[rplnt]

I follow them as well (mostly by idling on irc and posting major releases to reddit; I don't contribute). It's a nice project. Though I don't particularly agree with their priorities (i.e. recreating complete Opera 12.x).

For me Opera wasn't great because it had bundled irc/torrent/mail clients. I couldn't care less about those. It was great because it was stable, fast, small, memory efficient. No other browser was even close at that time (2012 they neded iirc?). Had all the things you want - content blocker, ui/input customization, great tab/window management, "inspector",.. and I don't even know what else anymore :)

I don't think Otter will be able to achieve many of those. Partially because it uses webkit and is in no place to maintain its own fork.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Well, I didn't care much for torrent and email in Opera 12, but they didn't bother me either, as they didn't seem to spend any resources when they were not used. Even with torrent, email and IRC, Opera was still the fastest and most lightweight browser around by a mile.

The thing with Opera features is that each user had their own pet features. In fact, when Opera released the new Chrome-based versions, removing lots of features, they claimed that those features were not used by the vast majority of users (an example was bookmarks which they claimed was unused by more than 90% according from their survey data). And it may very well be true, but the problem is that each particular feature was used by a different minority, so they upset a lot of users even if for different reasons for each user (in my case, menu bar, MDI and "click tab to minimize" were some of the biggest ones, other people don't care about these but loved tab stacking which I always turned off, etc.)

In view of this, even if I didn't use all Opera's features, I think trying to implement the full feature set is a sensible goal.

For the record I think the bundled clients, at least IRC and torrent, are quite low priority in Otter anyway.

[V-2]

> Well, I didn't care much for torrent and email in Opera 12, but they didn't bother me either, as they didn't seem to spend any resources when they were not used.

That's true, but they surely spent their resources on developing these extensions. In hindsight, this wasn't such a good bet. Case in point: noone else did that, and this approach is rather outdated now.

[rplnt]

Not entirely true with the email as it was also (or only I guess) used as RSS reader by many people.

[V-2]

So-called "superusers" are probably overrepresented in your circles (as in mine), and thus your point of view is kind of skewed ;) Ask your family members or people on the street, an overwhelming majority of regular internet users won't have a slightest clue what an RSS reader even is