[dezzeus]

Those controversies of Qihoo 360 (stated in Wikipedia for both the society and the product of "360 Secure Browser") and Haier (for their partnership in the mobile platform) can't lead to anything good for Opera (browser).

Also, the presence of a "consortium" for which I haven't read any other relevant name sound like a way to cover the direct acquisition…

What I can see here is: - A Chinese company trying to both comfortably beat their (Chinese) competition while gaining (out of PRC) customers for their "services" (which will likely be integrated within the browser); Which is fine, except for their "controversies". - An executive team (at Opera), that seams pretty all about finance and economics, trying to make the most (money) from an offer in a market (the web browsers one) that is (at least, I think so) hard to remunerate. Obviously those shareholders will be happy; but are those shareholders really involved into the product that they own, or they are just silent speculators who made an investment for the sole purpose of profit when they realized the company's potential of being acquired ?

I'm also disappointed because I used to like the effort that Opera has put into their own browser in the latest months; the same effort that convinced me to adopt their browser (beta version) instead of Chrome and advocate them.

P.S.: Obviously, those are just my thoughts after having read the article; I hope for a more detailed statement from Opera…

[Mithaldu]

> Obviously those shareholders will be happy; but are those shareholders really involved into the product that they own

The shareholders are ecstatic with joy. The browser has been nothing but an advertising front for what is factually an advertising company for years now.

The fact that you actually saw the abomination that was Opera 15 and beyond in a positive light, instead of the truth of abandoning browser development in favor of a token Chrome fork, speaks volumes to this strategy having worked for them.

[dezzeus]

I have to say that I haven't experienced* the 12 to 15 transition that you refer; to me Opera is just a browser that changed over the time and, because I'm not a long date user, I never ever seen it as the advertising medium that you say. Of course they could have chose to better differentiate themselves, but the actual decision/strategy seems to have worked also for me.

BTW, as long as I know, they also pushed some code into Chromium so I see it as a solid step toward the consolidation of web standards by using a common and open base. Better achieved if performance exists as well.

[*]: Even if I occasionally tried some desktop versions of Opera during the years, I've always preferred Firefox and later Chrome as default browser.

[Mithaldu]

It wasn't a transition. There is no other way to describe as this:

They threw away a perfectly functional software package with thousands of features, and replaced it with a fork of third-party software that didn't offer even a tenth of the features of the original package.

That said, yes, the strategy worked. The world at large swallowed their lie because it was mostly people like you, who weren't using Opera in the first place, and didn't know better about what really happened.

The people who suffered were their loyal users, people who had even bought Opera at some point.

[dezzeus]

You get my attention and curiosity; it is a browser, what were the "features" that you are talking about ?

At some point I've read that it had an e-mail client, later externalized; if those are the "feature", so I'm also ok with that, as I'm more into Vim than emacs. That's my point. If you're referencing something else, I'm curious. :)

[Mithaldu]

Well, the email client for one. Not only is it built in, it also functions better than any other i've seen. You know how many email clients have a spam folder that learns by what you drop in it and pull out of it? Opera mail allows you to enable that auto-learning for EVERY folder. It works great.

The mail client also doubles as an RSS reader client.

Aside from that, it also has mouse gestures that are core in the browser, not bolted on with JS addons, which means they work consistently, everywhere, and fast. Gestures i do a lot: Right-click + wheel to change tabs, hold right tap left to go back, hold left tap right to go forward, and various hold rought and move mouse gestures to open new tabs, close tabs, move up a level, etc.

Then there's the performance and memory efficiency. I have 100+ tabs open and the thing sits at 2 GB with my email story as well. Right-click + wheel scrolls me through tabs at basically display refresh rate, chrome can't even switch that fast.

A very powerful url blocker that can be configured per-domain is built in, and is faster than any kind of js-based addon could ever dream of.

I can actually manually edit menu and toolbar ini files and even add macros and javascript bits right there. For example i use that to add menu entries to right-click on links to open those links in other browsers.

I can edit text-based style descriptor files with additional image files to completely restyle the browser effortlessly.

Getting to the screen where i can view and edit cookies for the active page directly takes me 3 clicks.

I can configure activation, deactivation of js, plugins (flash, etc.), even animated images per site with 3 clicks, globally with 2 or a hotkey. I can tell plugins like flash to load on demand, i.e. only when i click on them or tell the page to start loading plugins by clicking in the adress bar.

I can add browser-wide custom css, or site-specific custom css, again, 3 clicks.

I can disable all CSS for the active page with one click.

It has a note-taking facility built-in that doubles as "richer" bookmark manager, and also serves to give strings for auto-complete suggesting when typing in input fields.

It has one-button keyboard shortcuts, e.g. "seach in page" is "." for me.

I can have a vertical tab bar and a horizontal one at the same time.

I can open a list of all links on the current page, filter it by various conditions, select the ones i want and hit "download these to a folder" in one action.

I can add custom panels in the side panel by adding urls there, which is where i keep a bunch of "translate this word" things.

And that's just scratching the surface. I could go on for a long time. And keep in mind: It has all this stuff in it, and excluding JS engine performance, still outperforms Chrome and Firefox. JS being slower and SSL compatibility slowly going kaput are the only actual downsides.

[dezzeus]

> [...] it also has mouse gestures that are core in the browser [...]

> It has one-button keyboard shortcuts [...]

> I can configure activation, deactivation of js, plugins (flash, etc.) [...] I can tell plugins like flash to load on demand [...]

> I can have a vertical tab bar and a horizontal one at the same time.

All of this is still here.

> [...] I have 100+ tabs open and the thing sits at 2 GB [...]

I'm not used to leave opened such a large number of tabs, but even today's Opera seems to handle them quite good (I may be wrong, but I think that Chromium smartly remove some tabs from memory and reload them later, on demand and with cache).

> A very powerful url blocker [...]

If you really need this, I think that /etc/hosts is the way.

> I can actually manually edit menu and toolbar ini files [...]

> I can add custom panels in the side panel [...]

> I can open a list of all links on the current page, filter it by various conditions, select the ones i want and hit "download these to a folder" in one action.

Perhaps extensions (which I do not use) are designed to simplify and customize the process...

> I can edit text-based style [...] to completely restyle the browser effortlessly.

Not really a feature, but a "nice to have". As for myself, I'm ok with the OS-native look.

> Getting to the screen where i can view and edit cookies [...]

> I can disable all CSS for the active page with one click.

I think that you can achieve the same result from the Inspector with a couple of more clicks (that's not a behavior that most users need).

:)