This is good news Congratulations for getting John Hicks on board!

Opera has come with a lot of new functionality lately, but I think you just need to focus more on squashing bugs before moving forward.

Great! Now that's something to cheer about!

abiwan: Bugs are being fixed all the time. For more bugs to be fixed, more people need to be hired, and that is exactly what we are trying to do.

The amount of added functionality is in fact tiny compared to the number of bugs that are being fixed all the time.

It will be interesting to see changes on how Opera will look in the future...

That's great news!
Thanks for putting all your efforts into it. We appreciate.

Fresh employees = fresh ideas!

Originally posted by haavard:

abiwan: Bugs are being fixed all the time. For more bugs to be fixed, more people need to be hired, and that is exactly what we are trying to do.

Opera keeps on growing... always a good thing....

With regards to bugs some people tend to point to the development of the Fox assuming the grass is much greener over there. When FF 3 went final 75% of the known bugs were not fixed....

Keep the good work up in Oslo and al of your other offices...

Finally Opera will get a nice (Vista sized) Icon!

Explane me please how scroll marker works. I don't get it. Under what conditions works it? thanks

Good to hear of companies thriving in these times.

Jon Hicks has done a good job on Camino ! I hope the Mac version will benefit from his job. I notice on his blog that he talks about a new icon too

I agree with nataniel. Can't wait to see his work and maybe then I'm using Opera again.

Welcome!

Originally posted by Jon Hicks:

Neither browser has an updated icon (a new FF icon is awaiting approval!), but Opera in particular really needs to. The shadow is the first thing that strikes you as being wrong, not just the lack of transparency, but the fact that it has highlights in it! I really fancy having a go at updating the Opera icon.

So the Polish people will polish Opera, right?

Sorry for the play of words



I'm really looking forward to Opera 10, do you guys have something like a Release Day (or year) for us?

Opera Team you want to open a office in Cuba???. We have a great programmers that like to work in it. What do you think???

This is very good news indeed! I occasionally use Opera (mainly for it's full screen view) but it's just too ugly and complex to be my main browser. Hopefully more than just design will improve

Originally posted by HellbillyDeluxe:

So the Polish people will polish Opera, right?

Welcome aboard to all the new Opera team members. Look forward to seeing your interesting contributions (from diverse backgrounds) soon.

As to all you whining about the icon and skinning, can we have a tiny bit of perspective, please? Yes, maybe I'd like to see graphic improvements. But does it occur to you that there's something called finite resource allocation? Everything can't get done, that will please everyone, by 5pm today. (Or try a new Opera Skin here.)

On the other hand, does your productivity or enjoyment at getting something done online, go down when forced to use another browser other than Opera? I'd say, "HECK YES." (Not my first selection of words.)

I've noticed a bunch of fixes and improvements with Build 5246. Great job.

I think it is great news that Jon Hicks is going to be working on Opera. I really loathe the current Vista-like look of Opera and I have to use another skin because of it. Hopefully Jon Hicks can do something about that. I can't wait to see his work.

That is a great news! I am sure Opera 10 will have a much better skin..

Originally posted by Salsero_Nash:

Opera Team you want to open a office in Cuba???.

We have at least one Cuban guy already, right here in Oslo

Can the team have a blog about how a beta development works?

Originally posted by haavard:

Originally posted by Salsero_Nash:Opera Team you want to open a office in Cuba???.
We have at least one Cuban guy already, right here in Oslo

I'll take a mojito with the next weekly build, please!

Offtopic: Noticed that Opera's fast-forward feature works great in the Discover Opera site without the "next" links explicitly showing "next page", etc...

Is this a tweak in Fast-Forward in v9.6 or are there some coding hints that you can provide to allow sites to more easily support that useful online reading feature (especially when I need to read tons of multi-page articles and not hunt to click on a tiny "next page" link)...?

Pozdrowienia dla zespołu Opery z Wrocławia!
Greetings for Opera Team from Wrocław!

Kraków is much, much more friendly than Wrocław! Anyway, nice to see Polish people mentioned. Good luck guys!

Please don't get me wrong, I love Opera and it is still my favourite browser, but since version 9.5 came out it's very frustrating for a web developer to test pages in Opera.

I filed a bug report (number 345575) and also opened a forum discussion about this: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=240591

This bug is still present in Opera 9.6

The problem is that Opera always reloads images from cache, and if you work on a local page and update images (a background image for example), you hit refresh and the new image does not appear because opera loads it from cache. You have to clear private data or restart the browser in order to see the changes.

So how do you expect web developers to test pages in Opera with such bugs?

Sorry for my long rant, just hope one of the Opera developers sees this

I can't wait to see Jon's influence. This is exciting news.

This should be interesting. I know the community has been vocal about Opera's appearance in the past. Glad to see something is being done about it.

Originally posted by EricJH:

With regards to bugs some people tend to point to the development of the Fox assuming the grass is much greener over there. When FF 3 went final 75% of the known bugs were not fixed.

The 75% number is somewhat irrelevant with nothing to compare it to. If Opera left 25% of their bugs open when 9.6 went final, then we could all applaud and celebrate how much cooler Opera devs are. 75% alone with no comparison has little value. With Opera's much smaller staff, I would not be surprised if Opera's not fixed percentage greatly exceeded ff's.

This is great news for Opera users ..it is time the Opera is given a makeover..

Congrats to Opera team, I look forward to seeing what you do with the browser!

Opera software is approaching 600 employees (if we haven't reached that already). Mozilla has 100 or so people employed? I think Opera Software definitely has the biggest browser team on the planet.

haavard,

Don't forget that it's an open source, add ons, etc which ads like 10k+? to mozilla team (for free).

