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Opera 15 Preview

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erikts:
Opera 15 provides a mish-mash of Opera features and the Chrome interface
The beta of Opera's WebKit-based browser will be familiar to both Opera and Chrome fans.

The browser may have lost some features, but it has gained a more compatible, more widely supported rendering engine. The lost bells and whistles come in tandem with a more robust browser. Opera clearly felt it was a trade-off worth making—the company's task is now to convince its users of the same.
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allen:
But if along with the render engine they stripped out a big swath of actual features, then it totally becomes a "what's the point" item.

So I have a bit of a mental memo to "check back in a year" and see what all or little became of their big new "we want to focus on the user" speech from back then. Apparently the first step to focusing on the user is ... removing features?!
-TaoPhoenix (May 28, 2013, 10:50 PM)
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It's no longer a question of what they'll remove... but what will they bring back. They didn't "replace" the rendering engine under the hood, they completely scrapped opera. Every feature, every bit of familiarity is gone. All they kept was the logo.

cyberdiva:
I've been using Opera since the days when I had to pay for it.  Somewhere along the way, it went from being my default browser to being #2, mostly because Firefox had a number of extensions I found valuable and because fewer web and software developers took Opera into account.  Still, there were a number of things I liked about Opera and in some ways found it better than Firefox.  But last week I downloaded a new copy of Opera 12.15 to use as my backup to Firefox on my new Win 7 64-bit laptop.  To my dismay, the Opera 12.15 I downloaded and installed was VERY different from the Opera 12.15 I have on my Win 7 64-bit desktop computer.  The laptop version was exceedingly stripped down, and I could at first find no way to customize it, no way even to tell it what homepage to use or what cookie settings I wanted.  There was no Tools menu anywhere.  After much gnashing of teeth, I finally found where it had hidden the Settings, and from there I was able to get it into usable form.  But the experience left a bad taste in my mouth.  And version 15 sounds a hundred times worse.  :down:

So while I'll keep Opera 12.15 as my backup browser for now, I guess I'll start looking for a replacement for the future.  Alas, it may not be easy, since I'm very wary of Chrome, and I'm also not eager to use IE.    :(

allen:
Can't even change the default search engine... grrr. Done testing until next update.

Dirhael:
Been a loyal Opera user for many years now, but unfortunately this looks to be the end of it if this is the direction they're heading. There's pretty much *nothing* left of the features that made Opera the browser it was. Webkit means that just as in Chrome, there's no more perfectly smooth scrolling, mouse gestures might be there but they're just as unreliable as anything I've ever tried in Chrome, there's absolutely no customization worth a damn left, no MDI (wtf!), page loading feels slower than it used to, no (apparent at least) way to change keyboard and mouse gestures/shortcuts, handling of pages/tabs when you've got a lot of the open sucks just as bad as it does in FF and Chrome, unlike the older versions of Opera, and a whole lot more stuff either missing, broken or just working worse that in the older versions. Yes, perhaps a lot of these things will be fixed in the future, perhaps not, but I'm just not looking for a Chrome re-skin, which is what this feels like right now.

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