Vivaldi.net: “Farewell to My Opera”

I have no idea how many - or few - users are now actively blogging and sharing photos on My Opera, neither do I know how many users ever in the site’s history wrote at least one blog post, accepted one friend connection or created one album. It’s quite obvious that the site did not have the growth potential to challenge Facebook’s or Google’s head start - but I can’t possibly see how disrespectfully squandering all that trust and goodwill those thousands or tens of thousands of users held, will be good for Opera Software ASA in the longer term. Hallvord R. M. Steen

Another nail in Opera’s coffin. I suppose I should feel a bit nostalgic, after all I wrote my first ever blog post on My Opera, but… While I sympathize with the users who will see their content disappear or will have to struggle to move it elsewhere, My Opera was an inferior solution for blogging, filled with spam accounts and I won’t feel any regrets to see it shut down.

Opera Desktop Team: “The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond”

So, starting from this fresh base, we decided to carefully consider how to build up Opera again: over the years, Presto-based Opera had become overloaded with features, a number of them confusing rather than helping our users — you can’t imagine how many reports we’ve gotten from users telling us that their favorite site was broken, simply because they had turned on fit-to-width by accident, for instance.

So, the approach when building the new product has been and still is to cater for various browsing use cases, but at all times, to keep the UI really simple, so that anyone can use it. Sebastian Baberowski

I gave Opera Next a try a couple of weeks ago, but I honestly can’t see any reason to use it at this stage. It’s just a stripped down version of Chrome that doesn’t sync with Google.

While old Opera had such a huge feature list that probably no one could name them all, the new Chromium-based Opera has an equally long list of features it doesn’t have and will likely never add back, instead referring users to extensions. I was all for removing unnecessary junk from the browser, but now Opera has jumped from one extreme to the other. It’s basically starting from scratch, putting itself many years behind to the other browsers. This would have been a fine decision a decade ago when Firefox was just starting or maybe even five years ago when Chrome launched… Now, not so much! The new Opera doesn’t offer any reason for regular users to switch to it, neither on desktop nor on mobile (Android to be exact), while at the same time alienating their small and loyal user base by stripping every feature they have been relying on.

To call this a vision is preposterous – at this point I don’t expect Opera as browser to survive the next year.

Dev.Opera: “Opera Mobile Emulator build with experimental WebKit prefix support”

Opera, along with Mozilla, announced at a CSS Working Group meeting (minutes) that we would support some -webkit- prefixes. This is because through our site compatibility work, we have experienced that many authors of (especially mobile) sites only use -webkit- prefixed CSS, thereby ignoring other vendor prefixes and not even including an unprefixed equivalent. This leads to a reduced user experience on Opera and Firefox, which don't receive the same shiny effects such as transitions, gradients and the like, even if the browser supported those effects. Bruce Lawson

Another pragmatic, sensible move from Opera.

I saw a lot of commentary on the web and especially on Twitter how this decision will break the web and encourage lazy web developers to ignore non-WebKit browsers even further. Personally, I don’t see this happening. For one, Opera is only supporting a small subset of WebKit-specific extensions, specifically those with wide-spread adoption and already supported by Opera, albeit under the –o- prefix. As far as I understand, the way this works is, when Opera encounters a compatible –webkit- property it behaves as if the code used the corresponding Opera-specific property.This shouldn’t prevent designers to test sites in Opera, because a) while some –webkit- prefixed CSS properties will be recognized, the rendering will be done according to Opera’s implementation, which may or may not be identical to WebKit’s and b) once you step out of the narrow selection of cross-compatible extensions the rendering will differ just like before. This is just a defensive move to ensure a better experience for Opera users, closer to the original intent of the designer. Ultimately, the end-user doesn’t know or care about the reason why the site looks nicer in a WebKit-browser than in Opera; if he encounters reduced functionality he will probably switch and never come back. This way Opera – and presumably Firefox and Internet Explorer at some point – will have a better competitive chance.

This article explains the causes and the current problem much better, impartially, I recommend you read it as well.

Regardless of this decision, Opera is doing fine in mobile.

Opera Add-ons: “Increased focus on Opera extensions […]”

Today we are announcing the beginning of the end for two of our current Add-on platforms. Starting with the upcoming Opera 12 release, Opera Unite and Opera Widgets will be turned off by default for new users. The two Add-on platforms will be completely removed in a later release expected before the end of this year. Arnstein Teigene

Probably the best decision Opera made in a while. I never used widgets nor Unite, they seemed like second class features that never belonged in the browser in the first place. It’s preferable to focus on making the browser faster, more secure, than to maintain legacy code that has no foreseeable future in the current browser landscape.

It always baffled me that Opera couldn’t get a significant market share on the desktop – it does OK in mobile though. It’s in every aspect as good as Firefox, maybe even better if you count out the extension ecosystem that Mozilla built. Maybe it’s a case of ‘simple over too complex’ or the lack of press coverage, with Opera not being produced by an American company. I remember my first encounter with Opera pretty well – it was in fact my first experience with a browser other than Internet Explorer. It was back in my college years, circa 2003, when I did my browsing only on the public PC’s available for free to students. I just stumbled on it by chance (it was installed on a single computer) and I was amazed at the speed with which it loaded pages compared to IE6. Unfortunately, by the time I got my own PC and Internet connection, Firefox had stolen the crown of ‘alternative browser’, so I only returned to Opera from time to time as a secondary option when my main browser was acting up.

