. Opera's excellent ability to save the current browsing session is ruined by the fact that the session files are now buried deeply in the Opera folder structure, and cannot be saved elsewhere. That's a mistake that is recent; with version 6 session files could be saved anywhere.
And this is completely irrelevant to just about everyone else. The old way to save sessions sucked. Thew new way is far better UI because it doesn't confuse the heck out of the user. It's Firefox UI design in Opera!
I must say that I'm not entirely certain they really listen all that well to suggestions and such.
Then you haven't seen the way frequently requested things are added all the time.
For example, people have been calling for extentions
Maybe extensions aren't considered to be of critical importance, or maybe it takes more than a week to implement an extensions system properly.
Then they do these "widgets" that are just pointless
Then why do Opera widgets have tens of thousands of downloads? Clearly there is something you are not getting, and clearly there is something of strategic importance with widgets, seeing as they are available on mobile phones too (they were before the PC version got widgets).
Also, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets.
Anything a widget can do, you can do better with an actual program in Java or some other easily portable language.
Except doing them with web standards is faster and cheaper, and it's easier to deploy.
If you look at their forums you can find some long running feature request threads that a lot of people have "+1"ed that just never happen.
Or take a long time. Or aren't a priority for some reason. Sometimes, long awaited features arrive only after some major rewrite since they relied on some kind of functionality which wasn't present yet. Rich text editing in Opera 9 was apparently one of those things. The old engine simply couldn't do it, and it relied on stuff that needed to be added.
So it's not just a matter of adding features just like that. It requires planning, and they may require other features to support them.
The truth is though, it seems to me that most of the suggestions are basically going to be things that should be ignored, such as a designer asking that they support a proprietary extention that works only in IE
Huh? What about the suggestions about better web dev tolls?
So what's left from a designer's perspective besides asking them to fully support whatever little bit of the standards they don't already?
Proper/better web development tools?
I'm wondering if this is just a publicity stunt or if they really do have a point for all this.
It is obviously not just a publicity stunt. Geez, do you know anything about Opera at all?!:o
Yeah, Nintendo, Google, Apple, etc. all have astroturfers flooding Slashdot, digg, etc. with positive comments. As for Linux, it's probably Linus who spends most of his time creating new Slashdot accounts to astroturf for Linux. Yes sir. Because it's impossible that lots of people are genuinely excited about news products from someone.
"the fact remains that you have consistently failed to explain what precipitated the collapse"
You are so blinded by your own stupidity that you forgot that I explained that the top part fell down on the floors below? Oh well.
Sorry for not responding right away. Conspiracy nuts like yourself get boring quickly, so I left the notification mail in my inbox for some day I was really bored.
In your work at Opera, you have clearly paved a path that includes going beyond the W3C standards. Whether it is WhatWG implementations, or new functionality specific to Opera (2dgame), you are pushing into new territory.
The goal of WHATWG is to formally standardize it as a W3C recommendation eventually. As for "2dgame", isn't the full name "opera-2dgame"? In other words, it's properly marked as "Opera-only" until it gets standardized through WHATWG.
Can you explain why W3C isn't sufficient, and why efforts at Opera to expand beyond the standards differ from Microsoft's embrace/extend model?
Opera isn't "expanding beyond the standards". It is working together with other browser vendors to create a new specification which builds on HTML. The way you are asking the question makes it sound like Opera is doing this alone, and that it is ignoring formal standard processes, which is wrong.
Even Mozilla is a member of WHATWG, so if Opera is "expanding beyond the standards", so is Mozilla.
From whatwg.org:
The technical work is currently focused on developing the specifications to levels appropriate for the W3C Last Call stage.
You've posted this URL a couple of times in the comments by now. Maybe you should report it to Opera instead? What is the "trivial (and common) code" you are referring to? What is the actual problem?
Re:OMG!? "Opera-specific extensions"!?
on
Opera 9.0 Released
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If you are going to use a small subset of the web, then I am sure Dillo will work decently. However, Slashdot, Wikipedia and Google are hardly what most people will stick with when browsing. People will visit a wide variety of sites, and there Dillo falls short, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, you aren't going anywhere on the web today unless you support reasonably advanced and
Choice? Sure. If you don't need support for huge parts of the web. Today, there are really only four browsers/engines that work: Trident (IE), Gecko, KHTML (Safari, Konqueror) and Opera. If Gecko was to support all the stuff these support, it would be a lot bigger than it is now.
