08 July 2013

Opera Desktop Team: “The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond”

So, starting from this fresh base, we decided to carefully consider how to build up Opera again: over the years, Presto-based Opera had become overloaded with features, a number of them confusing rather than helping our users — you can’t imagine how many reports we’ve gotten from users telling us that their favorite site was broken, simply because they had turned on fit-to-width by accident, for instance.

So, the approach when building the new product has been and still is to cater for various browsing use cases, but at all times, to keep the UI really simple, so that anyone can use it. Sebastian Baberowski

I gave Next a try a couple of weeks ago, but I honestly can’t see any reason to use it at this stage. It’s just a stripped down version of Chrome that doesn’t sync with .

While old Opera had such a huge feature list that probably no one could name them all, the new Chromium-based Opera has an equally long list of features it doesn’t have and will likely never add back, instead referring users to extensions. I was all for removing unnecessary junk from the browser, but now Opera has jumped from one extreme to the other. It’s basically starting from scratch, putting itself many years behind to the other browsers. This would have been a fine decision a decade ago when was just starting or maybe even five years ago when launched… Now, not so much! The new Opera doesn’t offer any reason for regular users to switch to it, neither on desktop nor on mobile (Android to be exact), while at the same time alienating their small and loyal user base by stripping every feature they have been relying on.

To call this a vision is preposterous – at this point I don’t expect Opera as browser to survive the next year.

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