My Opera experiencing is deteriorating quickly

My Opera experiencing is deteriorating quickly

I have been using Opera since '99, maybe 2000. It's ALWAYS been my browser of choice, when FF came out, it just seemed like an Opera ripoff, now I'm thinking of switching, this is getting ridiculous.

First, I have VERY patiently dealt with the 'some websites don't work right with Opera' BS since the beginning. For awhile, it was worth it, but come one, 10 YEARS LATER? Quit adding crap and work on this issue, make it work with websites that aren't up to that mystical standard you're always hyping, having 2 browsers is getting silly after this long.

Now for the NEW issues(All reported in the Bug submission form, but I want to be heard).

Randomly, when clicking links, whether on a webpage, my Netvibes home page, or Speed Dial, I will get my home page instead. I even got this on these forums just now.

Randomly, Opera will just freeze. I can scroll up and down, but links don't work, and neither does pausing You Tube videos.

Auto-complete has now turned into auto search, this rubs me the wrong way in two ways:
1. You have a search bar, just how many ways do I need to have available to search?
2. It worked before, now I have to type a slash after the website, WHY? I have turned off auto search, so why "fix" something that isn't broken?

Using Mouse Gestures to go Back or Forward is very, very slow. When I give up and hit the 'Back' button, it loads literally 10 times faster.

I haven't had a crash in years, except for random occurrences. Now it's at least 3 days a week...

This is quickly paling in comparison to IE, Safari and Chrome.

Ok, now I know someone's going to lock this, as they do with every 'I'm pissed; post. Maybe you guys should start listening to the customer. It seems to be working with Windows right now.


Now, I know you guys will eother delete this or Lock it, a trend that happens with every 'Opera is garbage' thread, but I don't care, I've said what I came to say. I'm ready to roll back, all of these issues have been in the last 2 updates.

I do agree that in general, it seems like things are deteriorating. Sure, instead of Opera Unite, which is great but that I've never used, I would have preferred to have drag and drop working like in any other browser. That is, having the possibility to switch between "copy" and "cut", for instance by using a modifier key (Alt, Ctrl, Option, etc.).

I have more gripes at the Mac version than at the Windows version, the latter seems more polished. The only problem I've never had with the Windows version was an update that erased everything (bookmarks, wand, skins, etc.) except emails.

But, let's not forget that Opera still has all of the things that made us choose it some time ago. It is still the best for me even if it eats 600 MB of memory with not that many tabs open (10 tabs), despite the cache memory being turned off. Even dropping a bookmark on a highlighted folder puts the bookmark as a sibling of the folder instead of putting it as a child.

Yes, 10.53 on Mac OS X often crashes at exit. Yes it's slow to open. Yes, the HTML mail editing window does not support D&D. Yes, D&D in general sucks: either absent or not functional. Yes, it's not light on memory. Yes, even the "fast mode" of history navigation is not even close to the blinking speed of page redisplay we had in 7 something. Yes, as I've posted in a topic I opened on this forum, the widget upgrade to full applications went awry for the two widgets I used to use.

But, I still have absolute control over configuration, which is clearly antithetical with Mac OS X. I still have keyboard navigability, which again is so much better than Mac OS X. Everything is a few keystrokes away. More importantly, I am simply amazed at how fast 10.51 and 10.53 are. And even with all plug-ins disabled, all sites I visit work as expected (except Glowria.fr where menus don't stay open). The bookmarks full view and keyboard access is enough to make me stay with Opera.

So yes, there are shortcomings but I'm sure the Opera guys and gals will fix everything. After all, they do have the satisfaction of their users (and not "customers") at heart, don't they?

Yes, I agree that having full control is nice and that it is the opposite of everything Mac stands for. People don't understand how I can work IT and not weep in joy every time a Mac is brought into a room. They don't understand that for the most part, you can't change ANYTHING on a Mac. Want a different theme? That's fine as long as it's silver or blue, that's the easiest example I can give people.

Sigh, I just hope that the next update fixes things. Google has already made me turn away from them, I hope Opera doesn't do the same.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

Yes, I agree that having full control is nice and that it is the opposite of everything Mac stands for. People don't understand how I can work IT and not weep in joy every time a Mac is brought into a room. They don't understand that for the most part, you can't change ANYTHING on a Mac. Want a different theme? That's fine as long as it's silver or blue, that's the easiest example I can give people.

Yes, I must admit, the lack of customization is the only thing that pisses me off about Macs; I can't even change the size of the system font! Want to lock items in the Dock so that you don't d&d them out of it by error? Too bad, it's impossible. Besides that, great system, really. I know I fell in love one year ago for the MBP I use at work. Maybe that if it had been personal and I had had to pay for it, I would have felt differently.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

Sigh, I just hope that the next update fixes things. Google has already made me turn away from them, I hope Opera doesn't do the same.

