Guest post by Opera 10.54 has been released on June 21. Both the Windows release and the Mac release are recommended security upgrades, although on Mac OS X, other fixes and improvements are listed as well. No 10.54 for Unix. As a matter of fact, the 10.53 version is still beta.
As a user of multiple platforms that has been very impressed with the 10.5X, I have been eagerly awaiting the final stable release on Linux. Alas, it is not meant to be.
On the plus side though, it looks like Opera will go back to unifying their platform for the 10.6X releases.
http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
Frankly, after checking the alphas and betas on Linux, I don’t mind waiting. Instability was the rule for those releases so I’m happy to wait for them to get it right.
I’m surprised they treat Linux as well as they do when it only has 1% of the market and isn’t a single platform.
Edited 2010-06-27 14:41 UTC
Opera 10.60 for all platforms will be released shortly. I personally think it will be in next week.
Opera desktop team is releasing big number of fixes. Even snapshots come everyday or even twice a day.
It does indeed look like we’ll get a simultaneous 10.60 release on Windows, Mac and Linux, because even the seemingly “abandoned” Linux platform has a 10.60b1 version available for download.
I’ve been disappointed that Opera seem to have de-prioritised the Linux platform – the current 10.10 release was released towards the end of Nov 2009 – an astonishing 7 months ago. With Google seemingly doing the same with Linux Chrome for a long time (it was only the recent 5.0 release that they finally came out of beta), it seems that Mozilla are the only cross-browser developer that are releasing simultaneously for Windows, Mac and Linux any more!
Opera has been my main browser for years. No complaints. I started using it when it first came out in the 90s. It had a small footprint then. Small enough to fit into a 1.44″ diskette. Of course it has grown from strength to strength. It had tabs long before the rest and many features that I can’t find in other browsers. Rendering now is comparable to other browsers and it’s 100% Acid3 compliant. And it’s way fast…
I’ve hated Opera for a long time because of its horrible UI, but they recently fixed it on non-linux platforms, so at least on Windows it’s finally a browser which I can use on a daily basis and recommend to others.
I don’t like their not-really-multiplatform strategy, but until Linux dares to run on my laptop, who cares…
Edited 2010-06-26 13:31 UTC
Maybe in the future we can have again Opera for BeOS/Haiku.. This will be nice.
Funny, for me it’s the complete opposite. To me the UI of 10.10 was the best around, near perfect with a few tweaks, while 10.5 is a huge step backwards in nearly every way.
You’re right, I should have clarified what I call a nice UI.
My vision of a web browser is that it’s essentially an easily replaceable tool which is used to browse a much more interesting object called the Web. Sure, I sometimes like to use more advanced features of the browser, in specific cases, but most of the times I just use it to browse the web. Find a website, explore it, go to another one, having several tabs open when I browse several things in parallel, like when I’ve several news to read on OSAlert as an example.
I want the browser to disappear when I do that. The UI must be clean in a spartan way. If I want to use an advanced feature, I’ll just look for it in the menus. For those which I turn out to use more often, I tolerate an icon. Nothing more. Nothing to clutter my precious screen estate.
When I do open a menu, on the other hand, I’m looking for a specific thing. Organization must hence be straightforward, allowing me to quickly find what I’m looking for. Proper use of hierarchy and short labels should make me read the possible choices fast, choose fast, and go the the next part fast. In the purest sense of efficiency.
The UI of the newest Opera suits my web browsing needs pretty well. It just works. It’s easy to understand. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari got it right too. IE and previous releases of Opera, on the other hand, don’t get it with their heavily loaded “engineer-friendly” interface. I just don’t use their features other enough, and browsing through them when I look for something dead simple is just overkill.
Edited 2010-06-27 16:14 UTC
I can see how different usage would make a very big difference to browser preferences.
I tend to browse with a lot of tabs open. Whether I’m researching a topic, or shopping for something, I want to be able to manage multiple tabs, organise them efficiently, and find and compare particular tabs quickly.
Opera 10.10 has some really nice features that make it the most efficient browser for that kind of use, while 10.5’s annoyances and bugs cause a lot of headaches with heavy browsing. It’s enough to make a big difference to my browsing experience.
