A farewell to MY browser

A farewell to MY browser

*move if needed*

For more than 7 years, thus nearly 1/4 of my life and about 1/2 of my internet experience, Opera has always been a trustworthy friend on my side, giving me solutions for things I couldn't even think of at times and making my life a lot easier. It quickly replaced my beloved lynx and became my favorite browser in nearly no time and although I'm usually pro open source I could live with Opera the way it was, because it still allowed me to do what I wanted and needed.

Now it seems, the old saying 'everything good comes to an end' seems to have catched me and I feel forced to drop my browser and to come up with another solution or just write my own browser(a yea to webkit).

For those of you interested, the following is a small sum-up from the top of my head, which lead to my decision to unmerge (uninstall in terms of Windows) Opera.

But first, so maybe you have a better understanding of my points, let me tell you some little things about me:

• I'm a happy user of Gentoo Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris (well, the latter not so much since a few days)
• I'm a software-developer with a passion in achieving the most that's possible with sane things(i.e. no Java-shit, don't use a library when it's not really needed, etc etc)
• I don't like graphical toolkits and I hate unneccessary *bling-bling* (think of animations, transparency, etc etc)
• I hate using the mouse
• I don't want things on my system which I don't use, espacially if I already have something which could do the same(in a better/my way)

So, having that out, let's start and just so you understand, I'm talking about the current status, being 10.53_6330 on my system.

