RIP Opera Browser ~1996 to July 2, 2013

bolo121

bolo121

Armchair Worrier
Joined
Dec 19, 2007
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Location
india
After all these years Opera, my favourite browser is dead.

I still remember how amazed I was back in 1998 to download a browser with tabs that fit into a 1.44 with space to spare.
It was light, fast and had tons of features that netscape and IE didnt even dream of.

Opera 15 launches, turns out to be a crippled Google Chrome | Apps and Software | Geek.com

Sadly they have had to give up the fight and now are on the same engine as google chrome :(
It doesn't even have something as basic as bookmarks!
Guess I'll have to get used to firefox.
 
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bolo121 said:
Sadly they have had to give up the fight and now are on the same engine as google chrome :(
It doesn't even have something as basic as bookmarks!
Guess I'll have to get used to firefox.
Click to expand...

Are you referring to chrome? If so, than yes, it does have bookmarks.. They're just placed in a more aesthetically clever way. ;) (The star beside the url, when clicked, bookmarks the page for you.)
 
bolo121 said:
It was light, fast and had tons of features that netscape and IE didnt even dream of.
Click to expand...
Until it became a memory blackhole*. Which only became worse after they integrated M2 (which was the reason why I finally quit Opera a while ago, it couldn't really handle some 6 gigs in emails managed in the integral M2 email application**). At least not without seriously more RAM than I was willing to give a browsing machine. Oh yeah, the builtin BT downloader, after they forced that into it, was quite bothersome too.

Does 15 final at least support launching the application without an internet application?!? 15 alpha didn't.

*- I have a computer I mostly use for casual browsing where a browser may stay open, tabbed and everything, for weeks on end. A Firefox/Thunderbird combo can handle that (somewhat at least). Opera can't (at all).

**- anyone got experience with that "Opera Mail" product aka the separated M2 they released? In particular in comparison to Thunderbird? I need heavy automatic filtering and moving across multiple IMAP and POP3 accounts as well as several 100,000 locally stored mails, which so isn't running great with that Mozilla crap.
 
Honestly, I am a bit surprised anyone still uses Opera (or IE). FF and Chrome seem to be the choice among everyone I know IRL (on Windows platform).

Kato, 100k mails? All yours?
 
kato said:
Until it became a memory blackhole*. Which only became worse after they integrated M2 (which was the reason why I finally quit Opera a while ago, it couldn't really handle some 6 gigs in emails managed in the integral M2 email application**). At least not without seriously more RAM than I was willing to give a browsing machine. Oh yeah, the builtin BT downloader, after they forced that into it, was quite bothersome too.

Does 15 final at least support launching the application without an internet application?!? 15 alpha didn't.

*- I have a computer I mostly use for casual browsing where a browser may stay open, tabbed and everything, for weeks on end. A Firefox/Thunderbird combo can handle that (somewhat at least). Opera can't (at all).

**- anyone got experience with that "Opera Mail" product aka the separated M2 they released? In particular in comparison to Thunderbird? I need heavy automatic filtering and moving across multiple IMAP and POP3 accounts as well as several 100,000 locally stored mails, which so isn't running great with that Mozilla crap.
Click to expand...

Opera had a reputation as being lighter than pretty much everything else.
Erm firefox? Open for weeks? Not possible until the recent rapid release versions at around 18 or so.
Firefox was notorious for having memory leaks and crashing after a week at best.
I have 30+ tabs open all the time in opera 12 with no issues.
I think the issues you faced came from M2 and not the browser. Heck even outlook behaves badly when you put multiple accounts and 100,000 mails!

Opera M2 is supposedly standalone now but i never used it. It had a pretty decent reputation for stability.
 
Tronic said:
Are you referring to chrome? If so, than yes, it does have bookmarks.. They're just placed in a more aesthetically clever way. ;) (The star beside the url, when clicked, bookmarks the page for you.)
Click to expand...

Nope, what doktor said.
Am creeped out by chrome for the same reason i use duckduckgo/startpage instead of google.
 
bolo121 said:
Opera had a reputation as being lighter than pretty much everything else.
Erm firefox? Open for weeks? Not possible until the recent rapid release versions at around 18 or so.
Firefox was notorious for having memory leaks and crashing after a week at best.
I have 30+ tabs open all the time in opera 12 with no issues.

Opera M2 is supposedly standalone now but i never used it. It had a pretty decent reputation for stability.
Click to expand...
Sad news indeed, i was just about getting fed up with that memory hog known as chrome.

Opera was always light and functional and worked best on lower powered machines.

Chrome crashed in the wrong way a few days ago, whoops just lost all your tabs. oh well.

So what is the latest version opera holdouts can still stick with then. V14 final ?
 
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Why not use firefox again? Its memory consumption has imporved in past few revesions. Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_entries in about:config to a lower value like 10 might help even more.

Or Why not try IE9 or 10? :scared: They are completly different beasts compared to older versions.

This is a good new to web developers. They have one less browser to worry about.
 
Double Edge said:
Sad news indeed, i was just about getting fed up with that memory hog known as chrome.

Opera was always light and functional and worked best on lower powered machines.

Chrome crashed in the wrong way a few days ago, whoops just lost all your tabs. oh well.

So what is the latest version opera holdouts can still stick with then. V14 final ?
Click to expand...

Opera 12.16 will be the last version.
13 and 14 were skipped in the process of transitioning to chromium.
Firefox looks to be the only alternative left.
 
bolo121 said:
I think the issues you faced came from M2 and not the browser. Heck even outlook behaves badly when you put multiple accounts and 100,000 mails!
Click to expand...
Meh, i think i'll just install Apache and Horde and use that as a mail "client"... at least i know how to change behaviour i don't like by messing with the source code there.

Doktor said:
Kato, 100k mails? All yours?
Click to expand...
That's not that hard - maybe 15-20 mails a day...
 
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Yeah? And of course mailing list stuff comes on top of that for another couple 100k...

Just glad my work-related emails are not in there. Those would easily double the daily amount.
 
I still have some mailbox files from FIDOnet on some old HDD. Those are around 20-25 years old.
 
Doktor said:
If we go to pre-Opera era, they will have even less worries. NS/IE compatible. Yeah!
Click to expand...

And no mobile browsers to worry about too. On the other hand browsers didn't had as many features for web developers as they have now.
 
To be fair most of those features don't rely or depend on the browser but on external software. Java and Flash mostly nowadays.
 
All I want is a browser that allows me to use addons and disable javascript.

Javascript sucks.
 
FF and Chrome allow you to pick which addons will work. Not sure about IE ;)

Moreover, I believe FF by default blocks Java.
 
Doktor said:
FF and Chrome allow you to pick which addons will work. Not sure about IE ;)
Click to expand...
I have been using FF for many years. The problem with it is that each addon hoggs up more memory. Last year I finally narrowed down on and removed adblock because it hogged unusually large amounts of my ram. Just 30mins on browsing through flicker photos would bring the browser to a crawl. Now I use just two addons, one is for dictionary lookup and the other is for the local language input.

Doktor said:
Moreover, I believe FF by default blocks Java.
Click to expand...
Yes It has the options to block java or/and javascript, both of which I keep disabled 98% of the time.
 
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