As for the UI, to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen the default Opera 10.10 UI configuration to be able to comment on it. I’ve been using Opera since version 2 back in the mid 90s, and I’ve generally just upgraded when a new version has come out, always using the Windows Native skin and keeping my custom configuration.
My Opera 10.10 configuration is very stripped down, minimalist and space efficient. I’ve never bothered using Opera’s tab bar, and for years I’ve turned off the main menu (I’d guess that I use menus once every few months at most), instead just using right-click menus, mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts. With the pop-up tab switcher and panels, I don’t see the need for any toolbars on screen other than the address bar.
I’ve set it up to suit my way of browsing, and of course I’ve become used to things being in a particular place and working in a particular way, with muscle memory built up over more than a decade of daily use. Previous versions were customisable enough that I could maintain that configuration from version to version, even if it needed a tweak or two. 10.5 is the first time that this hasn’t been possible.
10.5 has more changes than any previous upgrade; some things that have remained consistent since the very first public releases of Opera have changed in 10.5. Many of these changes can’t be tweaked away, so even if they were for the better I’d find it a pain to use until I adapted. When certain things just don’t work properly, act in an inconsistent manner, or are less efficient and waste space, it adds insult to injury.
I’ve noted on the Opera forums that it tends to be long term Opera users who dislike 10.5, with new users a lot happier. Although you have to be quick to spot the posts; the forum mods are very efficient at deleting any that criticise the browser.
Though I don’t visit the forums often, I’ve noticed that sometimes threads are closed, but in defense of Opera they seem to only do so for threads that are inflammatory/disrespectful, or when there are a ton of duplicate threads on the same topic.
For example I created a thread about how I couldn’t stand the new addressbar dropdown in 10.50, saying how I think 10.10’s was far superior (as do many others… hopefully Opera will give us the option to use the old dropdown style in the near future). They’ve kept the thread up (http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=420371) and it’s still there.
On the other hand, I do see a lot of closed threads where people say things like “OMG u guys are so STUPID why did you make this change? It sucks! Plus, I’ve been testing your beta and bug # XYZ is still not fixed, fix it!!!”
Here’s an example thread that was closed: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=605142
As long as you criticize Opera in a civil manner, I really don’t think you have to worry about having your thread closed or deleted. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
I get the feeling that the different forums have different mods, as what’s tolerated from posters seems highly inconsistent. Sometimes people will get away with critical comments, while another that isn’t much different in tone will get wiped.
They seem to be more tolerant of criticism on the beta testing forum than on the main Opera browser forum, at least if it’s discussing a particular issue. Lots of threads on the “Opera browser” forum get completely deleted, not even locked.
I’m not talking about posts attacking the Opera developers, or people ranting and raving, just ones saying something like “I prefer 10.10 to 10.5 because of X, Y and Z; any chance of changing these things back?”
A few people post agreeing and asking for the same things, then a minute later the thread doesn’t exist. I’ve seen this happen a few times.
Others get locked for reasons that are a bit dubious in my opinion. Critical threads get locked because they’re duplicates, or have Non-descriptive titles, or for supposed trolling, while multiple positive posts with the same flaws are left alone.
Sometimes when a thread is locked, individual posts that are critical of Opera are deleted from it, while the ones praising Opera are left. I’ve seen that happen even when positive posts have included personal abuse towards people who are having issues with 10.5. A post saying “I wish Opera would fix this annoying bug” gets deleted from the thread, while posts mocking critics as whiners and trolls remain.
After installing Opera 10.54, in a matter of minutes, it crashed 4 times in a row.
I just want a web browser that works. I’ve been tolerating bugs hoping they’ll fix it down the road for too long.
I’ve been a hardcore Opera user/fanboy since version 3 but I’m exploring my options.
I’ve been a big fan of Opera for years and I’ve defended it here in the past, pointing out neat Opera features and customisation possibilities to the Chrome and Firefox fans. It’s a shame I can’t be so positive about 10.5.
I’ve been trying to use Opera 10.5 as my main browser since the first beta was released, thinking that maybe I just needed to get used to its many changes, but despite that I’ve gone back to using 10.10 as my main browser. For me 10.5 is just a painful and depressing experience for a whole load of reasons.