1. The big O
   I don't need it and really I DON'T WANT IT. Yes, I've read a dozen of forum-pages and tipps, all to no avail, it's still coming back.
   It just doesn't fit in terms of optics, i.e. it may look good on Win32 or OS X, but for me it doesn't on Linux. I'm not running KDE/GNOME/XFCE, I'm happy with a "simple" windowmanager (sawfish in my case) and since I'm a mouse-hater, I generally have nothing to click, no icons, no window decorations, no title-bars, no nothing.
   For years I've been used to pressing Alt+F11 to show/hide the menubar at the times I need it, which generally only happens at the first setup after a new release has come out. I also don't usually use the tab-bar(so it's mostly hidden), but when I use it, I want it for tabs.
2. The big O (menu)
   Now, I feel like being on Windows here, accidently pressing just the Alt-key and the imho all-in-one menu pops up. Even worse, if I've been writing something, I have to press Escape and then Tab to put the focus back to where I've been. I don't want this menu and if I'm forced to have it, since you devs like to call me stupid, then at least let me bind it to another way. I'm not on Windows here, so how dare you emulating this behaviour on my boxes?
3. Cancelling support for (open)Solaris
   Well, I can understand this decision, really, nevertheless, it makes me sad. For years I could use my same profile on every system I needed to use, hell, I've got it on my usbstick and take it everywhere I go(yes, I know about Opera Link and no, I will never use it). Now I need to find another solution, it certainly won't be something from Mozilla and Chrome has to go a long way before I'd even consider using it.
4. Icons, the good
   What ever happened to the star-icon in the addressbar? It's been nice to see, if I already bookmarked a page or not, not that I ever clicked it, I just hit ^d for that, but it's been a nice visual indicator. You have read, how many people in the forums want this feature back, didn't you?
5. Icons, the bad
   Why in blood hell do I need to have favicons in the addressbar? Why can't I turn them off here, but I can use text-only in the tabs? Yeah, I can use a generic one, but hello, I don't want any icon there at all. The same shit applies to the icon in the search bar, I don't want that either, espacially if the field already shows "search with Google". And which graphical genie decided to put the panels-button in the statusbar?
6. The search-bar
   Oh, nice, I can now click and resize it - OH DAMN, there's a minimal/maximal value? WTF? If you allow me to do it, let me do it my way. Do I really need to modify the skin - in the hope this isn't a built-in default - to achieve that?
7. The address-bar
   Hello, Mr. Designer? This overlay is ugly and the 2-line thingy takes up precious space. And what in the world, why is the "search the web for" turning up, even if I unticked "Addressbar Content Search" in opera:config? There also a nice little "x" to remove entries from the history, at least I guess so, since hitting Delete didn't change anything? So I'm forced to click - again? Are you now partner of Logitech/MS/... or what?
8. Animation
   Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. On the first occasion, I thought my graphics have gone nuts. What do I need a sliding "hello stupid, here is your new tab"-thingy for? And of course, opera:config is the way to go, I'm glad I know this exists or I would have smacked someone for that being not in the normal options dialog.
9. Page dimming
   Did you have a look at your forums? Most posts concerning that topic state that it is unreadable and ask how to turn it off again? Of course, opera:config to the rescue. Do the designers even test such things on a non-Opera-testgroup? Is this in HIG?
10. Password dialog
    Now, really, what's so wrong about the old one? It worked, it didn't hide any option, one of which is now a tinytiny "x"-marks-the-spot in the corner somewhere up high and guess what, I could perfectly fine controll it via keyboard. On the first occasion I didn't even see it, being the background of the page being a dark blue and I wondered if I had turned wand off.
    Oh, and if you don't be fast, it now times out. Pure genius. Ever logged in to a page which is quite slow and you're not sure you remembered the password correctly? Guess what, log out, log in again and then VERY VITAL, CLICK!
11. The search-bar
    Come on now, another spiffy bar, plain stupid in design. The old "," & "." have been perfectly fine and if that wasn't enough, there's always been ^f. But now, a nice bar shows up with a tiny search-field, some buttons and that's it? Hello, Mr. Designer? Again? I've got 2048px horizontal (and that's just one of my monitors) and that leads to more than 60% free and unused space in that bar! Why the heck isn't the search field larger in such cases? Also, why the heck does it time out? I've been used to the timeout when pressing ".", and that's ok, but now? You open a bar and close it so fast, without even providing a setting for that?
12. Overall bumpyness
    Guess what, all these new dialogs bump down the page when spawned and bump it up again after using/timeout? Now that's what I call elegance.
13. SVG
    It's there, but we won't use it. Hello, you've got the best in-browser svg-experience, still you're using PNGs on pages like opera:{about,config,...}? Why the hell? And why not use SVG for the skin, making it scale nice without the blurry icons?
14. Toolkit heaven - or hell
    Oh, how I could hug you for trying to kill the need on QT, I really love that. On the other hand, I like to smack you for forcing a good subset of GTK and GNOME. So you want to force gstreamer on me, although I already have mplayer and I'm satisfied with that? You want to gstreamer on the KDE guys, which already have a fine combination of xine+phonon? And for what? To play some audio and video? Guess what, that would be possible already, if you'd just use what's available on the system. Because you, although having different teams for every platform, aren't willing to support the native infrastructure, I am forced to let something on my system, which is quite inferior to what I already have? Rest assured, I won't do that and it's not about those few MB, it's about a design principle of good software and yes, I also don't allow Java here. If you want to give the user the best experience, use what they already have. Oh, and btw, what about hardware-acc?
15. Where is the love?
    In general, I love that some people work at Opera, which are innovative, but I really hate it, that you're so half-baked.
    For about 6 years, a lot of people requested support for GnuPG/PGP/s/MIME in Opera Mail and what happened? Nothing, although this is one of the most bumped threads of the whole forum, nothing. No statement if you're even interested, looking or working on this, just plain nothing - ok, best you can get is an ~3years old interview. I often read claims that you care about the users security, but you do just nothing in this regard. Opera Mail is a really good client, but it lacks the vital for me to be even usefull. I mean, come on, there are now even Firefox-extensions which can i.e. encrypt mails send via GMail with GnuPG on-the-fly, I myself implemented GnuPG into one of my applications and really, it isn't that hard.
    
    Right next to this topic, there are a lot of people asking for support of chipcard-based authentication, since this is nowadays required in many countries to government related stuff or banking or ... This thread goes on for years, too, and nothing happened. Why should one switch his browser everytime for this, when you could also use another browser fulltime, which supports things like this o-o-t-b?
    
    What's up with the IRC-client? Bad enough that it opens a tab for every conversation, which is cluttering the tab-bar like hell, no it doesn't even have a proper setup-/server-config dialog. That makes it not easy/impossible to i.e. run costum commands on connect.
    
    RSS, grouping, filtering, downloading included attachment, passing the feed to an external application, anyone?
    
    Contacts? Come on, this is really hilarious, no option to i.e. skype someone, there's so much potential here.
    
    BTW, is there some "we unify all browsers"-magic working behind the scenes? I've been used to press "6" to zoom to 100%, worked for a long time, now it's a Firefox-y ^0 if I don't switch to 9.2 compatible? Same applies for ^l and the like.

Now this are just my day-to-day annoyances, I won't even start with widgets, unite, opera:config, speeddial and many other things. For me, Opera has gone much worse than I could have ever thought of and I don't see, when this will change for the better for me again.

So, farewell my beloved, "the best Web experience" - not for me anymore.

-- ph030
PS: All this text is IMHO and not intended to offend anyone personally!