Wandering by mistake

Over seven months ago I wrote that Opera Web Browser got stuck when it came to the browser stats at the Polish market. And nothing good happened since then.

Opera was used by 6.4% of Polish Internet users on September 2005, that is two years ago. Now, according to ranking.pl, Opera is used by 6.1% of the Polish users (when taking the weekly stats of September 25th - October 1st 2007).

These numbers are not fully comparable, since current ranking.pl stats are obtained using a new methodology, which shows a bit lower market share of Opera when compared to the results obtained using the old method. Now the stats are based on the number of page views, while they were based on the user (or rather cookie) count before. The stats based on the new method were also generated for some months back, but the publicly available data do not cover versions of Opera which currently do not exceed the required usage level of 0.1%, so I'm not able to generate a chart like the one mentioned below.

So, even though the old results appeared to be a bit overestimated, we still may say, that Opera goes through a serious stagnation in Poland, especially if we take a look at this old chart.

It seems that the official Polish Opera partner did not (as for now) rather help with making Opera more popular here. Well, it's hard to help by doing nothing, isn't it?

I was also tagged. But it was my vacation time, and now it is definitely too late (so many people have already written so much, and tagged everyone and his sister). So I gave up. But wait... I can't resist to say it once more: I want better search engines management.

And I'm really, really sorry for not making the Opsed Mini ready to be published yet. Bash me...

Opera 9.20 introduced some significant changes to the way the search engines are handled. The old, good, Opera Search.ini Editor (Opsed) is not able to modify the search engines used by Opera 9.20 and later. As I said Opsed development was stopped over two years ago and I was not going to make the project alive anymore. But… I have received, and still receive, lots of positive and encouraging feedback from people, who find the current implementation of the editor available under Tools > Preferences > Search too poor. Very poor. Users need some really basic functionality, like rearranging the search engines, grouping them by adding the separators, and deleting some "undeletable" ones. While the last of these requests may be unfeasible due to the possible agreements between Opera Software and the service providers, I can't understand why the other ones are still not implemented. So… Take a look at the poll displayed in the right column of this blog and consider casting your vote. Opsed is dead, but I'm considering developing something like "Opsed Mini", which will offer three features only: rearranging the search engines, adding the separators and deleting the "undeletable" search engines (after all I did not sign any agreements with Google nor Yahoo ). If you have any other ideas (remember the project name: Opsed Mini), feel free to post them as comments to this blog entry. And no, this is not an April fools joke. But, of course, it would be much better to see these features in the Opera's built-in search engine manager. We could remove the "so called" part from the title of this blog entry then.

This post was just an April fools joke ;-)

Opera Backup Tool, as one may guess when reading its name, is a tool for making Opera Browser backups. But that's not all - it offers much more…

Important note
Before considering taking part in the tests, please note that OpBT performs operations on sensitive and critical user data. Moreover, if you decide to use the Roaming Profile feature, your data will be sent over the Internet. The data are always coded using the strong encryption, and sent directly to your my.opera.com profile (that is no data is available to the authors of the application).
Previous versions of OpBT were available for a limited number of the hard-core, brave users only. Since it seems that OpBT reached the reasonable reliability and quality level, we have decided to give it a spin by starting the public tests. But keep in mind that you use the software at your own risk. If you are not certain of what you are doing - do not download nor do not use this tool before it reaches the 1.0 version number.

Opera Backup Tool quick overview

• Available for Windows only (as for now). To get all the good you need Windows 2000, XP or Vista. The Backup Scheduler and Roaming Profiles are disabled on Win 95/98 systems, since they do not support service applications.
  
• Offers backup of any Opera profile found on local computer. The complete profile or the selected profile items may be backed up.
  
• Restoring the backed-up data. You may go back in time to any point - just select a backup date/description and profile items to be restored.
  
• Backup scheduling - backups may be created on daily/weekly/monthly basis, as frequent as you need. The backups may be also created on demand and at every system startup or shut-down. If you are using Windows 2000/XP/Vista - you do not even have to be logged to your account for backup to be performed. On these platforms the backup scheduler works as a service application, which means that it starts when system starts, and that it has the administrator privileges regardless of the privileges of the logged-in Windows user.
  
• Roaming profiles - you may store your backups on a remote server to make it available on any other machine. All you need is creating a my.opera.com user account. Note, that due to the my.opera.com limitations (300 MB of disk storage), it is recommended not to include your mail accounts in the roaming profile. The profile is automatically transferred to your my.opera.com account on every Opera exit, and (if you want so) at the selected intervals while Opera is being used. On system startup the profile is automatically downloaded from the my.opera.com account, and Opera is not allowed to start before the download is finished. This operation is typically performed even before you manage to login to your Windows account, since OpBT uploads and downloads the differential and compressed data only.
  

The OpBT seems to create reliable backups. We need your feedback to be sure that it performs well on any, even most exotic, configuration. It is very important to us to know, whether you think that the privacy of your data is compromised in any way. If so, we would rather completely remove the feature causing privacy problems before publishing the 1.0 version.

Download OpBT 0.7

Be good and keep smiling.

Do not use Opsed with the latest weekly, that is Opera 9.20 Build 8746. It will simply not work. So, it seems that Opera 9.10 was the last version ever that was supported by Opsed.

BTW, I do really hope that all of the bugs related to the freshly modified search.ini handling will be fixed before Opera 9.20 final is launched. Otherwise the concept of making selected search engines hardcoded () and performing search engine merging should be dropped out of 9.20.