Opera, once known for revolutionizing web browsing and pushing boundaries has suffered greatly the last few years.
First their origin engine [Presto] was abandoned in favor of Chromium so as to be able to be competitive again. Many users did not like this as many features were taken away. Then the possible news of a sale and now this.
What will the future bring for Opera? Nobody knows, there is only once constant: Many people dislike that Chinese investors are taking control over the company and will leave Opera.
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/26/opera-software-sale-greenlighted-by-shareholders/
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Opera's Sale... Green Light is Given!
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Sunday May 29 2016, @05:34AM
Opera's rendering engine was good, and they had a following from technical people (including me), but they abandoned Presto to become a Chrome skin.
Now they reap the consequences of such unfathomable stupidity.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 29 2016, @06:33AM
Is that applicable to Opera's original "prime" market? Opera was always strongest in Eastern Europe, among Cyrillic language speakers. There was something about Opera that appealed to that group of languages, and Opera ruled in that region. Have they lost that appeal? Note that I only speak one language, English, so it's impossible for me to guage that market, or lack thereof. I can only read blogs and reports that make such claims.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 29 2016, @06:40AM
Yep. I'd mod you up if I had the points still. I didn't use Opera as my regular desktop browser, but I always kept it installed specifically for Presto. It was fast, light, and good for testing sites. Now, though, it's just a waste of space and resources. Plus they seemed to have mostly given up on the Linux version, it went something like a year without updates at one point. I remember an ex-developer hinting that the company had almost nobody left that used Linux, which was why that happened, but I can't find the source any more. Maybe someone else remembers and can find it...
The real travesty, though, was the mobile version. Opera's presto-based mobile browser was the absolute best in terms of speed and memory use, and then when they switched to Blink it just ended up being a heavier, slower version of mobile Chrome. It used to be my primary choice for a mobile browser, but after they Chromeified it, it went from "primary browser" to "no longer installed" because I no longer had a use for it.
You used to be able to still get the old Presto-based browser from the Play store for Android, but it looks like it's gone now. Not that it matters, the UI didn't scale to higher resolutions correctly so it became completely unusable on just about any device released in the past couple years.
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday May 29 2016, @03:13PM
Opera Mobile was always slow. Opera Mini 6.5.2 [google.com] on the other hand was always fast.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:58PM
Opera Mini isn't really the same thing, though, so comparisons to actual browsers is unfair. That's the one that offloads the rendering to Opera's servers, so of course it'd be fast in comparison because it's not exactly a web browser anymore. Of course, that also makes it a privacy nightmare, so fuck that. :P
Compared to other, normal browsers that don't offload the rendering, Opera Mobile was no slouch, even on the horrible phone I was using at the time. The damn thing was useless for just about anything, to the point that even the dialer lagged on it... Opera was the only browser that was still responsive and had tolerable rendering speeds on it. Miles ahead of Firefox and the AOSP-based built-in browsers at the time, in my experience. Chrome on mobile wasn't a thing then, but after it came out it was also painfully slow in comparison.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Username on Sunday May 29 2016, @02:16PM
Presto is fully HTML5 compatible, and it still works (currently using v12, what’s making it obsolete now seem to be in the script engine when running json, and it’s lacking of the newer ssl ciphers). It’s just none of the major websites were/are standards compliant and Opera spent the majority of their time trying to get facebook and the like to change their scripts or formatting so it was compliant. The switch solved all that. It’s just that they did not want to bring back the old features.
I had a whole thread on their forums advocating the switch to blink or an ability to switch between rendering engines(vivaldi), but looks like it was deleted, or not included with their forum upgrade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @05:03PM
It's like when Yahoo ditched their own search engine and struck a deal with Microsoft. Nokia ditched Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in favor of Windows Phone under the "leadership" of ex-Softie Stephen Elop. It's bad when customers ask, "And what is your value-add again, exactly?"
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday May 30 2016, @02:46AM
I thought Opera jumped the shark when they added that ad banner, I did not particularly like it before that but completely gave up on it way back then, using vanilla Mozilla, IE and a few oddball browsers (I remember the Off By One browser for one) until I discovered Firefox around 0.5. I briefly looked at it again around 2011 or so and was not impressed then either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @09:00AM
Erm, they never added the banner as such. The paid version never had a banner, the free version didn't exist before the banner was introduced.
For the banner to make you move away from Opera, you'd need to either have switched from the paid version to the free version, or from a pirated version to the free version.
I'm guessing the latter, in which case you could just have kept using the pirated version.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gravis on Sunday May 29 2016, @06:54AM
when you are a public company, if the shareholders tell you to set yourself on fire, you set yourself on fire.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @07:01AM
And why did they sell their company to the public? Money.
If only the Communist GNU Manifesto had become reality, the NSF would own all software, software development would be paid for by the Software Tax, and everybody would be Free to write as much Free Software as they wanted.
Instead we have greed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @08:51AM
yeah cos everyone knows how awesome communism turns out...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Sunday May 29 2016, @07:02AM
Being a public company is slavery to quarterly reports. Michael Dell and Eugene Kaspersky have it right, going public isn't all roses.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @07:04AM
Google Chrome
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday May 29 2016, @07:39AM
Yep. It's the end of the (browser) world as we know it. Opera is chrome and Firefox is still trying to off itself with its excessive memory usage and retarded interface. I'm surprised it doesn't come with a helmet pre-installed. Maybe if they ported it over to rust.
Say, uh, anybody get Internet Explorer 11 running in wine?
