Opera Otaku

(I posted this on the Choose Opera forum to address the concerns of community members who have been asking about Opera's technical and community support of User JS)

I appreciate the frustration of zotlan, fearphage, and others who want Opera to do more with User JS (both on a technical level, and in terms of official community support). Let me try to shed some light on the situation.

It's no secret that we (at Opera) haven't released anything in awhile to push forward our support of User JS, compared (for example) to the emphasis we've been putting lately on Widgets (on the Wii Internet Channel, on phones, contests on My Opera, etc). That's just part of how we do things. At any given point in time, we will work on and highlight certain aspects of Opera more than others (i.e. Speed Dial in one release, Link in another).

I can't comment on what we're planning (or not planning) to release, but I think it's too early to say that we've abandoned User JS as something we want to develop further. As with all Opera features we're working on, User JS is part of a long list of priorities, and we make occasional adjustments to our roadmap when we feel it's necessary.

Widespread community interest in User JS is definitely one thing that will improve the chances of more support for User JS in the near future. I don't visit the User JS forum very often, but I do know it exists (and have a handful of scripts installed myself). Myself and others at Opera know that it is an important feature that a lot of people care about, but it's somewhat debatable how popular it is for the majority of our users. As I'm sure you know, it is very difficult to accurately gauge widespread interest from web forums with thousands of posts. (I agree, by the way, that there are a huge number of people all over the world who want Opera to support extensions).

That said, I will make a personal recommendation to our product management team that we pay closer attention to how many Opera users actually use User JS. For example, in the feature usage study we did earlier this year, we didn't track User JS usage. I'll try to make sure we track that in future studies so we can find out how popular User JS actually is. By all means, however, post your own polls or suggest them to Daniel on Opera Watch or to Espen on My Opera.

Of course, even if we find that User JS is not that popular amongst our users, that doesn't automatically mean we don't want it to be. Developer tools, for example, are not used by most Opera users, but we recognize the importance of having Web developers on our side. Depending on how much we think it would benefit our users, we might want to actively make User JS more popular by improving its usability and marketing it more. For any feature, determining how valuable it is, irrespective of how popular it is or would be, is very challenging and depends on a wide range of factors. As Opera users who are champions of the User JS cause, keep making your presence known and be vocal about why User JS is so important, not just for yourself, but for Opera users in general (many of whom, right or wrong, probably prefer that we work on other issues ahead of User JS). Perhaps someone could submit an article about User JS on dev.opera.

In terms of short term priorities, I can safely say that we are working on improving the opera.com website. That includes having a better and more obvious section for users who want to customize their browser. It's something we're working on, and User JS might very well be part of that.