Wedge
Public area => The Pub => Off-topic => Topic started by: Nao on February 13th, 2013, 03:27 PM
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http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit
Farewell Presto, you served us well...
I've been an Opera fan since around 2005. At that time, other browsers really sucked for power users. I discovered tabs in Opera, then the low-memory footprint, and decided to call it quits with Maxthon or whatever default browser I was using at the time.
My best memories of Opera are of the 9.xx line, especially 9.2x which was heavily customized for my needs. It was just THE perfect browser: fast, full-featured and extremely stable. I had at some point over 800 tabs on my 2GB machine. It was unthinkable of. All of these tabs were loaded in memory, i.e. when I switched to them, they showed up instantly.
When I made the switch to 10.x, I was really worried with the many changes they'd done that made it slower and gave less acceptable web site layouts. I switched back to 9.64 or something, and stayed with it for many more months.
Then they went for 10.50 which was an improvement, so I started using it. Version 11, which came out in 2011, was better in every respect. They added stackable tabs, which was something I'd been wanting for a long time. Unfortunately, that feature was buggy, and everytime I quit Opera, I would fear that launching it would present me with a flat list of tabs. They eventually fixed that bug, but not before v12 I think.
Still, these were some good days too. I really liked version 11.
And then Opera 12 came out... And was an awful nest of bugs. I'd never seen that. They'd introduced internally 4 major things:
1- tabs loaded in separate process, so that one tab crashing wouldn't crash the others,
2- Flash ran in its own independent process. Same as above.
3- A 64-bit version, allowing for Opera to use more than 3.5GB of Ram.
4- hardware acceleration, not very noticeable except for one thing: fonts were now rendered using Direct2D, i.e. veeeery smooth job.
So... I had to make the switch. As it turned out,
(1) was useless because Opera had become FAR more prone to random crashes, even with less than 100 tabs. This is something that's crucial to me, and eventually drove me away from it. It was always crash-prone since version 10, but v11 was an improvement on that. v12 was a step down. In the real world, (1) never showed its strength to me, because when tabs crashed, they'd probably crash everything.
(2) actually worked, but it turned out that my Opera crashes were only partly due to Flash misbehaving. So, again, a step down...
(3) was horrible. Because of my tendency to use hundreds of tabs, Opera 64 would use absolutely all of my RAM. It usually isn't a problem, because when you launch another program, it'll just reallocate the extra RAM to it. But in the real world, this never happened, or not fast enough. I had a countless number of "Not enough memory, you should close Opera.exe" error messages showing up during my sleep (I mostly keep my PC on 24/24), and sometimes with some major crashes when I'd turn my screen back on. Yay... So, eventually I reluctantly came back to Opera 32, and guess what...? Much better. Still, Opera would usually crash within a few hours of launching it, and that's with ~100 tabs on. I never dared try with more tabs... It just wasn't there any longer. My Opera fanatism had reached an end.
I think I made the switch to Firefox around last summer, but found it to be so incredibly slow. I loved it when they implemented lazy loading tabs, though. i.e. Firefox no longer tries to load all tabs at startup, it will only load a tab when you activate it. Which effectively makes it currently the best browser for power users with 500+ tabs.
Then I started using Chrome more and more. I always hated its "no geeky stuff" approach, more especially the fact that it removed the vertical tabs feature, which was THE very best Chrome feature. Actually, after trying it out in Chrome (and Firefox's Tree Tabs add-on), I discovered that Opera allowed me to do the same (it has a side tab, and there's a Window feature in it that must be added manually, but then you get a tree-style list that works really well.)
So, what made me switch to Chrome then...?
One word: Sidewise.
It's a plugin that opens a new window on the left side, and attempts to emulate what vertical tabs did. But the developer is hard at work on it, and added many sensible features. For one, you can stack tabs in a tree style. Secondly, you can 'hibernate' a tab, just like in Firefox (using an add-on). Thirdly, and that's for the best -- when Chrome crashes (which it ALSO does on a daily basis, sometimes more), the tab list never gets lost, and it usually reopens my many tabs in hibernating mode, meaning I have the benefits of a fast browser (not many tabs) while still having my tabs available if I choose so. I can also, similarly to Opera (but not Firefox!) search my tabs quickly by entering part of the tab name or URL in an input box at the top. For instance, if I want to clean up all of my local install test tabs, I can just type 'unwedge' in the input text, and then middle-click on all of the tabs that get filtered. It just WORKS.
So... Opera is dropping Presto (only keeping it, from what I understand, for Opera Mini, where pages are generated on their local servers and then dispatched to requesters), and using WebKit.
What does it mean for us? Well, Wedge compatibility will be made easier. I'm a bit sad because I was also very proud about our compatibility with Opera -- I did 90% of my overall testing on it, after all... But it'll be good not to have to focus on so many engines.
Myself, I may very well come back to Opera. If the Sidewide plugin works on it (as it should), then I'll definitely give the new Opera a try. And if it doesn't work, I'll come back to test it on every new version. Because Opera deserves it. It deserves having advocates. Even though version 12 was a failure, it still doesn't mean they should be forgotten for what they did for so many years.
