Usually I protect Opera and point to its bright sides when somebody tries to insult my favorite browser, but with release of Opera 12 I can't help it but look at Opera from the other side.
In My Opera profile there is an question "Why did you choose Opera". I chose Opera +-6 years ago and the reasons back then were speed, community, standards support, innovation and customization. The question is, do all these reasons still stand? ...
The community has problems too. Recently, QuHno wrote an article about how lots of good developers and active My Opera members quietly disappeared. Not enough time to be an active member? Perhaps, but more likely they realized that life might be easier with another browser.
A few years ago Opera was one of the fastest browsers to implement new standards. When someone wanted to try new web technologies they used Opera. Implementing new standards (or not yet standards) has its issues because the standards often change but this is one of the places where it is advantage to have smaller user base. No one is going to use the new technologies in production until more browsers supports it. (Thumbs up for Camera support in Opera 12!)
Opera was the first browser to use many great desktop features. Tabs, Speed Dial, etc. Everyone saw Opera as browser that innovates. Not all projects were always successful (like Unite and Widgets - even though I really liked them) but that is to be expected. Unfortunately, lately Opera somehow stopped innovating. Last original interesting desktop feature was tab stacking and since then nothing much happened. Themes, for me, are mostly big disappointment as they are very buggy, slow and as many people points out - what normal users see is only changed background. Opera might surprise me and come up with something big for next Opera version. But with the feature removing (IRC, widgets, torrent, ...) I somehow don't believe that.
Lastly, the customization. One of the best things about Opera. It is possible to change position of all buttons, create our own buttons, hide and display panels. Change skin size. And happily it all still somehow manages to work even though Opera lately concetrate more on skin simplification. I should be probably glad that opera is not trying to improve the customization and in doing so somehow ruin it.
With all that happening Opera still has problems to fix ever lasting bugs. The worst are the Layout/Graphics related. It usually takes +-3 years for them to get fixed or they are not fixed at all. It might be that L/G developers are spending too much time with HWA, but if so then Opera needs to hire more people. Otherwise, other browsers will run far far away and opera might never catch them again.
I still love Opera and I will keep using it no matter what. All I wanted to say is - you can do better than that!
Originally posted by OlegYch:
I definitely agree! Or at least a bigger internal circle (electrans 2.0?
right now i report bugs and never get any status update on them, or they just being ignored or lost in noise in forum and desktopteam blog comments
If Opera is gonna be acquired by Facebook, the developer question will benefit, but I'm afraid some other aspects will suffer.
As for new features it seems they decided to clean up the house and polish the most important features as Opera has enough of them, and people are complaining about inconsistent UI and other inaccuracies.
I don't know if it's possible but involving community in developing for Opera could help. Unfortunately, Opera is not great at listening to cummunity, since even active members seem to have switched their browsers.
Originally posted by rafaelluik:
You did not give the site preferences as example. You wrote explicitly quick preferences. I didn't write quick preferences. Please re-read the texts.Originally posted by rafaelluik:
I don't know about Chrome but there are a lot of pages in Chromium (those two might not be identical) where you can set and view things:
chrome://chrome-urls/
I didn't count it but it is a little bit more than most people think.
Originally posted by QuHno:
LOL the number of settings in Chrome cannot be compared to opera:config.The Ctrl + F12 dialog is more for the average users, while opera:config has many advanced settings that shouldn't be touched by them easily, hence it's for the advanced users.
I gave the site preferences dialog as another example. Why don't you want it transformed into a webpage if you want the preferences dialog to die by the same purpose (having 1 kind of UI for configs)?
Never tried to increase the font size in any dialog. It's indeed easier to increase text size in a webpage like opera:config.
Originally posted by QuHno:
They have the same design...The tables at :cpu and :cache look the same, and the fieldset elements in :plugins and :config too, the font size, color...
:about doesn't show the grids of the table and that's the only variance...
Originally posted by rafaelluik:
Ctrl+F12 = Preferences, not Quick Preferences which is only F12 and yes, I am of the opinion that the normal Preferences can indeed be replaced by opera:config, especially because almost everything can be changed there. The same thing is done in Chromium too and it works just fine, so there is actually no real need for a modal dialog. Apart from that: have you ever tried to increase the font size in a modal dialog?
Originally posted by rafaelluik:
but in different styles. Look at them. I have no problems with them having different styles than the rest of the UI, but each of the internal pages should have the same styling as the other internal pages which they do not have at the moment. Just slapping a big red cut off O in the upper right corner and putting everything in a box is not equivalent "all the same styling".... but a comment in a blog is not the right place to discuss that. It affords a really lengthy discussion, because it is not easy to be explained as long as we don't speak the same language - not meaning our native languages but that the same expressions in the same language mean the same to both of us.