Really? Everybody is cheering for Chrome, including myself despite my staying with Opera. What's wrong with it? Too naked?

I'm sure Opera people will fix a few things, drag and drop comes first, then depressable buttons come second (it feels so weird to click a button and not see any movement, like on the "Preview" button of this forum) and the buggy spell-checker.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

First, I have VERY patiently dealt with the 'some websites don't work right with Opera' BS since the beginning. For awhile, it was worth it, but come one, 10 YEARS LATER? Quit adding crap and work on this issue, make it work with websites that aren't up to that mystical standard you're always hyping, having 2 browsers is getting silly after this long.

I haven't seen much of that in a long time, and sites that don't work right in Opera often enough don't look much better in Safari either. More often than not it's some funky JavaScript issue ( here at least )

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

Randomly, when clicking links, whether on a webpage, my Netvibes home page, or Speed Dial, I will get my home page instead. I even got this on these forums just now.

I've never seen that.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

Randomly, Opera will just freeze. I can scroll up and down, but links don't work, and neither does pausing You Tube videos.

Yeah, that's the single most annoying thing - random spinning beach ball syndrome all over the place. Closing a tab takes several seconds, sometimes switching tabs does too, especially with javascript-heavy pages. Textareas can be annoyingly slow ( takes bloody ages till anything I type actually appears ) etc.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

Using Mouse Gestures to go Back or Forward is very, very slow. When I give up and hit the 'Back' button, it loads literally 10 times faster.

Works fine here.

Originally posted by Mikey69r:

I haven't had a crash in years, except for random occurrences. Now it's at least 3 days a week...

Or more.

I'll vouch for the poor experience in 10.53 on OSX.

Mouse gestures using the ctrl+click trackpad have had regressions, FAR more crashes (I get 1 a day or more), more beach balls, NSL problems, huge memory consumption, bugs related to spaces and expose, focus stealing. I've documented all these with bug reports already so no need to go in detail here.

I've never found the OSX experience to be on par with Windows, but the previous 10.10, while not fast, was quite stable at least. I do recognize 10.5 was quite an effort for OSX, so I'm REALLY expecting 10.54 to fix a lot of issues, and if not 10.55 is probably the last chance for me to stick with Opera on OSX. Its quite painful right now , but I'm hoping for better results soon!

We are aware that the 10.53 release had some stability problems and there was a bug with Mouse Gestures.

A lot of fixes went into <a href="http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/05/05/startup-crashes-be-gone">this snapshot</a>. If you haven't already, feel free to try it out and see if it solves your problems.

Hmm, the WebM build from Opera Labs seems to be doing quite a bit better on my iBook.

I also am a ten year user.

All I ask is that Opera turn it's focus back to basics; browsing and email.

Opera Link, Opera Unite, and Opera Turbo are all very nice, but I can, and do, live without them.
They are not why I chose Opera.
I chose Opera because I wanted a stable, secure browser, in which I can read my email.
(Which is why I reverted to 10.1; it's SLOW, but stable.)

Opera, please stop trying to "keep up with the Jones" and being a "pace" setter.
You will turn away more users than you are gain.

Yes, I know Opera's reputation is based in innovation; but what use are innovations if the basics don't work?

Ditto on the longtime user front. I've had to back out to 10.10, which was the last release that really seemed to work fully.

I use Opera as my primary email environment, primarily because it supports such comprehensive abilities to index and search email message bodies: that capability has been absolutely invaluable to my business. That is working pretty well in 10.10, so I'll stop there.

All these new features for browsing are probably amusing for somebody else, but they are making the software really bloat very badly- and the performance of 10.53 was really abysmal. Also, the fact that future releases are really focusing on Intel and post-Leopard machines (the 10.60 branch won't even have Java support on Tiger!) means that I'll probably finally get off the merry-go-round at 10.10: I will not be scrapping my large number of PowerPC machines any time soon. And yes, I still use Classic mode- so no Leopard, either.

It's a pity. I'm also checking out the indexing and search capabilities of Thunderbird, which looks interesting. And if support for PPC/Tiger goes away, then so will I. That day is coming, seems like...

Just to follow up: I've discovered that the latest Thunderbird allows me to do all that I need to do with email indexing and searching, and then a few things more as well (like supporting sieve filters better). It is significantly faster when dealing with the huge message stores I need to manipulate (~75k messages, many with large attachments). It also doesn't stall my browser with the basketball when it is thinking about email searches and the like, which is a win, allowing me to multitask more effectively: staring at the basketball for long periods is unacceptable. So, I'm transitioning to Thunderbird/Firefox now, since they are still supported on my platforms.

