I used to use Opera for many years, and IMHO it was almost always the best browser around feature and speed-wise. The only thing holding it back was the rendering engine.
I ended up making the switch to Chrome when Opera 12 came out and was too buggy for my taste (it was the last straw).
It took a while to make Chrome feel Opera-ish, but I still miss Opera from time to time, you know, because of the little things.
One thing I wish Chrome had is the ability to select hyperlinks. Opera would let you click and hold the mouse cursor anywhere on a hyperlinked text and select it. If you try the same in Chrome, it will try to drag & drop the link instead of starting a selection. In fact, sometimes it gets really tricky to try to select hyperlinked text.
You might already know this, but Chrome automatically selects hyperlinked text when you right-click it. You're not able to select a part of it, but if you want to copy just the text, all of it, you can right-click any link, and then choose "Copy", right under "Copy link address".
It's a ridiculous example of "good on paper, not in reality."
All of his albums are good or better, almost all the albums sold well – and the more recent ones like You Are the Quarry are superb. Oh, and he's great to see live solo.
How about almost any rock band reforming? A great idea on paper and almost always a terrible idea. Smashing Pumpkins?
not to be too off topic but it seems to me that he's great live when he's not acting all kinds of crazy because two weeks ago someone in the vicinity of the stage ate meat.
Funny, its UI was always my #1 reason for using it. MDI + ability to completely hide tabs and Ctrl-Tab through them + Vim keybind scheme = fast workflow and maximized screen real estate.
Even to this day no other browser can match it, though Chrome/ium with a Vim plugin comes close.
I also used Opera because of the UI, but for a different reason. You could move around and change the entire UI and all the keybindings.
For example, I have all my tabs on the left side with thumbnails. Since my screen is widescreen, having the tabs on the left makes a lot more sense than on top.
I also use the built-in Mail client as I really hate going to web pages to check my mail when my browser can aggregate multiple accounts into a single interface and notify me when I get email on any account.
I hope the new Opera supports the same type of customizable UI and mail client or I'll be stuck on 12.15 forever.
Erhm, have you tried vimperator/pentadactyl? You know, one of the projects that started this whole "let's bake Vim into the browser"-craze? (They didn't exactly start it, I think, but they sure made it popular.) I can distinctly remember a couple of years ago when I switched from Opera to Firefox precisely because of Vimperator, because it was impossible to replicate the experience fully within Opera. It is still impossible today: Pentadactyl (Vimperator's successor) is much more fully-featured than anything you can do in any other browser, because of Firefox' approach to plugins.
Yup, I have both installed in Firefox and use whichever one isn't broken by the most recent FF update.
FF has the best plugin system, there are some FF plugins like Ant (flash downloader) that have no counterpart on Chrome or Opera, and of course Firebug for web dev.
I tend to use FF, Chrome, and Chromium for web development, and Opera for browsing, and test on all four.
It's not the binds. It's all of it, including stuff like buffer lists, programmability, marks (marks are sobloody important to me when reading long web pages. I'm seriously, seriously angered by the fact that PDF readers don't have them, and I might, one of these days, scratch my own itch and go hack them into evince or so.)
Opera doesn't even have a concept of marks. Never mind marks across browser windows, tabs, or even pages you don't have open. Also, I love the minimalistic interface: you only see a small status bar, and (optionally) a tab bar. You can even hide everything. You can't do that with Opera (at all.)
what will decide Opera fates is it's monetization strategy.
for browsers, that's the biggest difference (after quality of product)
Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.
if opera also monetize by selling the user, it will have no chance. at all. On the other hand, selling software or showing ads are also not viable. So i'm very curious to what they are going to do.
btw, what is the current business model of opera to begin with?! do they live only on licensing opera mobile for phone manufacturers?
>Google, the monetization is selling the user. So you get features like no-referrer removed (3 or 4 times) from the chromium project by google commits.
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read more about it!
search for stackexchange questions on how to change/disable referrer on chrome. you will see several accepted answers of things that do not work anymore. just be sure to search for some years ago.
from top of my mind, the command line option. the chorme:network-setting(sic) thing. the compile option flag
also, everytime i mention it people ask for source (on this forum where hardly there's time for any discussion!) and once i collected all the commits, but it's on my hell-banned account @gcb. feel free to dig that comment out if you like.
As with Firefox it's mostly search engine related income. They also sell opera mobile to manufacturers. Opera surprisingly has a lot of users in certain areas like east Europe.
Given that Opera (pre-Chromium, no idea how that turns out) is about the only browser usable on a slow network connection with the others only gradually catching up to server-side compression, caching of websites etc., this shouldn’t be a surprise.
My heart sank a little for Opera on reading this news; so it's good to know Opera was in on the secret. If not when they made the decision to adopt WebKit, then at least some point before the Blink news dropped.
“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”
“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to WebKit, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”
“Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Gecko, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”
Funny how adaptable these are. If you can't decide, just abstract away.
Both Gecko and Webkit seem to have made shifts away from providing a baseline for others to work on. Blink appears to be talking as if they're going in the other direction, and I can see how that would fit with Google's corporate goals, though it's not 100% clear what the truth is as it would appear that Blink won't actually be useful without some parts of the wider Chromium project.
Certainly Opera chose Chromium/V8/Blink rather than whatever other alternatives were available, and I can't see that as a bad decision for them.
Does this mean that Opera wont get sandboxing and "tab isolation"?
My understanding was one of the reasons Google forked as to rip out the webkit2 versions of those things, in favor of their own, which are fairly tightly tied to Chrome.
So either Opera is going to be more "chromey" or...they are going to reimplement those parts? Maybe they already have them (I am not that familiar with Opera these days)?
You didn't really answer any of my questions. (EDIT: I guess you did actually answer the first one. Thanks.) You certainly aren't required to, but still.. did you only read the first sentence I wrote?
Opera have said from the beginning that they are dropping Presto and switching to the chromium toolkit. New Opera is effectively a thick skin on top of Chromium. The world miss reported it as them switching to WebKit, which is true but not the layer they are taking it at. It's no surprise that they are following google with Blink.
So this is a fork of webkit? Does Safari get stuck with some incompatible because different engine? Apple can/will join blink too? How will it display the >blink< taglement? It's like Google are saying, "thanks for all the stuff you did on khtml, now we'll take it from here bub."
More like obsoletion by not differentiating and competing against Google's spyware browser chrome. Instead they opt for a weak and lazy approach, it's just a matter of time now.
I ended up making the switch to Chrome when Opera 12 came out and was too buggy for my taste (it was the last straw). It took a while to make Chrome feel Opera-ish, but I still miss Opera from time to time, you know, because of the little things.
One thing I wish Chrome had is the ability to select hyperlinks. Opera would let you click and hold the mouse cursor anywhere on a hyperlinked text and select it. If you try the same in Chrome, it will try to drag & drop the link instead of starting a selection. In fact, sometimes it gets really tricky to try to select hyperlinked text.