(Score: 2) by Kunasou on Sunday May 29 2016, @08:33AM
Sadly, IE6 times are returning but with Google Chrome instead...
Opera was my main browser until they stopped supporting Presto (v12.16) which made me move to Firefox...
Mozilla Firefox likes to shot in its foot like with their latest addition: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-extensions-firefox/ [ghacks.net] They're dumping their own extensions to use the Chrome ones. Also Australis, removing npapi (plugins), complete themes, the fail of e10s...
I tried to use IE11 with wine, still not there though.
I use Pale Moon instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:10AM
Google has apparently learned from Microsoft's prior anti-trust problems and in 2014 spent more than twice what Microsoft did to lobby US politicians.
I wonder what the browser breakdown here on SN is?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:14AM
Yet the Firefox team started a memory reduction project a few years ago. Did great, made the browser more stable. The smallest footprints were versions from 13 to 23. Since then, I've noticed memory usage creeping slowly upwards. Still, from what I read, current versions of Firefox use less memory than current versions of Chrome.
Could the community create another browser? I very much doubt the resources could be assembled to launch such a massive project. Browser functionality has grown hugely. HTML5 has native support for video and audio, and got to have a good JavaScript JIT compiler and engine, a plugin mechanism, and security, must have security. Just coming up with a list of all the required functionality would be a big job. There are all kinds of standards and candidate standards to support, such as APNG, Ogg Theora, Opus, etc. But, no DRM, and any part of the HTML standard concerned with that ought to be left out. Also, could support for GIF be left out? How about Flash, can we finally kill that off?
Further I think just trying to make a new browser for existing standards is something of a waste. HTML and XML really need an overhaul. Google's been trying out enhancements to HTTP to cut down on its verbosity, consolidate some of the chatter between client and server into fewer messages. And yet I wonder if that will be a mere sideshow, and the area where improvements will have the biggest impact is in data heavy parts, most of all, video.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @02:15PM
The last true from the ground-up community browser was Konqueror. That was fifteen years ago, and serves as the basis of every major browser left. Maybe it's time to dust off that old KHTML code (abandoned about 5 years ago) and make a new Mozilla Foundation.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:16PM
Well, every major browser except Firefox (and it's derivatives like Pale Moon) and IE (and Edge). Still, I'd guess something like 80% of web surfers are using a webkit/blink browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @09:01AM
...and in marketing bind them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @01:07AM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:05AM
When a company can't answer an existential question like why they exist, then there's no real reason for them to exist. Opera used to have its own rendering engine which made it exist as a testing tool, and a good one. I still have the old pre-Chrome version installed. If they're just Chrome with a different color scheme and icon, why is that necessary? And how did erasing the only difference between them and everyone else make them more competitive, when it was the only reason anyone used their browser?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @06:15PM
I had a similar moment. We have some software where 90% or so of the functionality is the same across competitors, it's the remaining 10% that sets them apart. Well, I got an order on my desk to copy a feature over because one sales guy said he needed it to land a whale from a competitor. Well, I could implement it, but that meant changing one of our big features and taking time away from our main differentiator. I brought that up and was losing during the meeting. Finally, the CEO himself finally opens his mouth and said, "People buy something because of what makes it different in a way important to them. I'd rather lose one account due to being different than the rest from being a poorly-made clone." The way people suddenly flipped their positions, you'd swear they were different people.
I think what happened with Opera is that they saw they were losing market share and thought they should copy Blink to stay competitive and lower cost, but all it really did is make them a clone. Same with Firefox and their UI and extension strategy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SuperCharlie on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:45AM
https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday May 29 2016, @10:18PM
Also the Otter Browser. Best of luck to both browsers.
http://otter-browser.org/ [otter-browser.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @09:00AM
Vivaldi is a privacy nightmare. There are numerous reports of it phoning home for no good reason.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @09:16PM
Yeah, they were the first browser which you were supposed to pay for, in a market where all the others were free and there was no value differentiation (no more than between the other browsers, that is). It backfired spectacularly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Sunday May 29 2016, @11:35PM
Opera was hardly the first. It used to be normal that browsers were something you had to pay for (except open source browsers like Lynx). Netscape and Mosiac weren't free either. Web browsers being free is something that Microsoft started when they gave away IE for free (though technically IE wasn't free as you had to buy Windows, but to most people who already had Windows IE was "free"). By doing that, everyone else started to give away their browsers to compete. Opera however decided to stick with the pay model. Opera seemed to do well enough as it wasn't that expensive and I thought it was worth the money. If you ask me the mistake they made was adding an ad-supported free version, because after that everyone seemed to run around saying Opera = ads. Eventually, they came around and gave away the desktop version of Opera. Of course, dumping Presto for Blink was their other huge mistake, as they threw out everything that made Opera great when they did that. They still make one of the best Chrome-alternative browsers, but it's still a long way from Opera 12.
(Score: 1) by shanen on Monday May 30 2016, @08:16AM
Opera actually tried several over the years, but never figured out this obvious one:
Break the software into reasonably small modules with project-based funding, and fund the projects that people are actually willing to pay for. Such a model can also be extended to cover ongoing costs as long as the features are implemented properly. If a cost-incurring feature is not currently funded, then attempting to use that feature would explain the status.
As usual, more details available upon polite request, but Soylent News also suffers from unsuccessful financial models... I wonder if there are even 1,000 distinct readers per day.
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice{5} ≠ (Beer^4 | Speech) and your negative mods prove you are a narrow prick.