I found a utility that allowed me to retrieve my Wand passwords, some of which are old enough that I'd completely forgotten them, to enable the move to Firefox (even though it had to be run on a Windows machine, http://www.passcape.com/opera_password_recovery ). It may be that 10.54 or a later version will fix the problems I experienced. But I know that that is temporary at best: all the real work is going into 10.60, which probably won't work at all for us Tiger folks. So it is time to go where there is still support, for a little while longer, anyway.

Thanks for the ride, and best of luck to the developers on focusing back on the basics! I might give it a try again sometime if or when business realities allow me to buy into the Intel/OS X 10.6+ world...

Originally posted by topdawg:

Really? Everybody is cheering for Chrome, including myself despite my staying with Opera. What's wrong with it? Too naked?

Sorry, let me clarify. I meant iGoogle as my home page, not Chrome. I spent all of this time searching for THE Gmail gadget, THE weather gadget and THE RSS gadget that did what I wanted them too, I spent all of kinds of time customizing them, and finally had a home page exactly like I wanted. Then poof! Google made some "upgrades" and they all stopped working. All the developers had the same exact thing to say regarding their gafdgets not working, namely 'I have been trying to contact Google for 'x' months/weeks to find out how to fix this and they have yet to even respond. Same with when the users complain.

Chrome, on the other hand, seems to be working fine, it's only because I've been so loyal to Opera that I haven't switched(It's also very anemic in the customization category, compared to Opera), but if things don't change here, Chrome would be the browser I would switch to. Strangely enough, 2 of the 3 'broken' gadgets work just fine in Chrome...

Oh well, I'm going to try the revert to 10.1 option, wish me luck!

Originally posted by MoonlightGambler:

I also am a ten year user.

All I ask is that Opera turn it's focus back to basics; browsing and email.

Opera Link, Opera Unite, and Opera Turbo are all very nice, but I can, and do, live without them.
They are not why I chose Opera.
I chose Opera because I wanted a stable, secure browser, in which I can read my email.
(Which is why I reverted to 10.1; it's SLOW, but stable.)

Opera, please stop trying to "keep up with the Jones" and being a "pace" setter.
You will turn away more users than you are gain.

Yes, I know Opera's reputation is based in innovation; but what use are innovations if the basics don't work?

Same here, user since 2000 or 2001. I second what you wrote, in general. Specifically, I can't live without Opera Link because of the number of Opera installs: one native Mac OS and one in an XP virtual machine on my professional laptop, one on a personal laptop with Vista, two on another personal laptop dual booting XP SP3 and Ubuntu 10.04.

I understand the move forward to HTML5 and fast Javascript, but yes, I agree the basics should work. Still no drag & drop support in the HTML email composing window with 10.60, no distinction between copy and cut in drag&drop. I don't understand some of the choices.

And yes, I confess that I'm been getting frustrated after 9.27 on Windows. Much faster browsing but less rock-solid application and more to rant about.

Update....

10.60 made my experience a bit better, but its still lagging on OSX.

There was something magical about Opera 10.10 when I could have 40+ tabs open across 2 spaces and leave it open for weeks at a time without hiccups. Now Opera crashes everyday at least once. The 10.60 build doesn't seem to crash slowly like 10.5x. In 10.5x memory usage would get out of control during the course of a day and then slowly die. In 10.60 memory usage looks kosher, but suddenly out of nowhere Opera will just choke and quit, with no rhyme or reason.

And yes, I've done 10.6 as a fresh install (deleted all UserPref directory and deleted Opera app for 10.5x and then installed 10.6)

Does the Opera OSX team test with spaces at all? There seems to be multiple weird bugs when dealing with spaces left over from 10.5x that are regressions from 10.10x:
* I can't drag and drop tabs from windows in one space to a window in another space
* Opera seems to not register mouse gestures when I arrive from another space. For example - check my music player in space 3, then come back to space 2 which has an opera window open. Move mouse over opera window and mouse gesture for new tab. Nothing happens - Opera doesn't claim focus to create a new tab. Or sometimes I'll arrive at an Opera window after coming in another space and start typing in a box/search field in Opera, but some other window in the same space (e.g. IM window) actually has focus even though Opera is supposed to. This usually ends up with me accidently typing my google search into an IM window and hitting enter accidently! Luckily I've haven't had an embarassing disaster yet, but thats scary!
* Often times I arrive at an Opera window in space 3 after coming from space 2 and see that unregistered mouse gestures for the opera window in space 2 actually ended up registering mouse gestures in space 3 - meaning ill see like 10 tabs opened up all pointing to the speed dial in the opera window in space 3. Annoying!

In general Opera 10.6 still has some application focus issues especially across spaces. It would be great to get some 10.6x build quickly pushed out that focus solely on bug fixing and nothing else. I don't want to wait for a month to see this stuff corrected.