10.5’s UI isn’t too bad if you just use the standard configuration, don’t customise it, and don’t have preferences built up from using previous versions of Opera for years. But beyond the defaults the UI is still full of bugs and annoyances and broken features. To me customisation was always one of Opera’s great strengths, and it just doesn’t feel like the same lovely browser when it’s so crippled.
There are still options in the preferences of the latest 10.6 beta that don’t work properly and cause strange issues. These are bugs that have hung around since the early 10.5 betas several months ago without being fixed. To me that’s a big disappointment, even though I can understand that Opera had other priorities.
All kinds of neat little features that made Opera such a unique and powerful little browser just don’t work properly. Tab ordering is inconsistent when you open tabs in the background, MDI features are horribly broken, some sidebar panel options cause Opera to spawn blank windows, there are graphical glitches, lots of annoying rough edges that make it unpleasant to use.
The latest version of Opera does well in benchmarks, but it has memory leaks, crashes far more often, uses more system resources and has a significantly less responsive GUI. I can push 10.10 to breaking point with a silly number of tabs and it keeps on running smoothly, while 10.5 behaves strangely or breaks completely with a fraction of the use.
On top of that, there are some really stupid changes and decisions, for every step forward in the browser there are 3 steps backwards. I’m talking about eye-candy idiocy like making the pop-up tab switcher transparent, so that you get transparent text overlaying web site text. Or the bloated and far less efficient address bar drop down, with no way of restoring the old feature.
To me even the latest Opera release feels beta quality at best. Browsing is smooth and efficient in 10.10, but in 10.5 it’s a chore.
I hate to say it, but even sluggish Firefox is looking more attractive to me. It has fewer annoyances and some nice extensions for tab and session management.
With some of my favourite Opera features so badly broken, and so many issues and bugs, to me it’s a pale shadow of the superb browser it was.
It’s either they hired a bunch of new developers who don’t know what they’re doing, or they are having problems evolving the code base, because it’s too tangled.
I wonder if part of the problem is the fact that Opera is developed in C++. Object oriented programming languages were the rage in 1990s, but I think there is more to developing reliable and reusable software than using something like C++.
I have been programming in C for the last 10 years, and wouldn’t touch C++. I find C simpler, easier to use, more portable and I can do almost everything in C that you can do in C++.
So I wonder how many more/less bugs Opera/QT would have, if they were developed in pure C.
What about Java? It seems everyone is doing Java these days, and they all say “Java is just as fast as C++”. Where are all the killer web browsers written in Java?
Java is about as fast as a snail oozing up hill. I don’t care what the benchmarks say – that coming from someone who has been using it professionally for 8 years now.
It HAS gotten better, easier on the eye with the 1.6 releases, but I’d rather develop in something else. Heck, I’d even develop in a slower byte-compiled language that is more “fun” to use… but I do like how they’ve made some effort with recent changes to make it cleaner.
[clarification – using it in a web context… this includes java-based server engines and the whole, massive, J2EE monster]
On my home machine, a five-year-old Vaio laptop running Linux Mint “Isadora”, Opera is quick and convenient but is disadvantaged on account of rendering issues in some of the menus (could be an X-problem); on my work SL MBP it uses a lot fewer resources than Chrome or FF however, and I prefer it in that environment; FF eats memory (I often have 10+ windows open, but only about 5 plug-ins), and Chrome (with Flash) eats CPU cycles in my case like mad.
This might sound like a ‘compare apples with oranges’ snapshot but I hope Opera will carry on – I think it’s great to have a good variety of browsers, and it’s good to have some concrete competition for the hype from the bigger boys.
I’ve tried Opera since the ad-supported version 5.x but it’s been quirky at best for me and it’s only been what it does with IE-targeted pages that have really drawn me to it.
Since 10.1, I felt it was much more usable, which is apparently just the opposite of what the typical Opera users feel. It’s sad to say that we’ll never meet in the middle because it’s always been a capable browser that came off really odd.
I hope the Opera team doesn’t lose their most ardent supporters in reaching out to the rest of us because they might find themselves without supporters at all.
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But over the past year I’ve installed and de-installed Opera several times, not sure if I want to try again. I like the speed, I like some of the features, but… I always end up having problems with websites I need to NOT have problems with. This may not be Opera’s fault or problem because the sites are poorly written, but when Chrome and Firefox and IE work fine with them, it becomes and issue to me.