Dillo is tiny, great. But that's because it hardly supports anything, right? Tried any non-static sites in Dillo lately? Heck, even static sites break Dillo...:(
That doesn't change the relevance of my comment. From what I can tell, people are primarily getting a Wii, and those who aren't are getting something else and Wii.
Slashdot Mirror
What's "that interface", then? When you start Opera for the first time it basically looks like any browser, doesn't it? Even though it has a mail client built in, all extras are hidden by default. Maybe you haven't tried the latest version yet, but only the old 7.x which did have lots of buttons by default?
Other than that, I don't understand what you are trying to say.
Thus, you may not be an idiot, but you certainly are clueless when it comes to Opera.
You are missing the point, and ignoring the other examples. Of course they do. Opera even has a wishlist forum for feature requests. Users are invited to download early alpha versions and give their feedback. And so on. Bookmarks are cluttered, and external programs are a pain. There's a reason why people love Apple widgets, and why Microsoft is doing their own widgets with Vista. I didn't. Yeah, who needs web applications when you can just download programs instead? Gmail, etc. are just silly. Who needs webmail? Use Outlook Express or something instead.Again, you are proving that you aren't getting it. Just because you don't see a use doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Yes, and a lot more. It has never been just a browser, as I pointed out. Developer tools are a whole different matter entirely.Firefox's success has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Firefox had a major marketing push, as a completely free browser. Opera could obviously never reach as many users as Firefox since it was adware/payware.
Opera's mistake is not the UI at all. Rather, it is the failure to do a major marketing push when everyone was looking at an alternative to IE, and while Firefox wasn't finished yet. Firefox came almost exactly at the right time: While everyone was focusing on IE's shortcomings, especially regarding security.
Not at all. Simply press the down key on the keyboard. So, wrong. Huh? Opera is making more money than ever! Most of Opera's income has come from mobile phones and devices for several years now anyway. So, wrong. It was $39, and you are just one single person. Most people do not want to pay for a browser. This is vague nonsense. I've already demonstrated that you are wrong about why Firefox is more popular than Opera, and shown that you are not representative of most users. Wrong, and also irrelevant. Firefox doesn't even have any tech support (unless you pay $50 or so per incident), and yet it's more popular than Opera. So, you are contradicting yourself. Well, I've shown how you are the one talking nonsenseAlso, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets.
Except doing them with web standards is faster and cheaper, and it's easier to deploy. Or take a long time. Or aren't a priority for some reason. Sometimes, long awaited features arrive only after some major rewrite since they relied on some kind of functionality which wasn't present yet. Rich text editing in Opera 9 was apparently one of those things. The old engine simply couldn't do it, and it relied on stuff that needed to be added.So it's not just a matter of adding features just like that. It requires planning, and they may require other features to support them.
Huh? What about the suggestions about better web dev tolls? Proper/better web development tools? It is obviously not just a publicity stunt. Geez, do you know anything about Opera at all?!Sorry dude, but that's not the way it works. If no one links to you, you won't get on the first page. Simple as that.
Yeah, Nintendo, Google, Apple, etc. all have astroturfers flooding Slashdot, digg, etc. with positive comments. As for Linux, it's probably Linus who spends most of his time creating new Slashdot accounts to astroturf for Linux. Yes sir. Because it's impossible that lots of people are genuinely excited about news products from someone.
Sorry for not responding right away. Conspiracy nuts like yourself get boring quickly, so I left the notification mail in my inbox for some day I was really bored.
Even Mozilla is a member of WHATWG, so if Opera is "expanding beyond the standards", so is Mozilla.
From whatwg.org:
That's self-explanatory. It's a fast moving industry.
You've posted this URL a couple of times in the comments by now. Maybe you should report it to Opera instead? What is the "trivial (and common) code" you are referring to? What is the actual problem?
Canvas is not a standard anyway.
Because it is flamebait. Comparing an encyclopedia to an airplane in this manner is silly.
If you are going to use a small subset of the web, then I am sure Dillo will work decently. However, Slashdot, Wikipedia and Google are hardly what most people will stick with when browsing. People will visit a wide variety of sites, and there Dillo falls short, unfortunately.
Choice? Sure. If you don't need support for huge parts of the web. Today, there are really only four browsers/engines that work: Trident (IE), Gecko, KHTML (Safari, Konqueror) and Opera. If Gecko was to support all the stuff these support, it would be a lot bigger than it is now.
Dillo is tiny, great. But that's because it hardly supports anything, right? Tried any non-static sites in Dillo lately? Heck, even static sites break Dillo... :(
What bluff?
That doesn't change the relevance of my comment. From what I can tell, people are primarily getting a Wii, and those who aren't are getting something else and Wii.