Well, this explains why they stopped releasing new test builds.

I'm going to adopt a wait and see approach until they unveil the final product. From the press release, it isn't much clear what Opera is actually going to do with the desktop product. It does suggest that all they're really going to do is to integrate WebKit into Opera, something that potentially has few drawbacks.

But the mention of Chromium got me thinking that maybe the higher ups are redirecting the company focus on other, more profitable interests, moving manpower from the Desktop Team to other projects and transforming the desktop browser into little more than an Opera-branded Chrome, effectively pulling a Nokia, which does sound like a colossal bad idea... unless brand pull and user inertia is strong enough to only lose the most dedicated users, all two of us :P

The browser market is getting more and more hostile to the likes of Opera, with some opportunity windows closing fast, so you gotta do whatever you can to stay relevant. Even though one of them windows can't be jailbreaked ;)

Speculation aside, this change is akin to Opera Software throwing the towel. Years and years of effort, laid to waste. Precisely now, when things were so much better than in the old, much difficult days. Business is business, I guess. I hope the future brings along open source versions of Presto and the various incarnations of their JavaScript engine, preferably BSD-licensed, if only for preservation and research purposes.

The competition angle is interesting too. The browser wars have gone cold. Everyone is on WebKit now. Apple, Adobe, Google and now Opera. It's quickly becoming the de facto rendering engine, specially for embedded development. People bemoaned the lack of a reference HTML engine for years and now they pretty much have one, and as open and portable as it can be. Does it make sense for Microsoft and, above all, Mozilla to keep developing Trident and Gecko?

You can disable all the nagging around the UI. My version looks almost exactly like 2.x

I would personally recommend Halite, if Eóin still kept working on it. As it is today, it is at a disadvantage because it doesn't support as many features as the others. Plus, it looks pretty snazzy. The competition tries its utmost to be the ugliest option available. At least we're still much better off than a couple of years ago, when both Mac and Linux roundkicked Windows' ass when it came to the number of options available. Now they just simply kick its ass.

BitTorrent is a dead concept, made with centralized trackers in mind which has been proven a very bad design idea.

-Tuxman (February 23, 2012, 03:44 PM)

Indeed, DHT seems to be faster locating peers than most trackers. A torrent directory is not the same thing as a tracker, though ;). ed2k and KAD still have the upper hand when it comes to decentralization, but they're working on solving that for BitTorrent. Are both networks still having enough activity, anyway?

But WinRAR will not allow you to create a Zip archive with more than 4GB of content, so I also use 7zip when I need that capability.

-xtabber (February 09, 2012, 09:11 PM)

That was finally fixed on version 4.10, so give it a spin. I don't know how it took so long for them to add such feature.

7-zip is good, but the interface is mediocre and the 64-bit version does not show up in the context menu of XYplorer on Windows 7 64-bit systems.

A limitation of XYplorer and a oversight on 7-Zip. XYplorer is a 32-bit application only and 7-Zip only includes a 64-bit shell extension (WinRAR includes both versions). Donald said a 64-bit version of XYplorer is coming but I don't know how he intends to do that given the number of roadblocks ahead.