Opera is 15

[PhilB66]

Celebrating 15 years of browser innovation

[Josh]

And it still does not support editing stored passwords, autocomplete, extensions, any sort of third party integration, and various other common features that many browsers have supported for years. Innovation is one thing but quite frankly, I would rather have autocomplete over torrent support in a browser. Way to go opera, you are innovating yourself well below the 1% usage line!

[fenixproductions]

2Josh
I've never used that but I wonder about:

10. Fill forms & passwords
With the Wand, you never have to retype your information.

-15 reasons to use Opera

I've been using Opera AFAIR and I must, sadly, agree with you. Maybe it's the best browser in the world but the most hostile too. There are dozen of features which are so hard to do even for advanced users that it is ridiculous. For an example: you can customize your menus any way you like BUT you need to dig into strange INI files. It's too much for me. I know how to do it but it has always been to much trouble and I was skipping such work any time.
Same goes for Opera Link. It is nice but, for God's sake, there is no simple Wizard to make it right and choose priorities of synchronisation. Of course you can type opera:config into your address bar and rely on nowhere described variable but who knows about it? It took me hours (seriously) to find out how to do it the way I want. After loosing 500 links I've decided to never use this functionality again.

And they really thought that widgets will be good enough to replace the lack of extensions. This is just a joke.

I wrote it once and will do again: they will have 1% until the end

I admire their developers but management and marketing skills: both are crap. They had a chance to do something with popularity and they never decided to go for it because of "We are for experts only" policy. The only thing which left for them is to complain to EU. Mozilla did great work to fill the hole in market for average users. Opera never understood that there are more n00bs than pros.

[Josh]

Thank you for reminding me about widgets. What a completely useless addition to a WEB BROWSER. Opera is more focused on NOT being a web browser and being everything else. I guess they should stop focusing on attacking Microsoft and actually listen to what users want and see what users are using on OTHER browsers.

[fenixproductions]

2Josh
I think they are listening to the users but to the wrong ones. I've called that: "We are for experts only" policy.

It is stupid somehow because I have the feeling they are thinking that this way Opera will be more popular. It's very far from true IMHO. They will be unknown as long as they don't admit that stupid* users can use their tool.

*) Sorry for everyone for such term but majority of users don't know (or don't want to) "IT stuff". It's like Apple would start complaining that poor people don't understand their greatness

[Josh]

Also, the wand is a tool which saves and fills passwords, however, it does not let you edit any stored passwords. To recreate a password, you have to delete the old one and then relogin and save the new. Not deleting the old first results in a second entry existing in your login list.

[urlwolf]

What killed them:
   Not-so-good compatibility with all the new ajax sites. This shows a worrying disregard for the people who are building innovative stuff (startups). All startups push the limits of your browser. And they build and test on Mozilla because it's just more open (plugins), more debuggable (firebug, coincidentally a plugin), and more widespread (so the return for your time and effort is higher).
   
   Even in they get the best grades for compatibility with standards, the real test is the sites out there that fail to work 100% with Opera. My guess is that this is quite a lot, but the Opera user rarely notices unless there's a major borking that makes the site unusable; then they go to another browser, and discover what they missed.
   
   Not so fast anymore. Opera lost the javascript wars
   
   Perceived as too complicated
   
   One misses too much functionality by not having plugins. At a certain point, not long ago, plugins would give you little advantages; nowadays, there's an entire universe of new things that take the form of FF addons. Some of the most innovative software in 2008 was an addon.
   
   

I think they are listening to the users but to the wrong ones

Agreed. And they have lost their sense of what's useful on the web today.
Opera smells like some creative guys (who put out incredibly innovative features) crushed under the weight of horrible management.

I switched from Opera to FF ~ 3 months ago, after being an Opera user since v. 5.

[zridling]

I love me some Opera! Looks and works the same on Linux as other platforms, plays very well in the cloud, and its customizability is unmatched. I can set any tab behavior to any keyboard shortcut, effectively creating an AutoHotkey script within the browser itself. I'm forced to find extensions and pray they don't break with every upgrade with others.

[Josh]

Zaine, while cross platform capability is nice, firefox and other browsers have this as well. Opera is LACKING in customizability in that if the browser has a feature missing that you want, you cannot add it. You have to hope that one of the power users on the forum can convince the moderators to possibly alert the developers to the request. I am not a firefox zealot, far from it. I do use it, but that is only because at the moment it suites my needs. I have nothing against IE, in fact I swear by IE8 at work. All browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. One of Opera's MAJOR weaknesses is that if you can live with what is included, you are great. You can customize it to no end on the features that ARE there. That is where the problem occurs as stated above, if there is something you want that is not there, you are pretty much SOL.

[Ehtyar]

15 eh? Sounds like a good time to die...or be community-developed.

Ehtyar.

[Josh]

15 eh? Sounds like a good time to die...or be community-developed.

Ehtyar.

-Ehtyar (April 30, 2009, 03:43 PM)

AMEN!

[rgdot]

I'll be more interested to see how Firefox and Chrome are doing when that old, Opera I have never used more than occasionally.

[fenixproductions]

I'll be more interested to see how Firefox and Chrome are doing when that old

-rgdot (April 30, 2009, 03:58 PM)

They will be nice operating systems without decent browsers :p