Originally posted by QuHno:
I was answering Jim...Originally posted by QuHno:
Is it forbidden? Operating systems are full of that, unless you think of the Microsoft Metro interface which seems all 2D.Originally posted by QuHno:
Dialogs aren't forbidden you know... And after that you'd be nitpicking about the quick preferences one, and so on... Do you think the quick preferences one would fit well as a page in a different tab than the one of the page you're editing the settings? Also this dialog is modal and this may be for a reason.Originally posted by QuHno:
I aways saw these pages as having "the design of the internal Opera: pages", they don't require to fit to the UI (whatever you say it's flat, while you said it had 3D elements a few lines before...) because they aren't part of it, they're internal pages on their own, with their own styling.Originally posted by BS-Harou:
+1
... not only is that done really well, it also looks good and feels natural!
I am no designer (as I am no rancher, but I still can taste if it is a good steak), but I see and feel when a design looks as if it has a consistent style guide or not:
- 3D elements paired with 2D
- color with graystyle
- for some things icons for other things equally important no icons.
- Crtl F12 settings in a dialog whereas opera:config as web page (The settings dialog could be changed to the same design as the internal pages, something like a resorted and cleaned up opera:config for every days use, that would solve some space problems with translations too)
- Different styling of the opera:foo pages e.g. opera:cpu : colored oval things? Why not plain rectangles? There is NO other element in Opera that is similar. Why do opera:config and opera:plugins have buttonesque headers and not flat like the whole surface of opera?
There are 100s of these little things that show, that the UI is not made from one cast.
In short: It is a style mix and in my eyes and not a good one because there is no Opera identity to it.
And I think the Opera menu organization is super fine, it beats Chrome and Firefox's hands down.
"The community has problems too. Recently, QuHno wrote an article about how lots of good developers and active My Opera members quietly disappeared."
I stopped because of the bad forum GUI upgrade.
"A few years ago Opera was one of the fastest browsers to implement new standards."
I started using Opera around the 9.63 release; I didn't see new standards until a year later (10.5 pre-alpha).
"Opera was the first browser to use many great desktop features."
+1 Was the largest difference between it and other browsers.
Opera is really not competitive due to few differences, but neither is Chrome nor Firefox.
Browsers competing is now uninteresting.
It seems Internet Explorer 9 killed the browser speed wars (which was always my favorite part of the competition). When IE used dead code optimization for benchmarks, makers stopped optimizing since they only way to beat IE would be use the same, purely artificial method that wouldn't have resulted in benefit for the user.
Also, most of the JS engine advancements and optimizations are implemented (or at least the improvements that can be realized on average hardware). There are many possible enhancements, but they require good, uncommon hardware. (Parallel computing, GPU rendering, etc.)
Of course GPU rendering exists and is implemented, but not many care since the benefits can't be exploited by virtue of there being almost no useful web apps that utilize it. The little amount of web apps is because few people have good enough GPUs and browsers are too slow on the complex (WebGL). People upgrading to Windows 8 should spark some speed competition.
The other thing that made the competition interesting was Opera's innovations. This seemed to have stopped when Jon Tetzchner left.
"And they need help with the menu organization."
+1
your comment in my blog
Yes, the whole UI is a bloody mess:
There are:
- bubble like things for extensions, zoom, security info etc.
- menu like things like for the -O- button
- plain dialogs for normal settings
- web page similar things like for the opera:foo settings (compare config, gpu and cpu - 3 different stylings in the box) and info and not even the web site like settings pages are consistent in their styling.
And then there is the mail/news, downloads, bookmarks etc. page styling, which clash with the rest.
That's why I wrote: "The ones I know (meaning good designers) have a concept of what they do in their mind and then start developing the interface or whatever. The developers have to follow them by writing code that supports the design. Slapping a design over a poor interaction logic never works."
http://my.opera.com/QuHno/blog/2012/06/19/answer-to-angry-with-opera
... just my opinion - no solutions, sorry.
Originally posted by toyotabedzrock:
What exactly are these things? I know pretty well what I would like to have in Opera, but I have no idea what would make common people change their mind to start using Opera.
And they need help with the menu organization.
It presumes Opera has all the money to hire the people needed to fulfill your expectations.
Also, the customization is intact in Windows and Linux.
The Google make their own "standards" and they (surprisingly) implement their own "standards" before the other browser (mainly in Working Draft and Editor's Draft phase).
The Opera sometimes implement these rudimentary "standards" and make extra work for themselves. For example: Web Sockets, device element or Web Databases->IndexedDB.
The Opera is a browser with small marketshare. It is sufficient implementing at the "Candidate Recommendation" phase. If Opera doesn't implement some alpha standard the web developers will use in their site (with fallback), because Chrome and Firefox is 80-90% together.
If Opera does implement some alpha standard the web developers won't use in their site (even without fallback for other browsers) if the other browser doesn't support it.
I preferred auto tab stacking but they removed it too