Red-stained Opera wants someone to hug it and whisper: 'No more pain, no more tears' Opera Software has announced a 45 per cent revenue boost for its second quarter of financial year 2015 while hinting at a possible buyout, but didn't draw much attention to its $3m losses. Chairman Sverre Munck said on Wednesday that “the board has seen an interest in different alliances and cooperations with Opera over the …
But Opera stopped being relevant to my interests when development of Presto stopped and BlinkOpera came out blind, deaf, mute and crippled.
So I'm posting this from Opera 12.17 and when I need to open a site that is incorrectly coded, I fire up Vivaldi (thanks, Jon!!).
I tried the "new" Opera and it was crap really, the only saving grace being the 'Turbo' feature still working.
What happened to configuration options? You know like disabling animated GIF images? Blocking certain types of content easily? Turning on and off plug-ins and javascript from the menu or short-cut keys? Bookmark menu down the side where it is easy to find and works on wide-screen monitors?
Still on 12.16 for Linux for a lot of the time as it is less shit than Chrome and (to some degree) Firefox as it also suffers from chrome-envy by a number of the GUI morons developers.
Like ScissorHands I still use Opera 12.17.
As soon as they switched to chromium the result was a tarnished turd of a browser. The previous "most user configurable browser on earth" became such a pile of crap that you couldn't even configure a home page or bookmarks. What happened to the company which developed a lot of the browser features we now take for granted? The "mouse gestures" on the old Opera are a fantastic feature for example.
Opera 12.17 is my daily browser unless like Scissorhands, a website demands a "more modern" browser.
Commenters above are saying they still use Opera 12.17 (the last release before Opera changed it's internals, modern Opera is version 31.x.x.x).
Isn't that a really insecure approach? Hoping anyone running 12.17 doesn't use the same computer/network for tasks requiring logins to important websites. (eg banking, etc)
Opera, by default, doesn't do an awful lot of the shit that other browsers do. Not saying it's invincible, but plugins can be made press-to-play by default and easily blocked - and it's been that way for years.
When exploits came out for other browsers, e.g. storing hundreds of megs of data in site-specific storage, Opera already had limits and UI for handling the situation that no other browser did (and could crash your other browser or reveal info or just plain stop everything working).
When you think about it, rendering HTML isn't much of a risk, security wise, if you just handle it as untrusted data. Worse that happens is you hit a resource limit, done properly.
Again, not saying Opera was invincible, but it was taking account of possible attacks years before it was revealed that other browsers all fell victim to them and had to be hastily patched.
Long time Opera user... from before Firefox was released.. back in the days when you could pay to remove the ad banner.
Opera became irrelevant to me after 12.17, the newer versions are not installed here - and never will be.
Its a shame that short sighted management sold this useful browser down the river, but hey - ho move on... there are others... Whatever they do now is unlikely to get this long time user to return to the fold, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
What bout the 200m new opera fans that don't need to converge on every opera story with the lame "chopra" nonsense?
Opera works better than it ever has, browsers need to work, and presto was on it last let's for years, the amount of site patching they were doing in user.js to get stuff barely working was massive. That all went away with blink.
Fell in love with Opera for it's plethora of "disables." Disabling everything from java, flash, even images was revolutionary on dial-up, as was Turbo pre-fetching.
I agree that recent desktop versions lacked the kit-car customization, but the mobile Opera (10.0.1xxxxx) on Android is so much better than Chrome, and 1/10th the size. It's also 1/5th the size of Thunderbird for Android. Opera is winning my heart and mind once again. Disabling image downloads is fabulous for my data usage.
I may have to load Opera on my desktops again and see what's changed...hopefully some new GOOD features.
Well of course they are broke. They treated their users with absolute comtempt and now they are suffering from the inevitable backlash.
Presto, by the way, wasn't what made Opera. It never was. Users generally couldn't care less what rendering engine a browser uses so long as it puts stuff on the screen in more-or-less the expected manner. The UI is what makes or breaks a browser. It is the broken no-better-than-Chrome UI in the third-rate browser rebadged as "Opera" today that turned Opera users off en masse, not the rendering engine underneath.
The switch of rendering engine wasn't impoirtant. Presto was far better than most critics realise or admit (and still is for that matter: 12.17 works perfectly on most sites to this day). Secondly, no-one would notice if (by some magic) you switched the rendering engine underneath the browser from Presto to Gekko to Webkit every 10 minutes, so long as the UI was the same. Rendering engines don't matter. The UI matters. Opera ASA have only themselves to blame.
I'm also using 12.17 on my work and home PCs. When I need an alternative I fire up IE (heaven help me). On my W10 Surface I use Edge, and it seems okay so far... I think I'll probably migrate there completely when Opera 12.17 really bites the dust for the sites I use.
Opera 12 is/was *good*. It wasn't just about Presto, but about the whole UI and customisation. It works for my needs, in a way no other browser really does (as Vivaldi crashes too often for me - must try again some day, I guess.)
Oh, for Linux systems I use FF only. Chrome's a no-no as Google insists that RHEL is too old to support it (i.e. they can't be bothered to compile there).
I held onto the last version of Opera 12 for quite a while. My first attempts to use the post-Presto versions went badly, but eventually one release proved functional enough. There's still some features I miss from old Opera and I liked the integrated mail client but by the time I said goodbye to Opera 12 I was increasingly needing an alternative browser to handle the pages that it couldn't handle.
I'll be sad if Opera is no more.
I read the financial report and there is no trace of the "red stain" reported by the article.
It seems they made a profit (ebit) of a bit more than 18M dollars... Numbers go down in negative if one calculates the cost of acquisitions of other companies.
They were at the low end of their predictions and the advertisement arm of the company was sluggish... Which meant lost value on stocks, and greedy shareholders wanting for cash.
For who cares:
http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/7022/225793/version/1/file/636bc413d90efe144e8f5a43f87eee4609571684__05fd16397eb5292989953ee0455bffd0.pdf
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