Opera getting bulky ?

Opera getting bulky ?

I was looking back as previous versions of Opera and noticed how much leaner they were. 8.2 for instance came without Bit-torrent and was around 3MB while todays 10.x is 6 so doubled in size. I was just wondering if Opera done a version of the browser without the email client Bit-torrent, unite and god knows what else they've shoved in it over the years

Are you that short on free space?

You have to remember that back when 8.x was released (2005), the internet itself was also simpler.

CSS3, XML, SVG, Web Fonts, Web Forms, MathML, have all either been added, or have gone through changes/additions.

There's also a lot of stuff that you probably do use, that takes up quite a bit of space:
Search Engine Editor
Content Blocker
Speed Dial
Spell Check
Source Viewer
Fraud Protection
Site Preferences
Crash Logging
Dragonfly
opera:config

If you don't like it, then keep using Opera 8.x. If you strip out all the so-called "bloat", that's what you would be left with... plus Opera has always been more of an "Internet Suite" than just a web browser.

Besides, having different versions is problematic to maintain and would slow the development down, separating the different code bases, more testing... and inevitably people using this "mini" version, would start requesting features from the "bloated" version...

Opera has way more features by default than any other browser, but it's less than half the size of Safari, about 20% smaller than Chrome, and about equal with Firefox.

No I know browsers need more however Opera is adding things we don't necessary need like Unite, Email and Bit-Torrent. It would be nice if we could have a version of the browser without all these

Originally posted by Defiant1337:

Opera getting bulky ?

Nope.

I was looking back as previous versions of Opera and noticed how much leaner they were. 8.2 for instance came without Bit-torrent and was around 3MB while todays 10.x is 6 so doubled in size.

Actually, 8.02 was nearly 4 MB. The reason why Opera 10.x is bigger is because of all the new web standards they have to support, and of course all the workaround for bugs in other browsers.

I was just wondering if Opera done a version of the browser without the email client Bit-torrent, unite and god knows what else they've shoved in it over the years

No, and it would be pointless. It wouldn't reduce the download size much at all.

Originally posted by Defiant1337:

No I know browsers need more however Opera is adding things we don't necessary need like Unite, Email and Bit-Torrent.

Opera has always done this, but it's so integrated these things hardly take up any space at all. If you don't need it, ignore it.

It would be nice if we could have a version of the browser without all these

No, it would be completely pointless because it would be almost as big, and there would be no performance gains.

It wouldn't be pointless because they seem to add more with each new version

Originally posted by Defiant1337:

would be nice if we could have a version of the browser without all these

Why would you want to have a browser without those options? If you don't use them, they will not be in your way or slow opera down and removing them wouldn't make opera much smaller. (Some menus like feeds, mail, etc... are hidden until you start using them)

Originally posted by haavard:

As I said, features that are not used will not impact performance or memory use. Removing the e-mail client would not make Opera use less memory on your system if you don't use it in the first place (if Opera uses about 40 MB right now, it would use about 40 MB under the same circumstances if the e-mail client was removed).

(src: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=2249792 )

AFAIR the mail.dll of M2 was just about 300k when they added it and the torrent client is not worse, so no big loss of space.
It is the support for more and improved web standards, as the previous posters stated.

BTW: Opera is a still lightweight compared to the competitors ...

Originally posted by Defiant1337:

It wouldn't be pointless because they seem to add more with each new version

Like Sirnh1 mentioned/quoted... there's very little difference in resource usage, about the only difference is about 2MB's of extra memory because of the size of Opera.dll (or *.so, etc) which is insignificant considering most web pages are about that size.

Naturally they add stuff with each new version... so does everything else... cars, electronics, new houses... it's getting fairly hard to find a toaster or coffee maker that doesn't have a clock, or some auto-sensing whatever-ma-whuts... etc.

Sorry, but time cannot stop, and nor will technology.

Originally posted by Defiant1337:

It wouldn't be pointless because they seem to add more with each new version

Yes, they add support for more web standards. Do you want Opera to stop supporting new web standards?

Because THAT'S what takes up space, not those other features. That's because Opera was written to be tiny and tightly integrated, so all those other features just reuse the stuff that's there already.