Bye-Bye, Opera.

[Fairportfan]

Opera has finally pissed me off for the last time.

I've been using it since it cost money and the whole program would fit on a single 1.4 meg floppy.

But they've been steadily dumbing down the UI and apparently stripping away some of the bells and whistles i don't use but that some people love.

And finally...

The next full version (v15) will be built on the Chrome engine instead of Gecko, which is annoying.

And it has a seriously re-designed/dumbed-down UI that i can't figure out how to fix. (Up till now, i could import the "Operaprefs.ini" file from my earlier versions and force the UI back into some semblance of reasonable usability, but they seem to have changed the .ini files.)

But, worst of all, they have decided that they are going to combine Bookmarks with Speed Dial. And you can't import your old "Bookmarks" file, because they changed that format, too.

Oh - and something in the latest build doesn't like Flash and crashes randomly on Flash-heavy sites ... and the Amazon search function suddenly doesn't work.

So, after almost twenty years ... Firefox.

[jwhouk]

Welcome to the Dark Side. (Oh wait, that'd be IE.)

Welcome to the 20th Century, then.

[Fairportfan]

Yeah. I'm gonna miss the 21st Century.

I have to add a couple of plug-ins to Firefox to get it to do what Opera does natively.

[Dave]

Ugh. Sounds as if the Opera developers have decided to stroll down the same swampy lane as Windows 8, KDE 4, Gnome 3, et al. Introduce a "new, simplified, advanced, easier-to-use, and ergonomically-correct" user-interface paradigm which discards features, throws away about ten billion user-years' worth of accumulated experience and reflex, demands substantially more hardware resources to implement its cool-looking eye candy (to the point of being completely unable to run on a large fraction of the installed hardware base), break compatibility with older applications and data sets. and decline to provide a backwards-compatible mode because This Is Better And You'll Love It... and then look hurt and misunderstood when their existing users scream at them.

Well, I'll buy that approach for a quarter!

Pardon me if I' being cynical here, but I've seen too many projects fail because of this sort of over-eager "throw away the past with nary a backwards glance" redesign. Wouldn't mind a bit if the developers spun it off as a new project and let it compete (win or lose) on its merits... but all too often they actively attempt to kill the old system as a way of compelling people to grow familiar with the new.

Kinda like the line that Bia has tried to sell to Shelly... "Your old life is irretrievably gone, and the new life I designed for you without your consent will be so horribly painful that you'll yearn for death. You'll end up loving it!" Thanks loads, toots

[Leak]

The next full version (v15) will be built on the Chrome engine instead of Gecko, which is annoying.

Small correction - their "old" engine was called Presto; Gecko is what Firefox is built on.

[Fairportfan]

The next full version (v15) will be built on the Chrome engine instead of Gecko, which is annoying.

Small correction - their "old" engine was called Presto; Gecko is what Firefox is built on.

Right. They did use Gecko for a while, earlier, i'm pretty sure, before they developed their own, which was faster and more efficient.