You may ask, why use WebKit and not Gecko..? After all, Opera has always been friends with the Mozilla foundation, and they served as moral support on their fight against the H264 format. But that war was lost last year, and worst of all -- Firefox started losing market shares. Opera knows what it means. It lost market shares to Chrome, too. I think it's simply a matter of Opera finally being realistic (in their decision to dump Presto for another rendering engine), and thus, if they want to be realistic all the way, the only engine they can rely on is WebKit, not Gecko. Because it's no longer about making your point and winning a way; it's about focusing on what they're really best at: user experience and new innovative features. WebKit is now the leader in rendering innovation. Opera will help them stay on that road.
I think it's a good decision that they made. Opera indeed had a superior engine (Presto's HTML, Vega's layout and Carakan's JS), but I don't know of many people who used it for *that*. They used Opera because it was the best user experience they could have -- everything could be modified in the interface. And that's what I mostly miss with Firefox and Chrome. Using plugins for everything isn't always practical. Opera had it all. Now it has even more. I can't wait to try it...
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Nice post, from a fellow Opera user from around the same time (when they took off the adverts). I still use Opera because in terms of functionality it's always been ahead and still has many must-have features without having to load add-ons. I have started to use Chrome more recently because of compatibility issues so if these will be stopped with the engine change then, for me, Opera is back way out in front.
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I started using it daily about a year before it removed any ads, I think. I remember I didn't pay for it, but got a legitimate copy through their marketing program -- I posted an ad-like link on my website for some time, and got enough clicks to get a proper ad-free copy. The irony... :)
Oh yes, one of the things I love so much in Opera is the 9.2x-era keyboard shortcuts. Thankfully, they left the option in after they overhauled the shortcuts... One of the things I always do when installing a clean copy of Opera is to switch the shortcut system. Pressing 1 and 2 on my keypad to switch between tabs is especially nice, but pressing 4 did what no other browser has ever done: it minimizes the current tab, and switches to the *last used* tab (before the one I just minimized.) Firefox can minimize a tab when clicking it, but it'll only switch to the last tab, and then register the tab I just minimized as the last tab, meaning that even with keyboard shortcuts, I can only switch between two tabs... Which pretty much sucks.
Well, that's just me of course... :^^;:
One of the things I'll regret in Opera is Dragonfly. The version in Opera 12 was finally mature: proper JS tracing, and it had a nice feature the other browsers didn't: it rewrote indentation on minified scripts, meaning I could easily trace through my minified stuff without the need to disable minification in the admin settings. It was very, VERY helpful... I hope Chromium implements that in the future...! Maybe Opera will offer a patch.
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opera has "sidewise" in panel just, add windows panel with +
it works like charm with tab stacking
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Quoting myself............ ::)
Actually, after trying it out in Chrome (and Firefox's Tree Tabs add-on), I discovered that Opera allowed me to do the same (it has a side tab, and there's a Window feature in it that must be added manually, but then you get a tree-style list that works really well.)
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Where is Opera "Ice"?
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Yeah, would be nice to have Dragonfly esque features in other browsers.
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Coming soon, I guess...
It was demoed last month, there's a video of it online. I don't really like the looks of it... Hopefully, it'll remain an iOS exclusive or something. Not that I'm particularly happy with Opera's app for Android (I never use it willingly), but at least it has a UI, not some marketing bullshit of a non-interface.
From what we know, they'll demo a new version of Opera for Android in 8 to 12 days at the MWC.
I've read hundreds, thousands of comments on this move to WebKit, and basically the community as a whole is against the move. They're not ready to trust Opera's ability to keep their browser 'as it is', with no changes to their UI/UX, most people expect it to be a Chromium clone. I don't think it'll be. Bruce Lawson has said in an interview that they're "free" from Google/Apple and are only forking Chromium, i.e. they're going to do what we did with SMF2... And that can't be a bad thing, can it? Basically, their development process will be public, they'll add stuff to Opera and maybe submit them to Chromium-dev, but rejection won't stop them from adding their own changes to their browser. They're also free to remove anything they consider as bloat...
The thing I'm more concerned with is that with this, Opera has effectively confirmed that they laid off a good number of their development team. Some of the more 'vocal' ones like Anne van Kasteren for instance (he officially started work at Mozilla recently), who was instrumental in pushing several of Opera's features to W3C standards. I'm afraid that their absence will be felt.
Some also say that ex-CEO Jon left Opera because of growing concerns over its impending lack of independence. It's been said that he sold half his remaining Opera shares the day before they announced the WebKit switch. To me, it definitely means that he doesn't trust Opera to be going in the right direction... :-/
Anyway -- those left at Opera will, I'm sure, be working very hard to produce the best Chromium clone out there. Which is why I'll be delighted to try it. But I don't think it's gonna bring down the house or whatever.
As for Dragonfly, given that it was developed in JavaScript, and Chrome Dev Tools aren't AFAIK, it's not going to be trivial to port it, and as an Opera employee said they'd already pulled the plug on it, we can only count on individuals wanting to port some features of DF into CDT as it is now. Fingers crossed...
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New Opera for Android sucks.
Chrome is better. I'm sad.
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New Opera for Android sucks.
Chrome is better. I'm sad.
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Its mostly the tab list... its taken from the stock browser. Which sucks in the first place. If I wanted to use stock, I'd use it. At least it got flash support.
Chrome has issues with text auto sizing since the latest update, though.