Welcome aboard.

The discussion here is about bug numbers, so extensions aren't really relevant. And I think very few people outside of Mozilla actually get to submit actual code patches.

@kamalesh: look into the file fastforward.ini to see what Opera uses to find a 'next' thing to show you. The best (semantically and practically) way to trigger this is including <link rel=next href=nextpageurl> elements in your pages. This is now also used on the Discover Opera pages.
BTW, using this link element also will make Firefox use its prefetching trick (see http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Link_prefetching_FAQ ).

Originally posted by haavard:

Opera software is approaching 600 employees (if we haven't reached that already). ... I think Opera Software definitely has the biggest browser team on the planet.

I was referring to the desktop team. The main one that affects my life and the testers here. The 75% number is about the ff desktop product and what is still open. Is the desktop team even a 12th of that number (qa and devs)? I personally think the development at Opera is slow. Relevance: I generally attribute this to the small size of the team working on the product. Slow to me is represented by the incomplete changelogs and no notion of the 100s of bugs fixed with every new snapshot. Hearing about it is one thing. Seeing it is another. Also no idea of what is being developed on peregrine and other branches in the background. If you measure Opera's performance by the menial changelogs and the time things take. I'm not saying my view is correct but that is the perception I have; right or wrong.

Also civilians can submit patches last i checked. They are only added after being reviewed by staff though. What's the point of being open source if no one outside the company can contribute?

Remember that the core team is indirectly (often directly) working on the desktop browser as well. The core is a major part of a browser, after all.

As for bugs being fixed, the latest snapshot isn't necessarily the latest version of Opera that's being worked on by all developers. And the changelogs don't necessarily mention all bugfixes.

So I would indeed maintain that we have the biggest browser team there is.

Originally posted by abiwan:

So how do you expect web developers to test pages in Opera with such bugs?

Just open this background image/css/whatever in next tab and reload just it

Sterkrig, I was doing that too, but it's an extra unnecessary step, the versions before 9.5 didn't have this problem. I'm still waiting for this to be fixed.

abiwan, I doubt it'd be considered as a bug. Did you play with History settings for documents and images?

P.S. That's not a place for such a discussion, I think

Originally posted by haavard:

Remember that the core team is indirectly (often directly) working on the desktop browser as well.

So the core + desktop team is bigger than mozilla? That would be worse in my eyes... then i'd have no way to excuse Opera for being slow.

Originally posted by haavard:

As for bugs being fixed, the latest snapshot isn't necessarily the latest version of Opera that's being worked on by all developers. And the changelogs don't necessarily mention all bugfixes.

Known and known but there are no other sources to go on. We only see what you show us. To the outsiders (non-elektrans and non-staff), the water is very still although there could be much going on underneath the surface. We don't know what is fixed, what is being worked on, what is not being considered, what features you would like to add but have unsurmountable dependencies, what features you tried to add but failed somehow, what you are currently talking about including in the future, etc. There is much uncertainty about the dev process. We only have speculation and perception to go on. Thus is the nature of the closed processes at Opera. Example: For over 2 years, some people (me included) thought Opera could care less about inline spellchecking and the people who cared about inline spellchecking.

The bottom line here is that development at Opera is far from slow. You'll get to see the goodies in time. Until then, enjoy 9.6

I definitely believe Opera has things cooking (Join us in Linnkoeping; Peregrine,..). Yet it would be nice to see roadmaps every this many months just to have a bit of a clue what is being cooked. I am aware that projections in roadmap may change when new insights or comptetition emerges. That is the very nature of development

I love Opera and test your snapshots for fun. But why so silent for a long time? The last "roadmap" about Peregrine is from February 2007 (Codenames explained). Please take some pride in presenting your plans to the world a bit more often.

Just want to add my 2 cents to Opera vs Firefox bugs discussion:
Opera with recent major releases (9, 9.5, 9.6) has far more regressions that Firefox does -- that's from my own experience as web-designer/developer. I don't see many regressions in Safari either.

Originally posted by haavard:

The bottom line here is that development at Opera is far from slow.

I think you have forgotten what it is like to be on the outside looking in. Sure you get a few hundred emails a day about product changes, bug fixes, bug comments, and bug status changes. We don't. We see roughly 10 things change approximately once a week. Thats about 500 changes in a year or less (there is not a build every week). From personally experience, 500 emails/changes is about a weeks worth to me. I am not trying to say either of us is right or wrong but I don't think you have a grasp of the gravity of the situation outside of Opera.

Originally posted by FataL:

Opera with recent major releases (9, 9.5, 9.6) has far more regressions that Firefox does

I have noticed that as well. The code base seems a lot more volatile at Opera. I'm not sure the reasons for that and I doubt we will find out here/now.

"So the Polish people will polish Opera, right?"

LOL

Pozdrowienia z Polski!
Greetings from Poland!

If you are actively testing Opera, you will obviously be very focused on bugs in Opera as opposed to other browsers. I don't think Opera has more regressions than Firefox or other browsers if you consider the big picture.

If you really want to continue this discussion, though, I suggest using private messages instead.

This thread has derailed terribly, but i just wanted to pipe in and say that i'm thrilled that John Hicks is joining the team. As a Mac and Opera user, i'm looking forward to the polish that John will bring to the browser.

haha, now I'm sure they got Jon for the release of Opera 10, I mean you guys just started working on it right ?? and you want some kick-ass logo and skins !

I hope you like it here Remik,Patryk and Jon.

Ahmed Ghanem ( Opera Campus Crew Member ).