I assume at this point that Opera have decided to quietly drop ongoing support for Linux.
There have been no updates to the Linux browser since the last one based on their old rendering engine - none of the Chromium/Blink based versions have made it across, even in beta.
From trying it on Windows, you're not missing much. It's mostly Chrome with a different skin as most of the features users liked on Opera < 12 are gone or have lost functionality. I still use Opera 12 for that reason.
Some of that functionality may return in the future, but they have said that things like bookmarks will never be like they were exactly on Opera < 12. If they had lived up to making it Opera 12, but with a Chromium Engine, it wouldn't be a problem, but as many long term users were afraid, someone at Opera is using it as an excuse to radically change what Opera is.
It's still relatively early (they're on rapid release, so 15, 16, 17, 18 don't mean what they used to) and Linux is a tiny sliver of a market for the Opera folks. Opera seems more focused on achieving commercial success across modern mobile devices (as opposed to the dying feature phone business) as well as desktop browsers. Dropping the old rendering engine helps them towards that goal (for good or ill). Delivering on a Linux build at this point probably doesn't.
They have a lot of development time to still put into the new Opera builds full stop. And making them work on the most popular platforms (with the most users and thus the most revenue from partnering) makes sense. Mac is about 1/12th the userbase of Windows. Linux is about 1/5th the market share of Mac. So, it would be the last in line to get work put into it.
yeah, I really miss this. I gave up Opera 12.16 and switched to FF recently. Looking forward to the new UI customization features in Australis, but there was so much more to Opera.
Maxthon is coming to Linux as well, so that'll be interesting
I'm hoping that they'll bring it back eventually, and that right now they're just focusing all their resources on getting the Win and Mac clients back up to feature-parity with 12.x, plus whatever else webkit brings to the mix.
They're basically in somewhat of a sprint right now, but /fingerscrossed that once they're out of it, they'll port it to Linux too. They're building on Chromium, which has a Linux version, so hopefully it's in the realm of possibility.
That said, will be interesting to see how long Opera 12.x lasts on Linux. I'm on Ubuntu 12.04 now and it's fine, next OS upgrade will be to 14.04 next Spring (or some other Debian distro if I decide to ditch Ubuntu). I wonder if Opera 12.x will work on that.
For me the user interface was always snappier and felt just all around better. Now with webkit they have a faster render engine and feel like a lighter and faster version of Chrome (plus you can install all addons from Chrome with this extension: https://addons.opera.com/de/extensions/details/download-chro... )
Mouse gestures. I've tried gestures extensions in every other browser and found them all flawed or limited in some way.
Unfortunately other than that the new Opera is just a skin on Chromium. In the switch they've ruined password manager, fast DOM-preserving back navigation, and tons of others goodies.
I haven't used the new one yet, but the old one had a superior tab interface to everything out there, which they called MDI (Multiple Document Interface). For serial tab abusers like myself, it was a noticeable difference that always had me scratching my head why the other browsers didn't copy the idea.
Beyond tab management (which was exceptional), the side panel was and is my favorite UI widget hands-down. In the same vein as hot-corners, being able to 'toss' the pointer into the edge of the screen to open mail, notes, etc. felt just plain better than other methods.
But still no support for being opera instead of a crappy chrome clone? What happened to that whole "we're not going to make the webkit based releases the official releases until we've added back all the missing features from opera 12" thing?
Even so, the rate at which they're adding back the features is unbelievable - I think it 12 months they'll have all the old Opera features back sans IRC client and mail client (which they said they'd drop anyway).
Opera's future looks really promising if they can survive this very bumpy ride.
There have been no updates to the Linux browser since the last one based on their old rendering engine - none of the Chromium/Blink based versions have made it across, even in beta.