Set Gmail as default email client in Opera

I described in an older article how to make a webmail service, in this case Gmail, your default email client in several browsers. With the release of Opera 11.60 at the end of December, setting this up got slightly more user-friendly. Opera now supports custom protocol and content handlers, meaning that adding Gmail as the default protocol handler can be done directly in the browser, following these steps:

1. Login to your Gmail account in Opera;
2. Type the following command in the address bar and press Enter:

   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

3. Confirm at the prompt and you’re done!

Browser speed tests – collaborative edition

Last month was particularly busy for browser makers, as all the top three players in terms of market share released updated versions. While offering a double-digit version number was not such a big event for Chrome with it’s fast release cycle, the changes in both Firefox and Internet Explorer have been huge, covering everything from performance and standard support to the interface. It’s a good time to do another round of speed tests to compare what they’re currently offering. After my last two tests, this time I am going for something different: since I spotted on Twitter a Google Docs spreadsheet where several people contributed their own system configurations and test results, I am using it for my quick analysis.

D'autre gens pour compléter mon doc de benchmark de navigateurs http://j.mp/fMj96S ?

— Edouard Seynaeve (@seynaeve) March 22, 2011

Load new tabs in the background in Chrome and Opera

Despite lagging behind other browsers in terms of speed, Firefox is still the number one when it comes to customizability. One feature I look for in every browser I use is the ability to set the default behavior for newly created tabs, more specifically to make them load in the background. It keeps your focus on the current page and also saves time, because you can continue reading/watching the current tab while the new one is loading in the background. Of course, middle-clicking with the mouse – or Ctrl-clicking - links has a similar effect and is supported by most popular browsers, but it’s usually more comfortable to use the left mouse button. And there are situations where the middle-click is useless, because the tabs are triggered by context menus – like “Search for highlighted word”-, keyboard shortcuts or by external applications. Firefox has extensions that covered all these situations since the browser was launched, and later, in version 2 or 3 (I’m pretty sure it was 2), the option made it’s way into the main software.

Browser tests: a look at standards

If speed plays an important role in the every-day browsing experience, the same can be said about compliance with web standards. With all browsers and web designers using a common language, users would have a more consistent, browser-independent experience and designers would spend less time working around browser-specific bugs and incompatibilities. A very desirable goal, but “are we there yet”?

The simplest answer is ‘No’. But as with speed, some browsers are closer to the objective than others. Lately, a number of new online tests were launched to check different aspects of rendering. In a way, these are more straightforward than speed tests, because the results are not influenced by the particular hardware where the applications are installed. I ran the same set of browsers from my previous speed test through them, so let’s see what we can find out:

Unofficial browser speed tests (Round Two)

About three months ago I made a series of tests on my computer to check how fast the browsers of the day really were. Of course, three months in the online world is a very long time: Google Chrome has recently moved up to version 6, at least in the dev channel; this is usually an indication that the stable channel will soon follow; Opera managed to finish version 10.50 just in time to be added to the browser choice screen, even though that didn’t really change the hierarchy on the browser market; and Internet Explorer tries to get back in the game with his next version, currently available as a ‘Platform Preview’. Besides, I have also changed my PC in the mean time, so the results from last time are clearly out of date.

So I decided to repeat the tests with more-or-less the same conditions as before: the online test suites SunSpider and V8. For V8 I ran the test three times in each browser and averaged the result; they tend to vary quite a lot from a run to the next. SunSpider already delivers an average of 5 test runs. The browsers are also a little different: I used the most recent stable versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, as well as the alpha version of Firefox and Internet Explorer’s Platform Preview #2.

The (non)effects of the browser choice screen

Two months have passed since Microsoft released the browser choice screen for European users of Windows and so far it hasn’t made a real difference in the market share. The trends established in the previous months continue largely unchanged, with Firefox, Opera and Safari stagnating, Google Chrome steadily on the rise and Internet Explorer slipping to under 60% for the first time in a very long time. I didn’t expect much of an effect from the choice screen to begin with. Since Internet Explorer is associated with Windows, the operating system on their computer, less technical people will probably choose it when faced with that screen. After all, the two products are from the same company, so they must work best together, right?

Like in other cases, browser makers have rushed to report record download numbers originating form the choice screen. This time it was Opera who announced they doubled the download numbers in Europe after the Choice Screen rolled out. I have always been skeptical of such statistics, because they don’t translate very well into actual usage for the browser. To illustrate this with an example from the blogging world, a download is the equivalent of a new visit on a site, while regular usage is like having a loyal reader base, with returning users and subscribers. And we all know first-time visitors don’t convert to subscribers that easily.

Unofficial browser speed tests

And by “unofficial” I mean tests made on my home computer. Now that Opera launched the first beta version of 10.50, I was curious to see if the advertised speed gains were real. My first impressions after installing the new beta were that it was indeed faster, but nowhere near Google Chrome.

For my tests I used two online benchmarking tools, SunSpider and V8, which were also featured in the official Opera tests. I tested the current browsers installed on my computer (well, except Internet Explorer): Chrome 4.0, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.50 and an older, portable version of Safari 4.0. I opened each of them separately for the purpose of the test and closed the program after getting the results. There were no other major software running in the background, except for the antivirus.

Set Gmail as your default email client

A couple of days ago, logging into Gmail, I noticed a new tip in the upper right corner: , linking to the “Become a Gmail Ninja”-page. In the mean time it was replaced with the news of the default https access for Gmail. While the “ninja” page isn’t new, I want to elaborate a tip in the ‘master’ section:

9. Set Gmail as your default email client.
Instead of automatically opening other email clients when you click mailto links, you can set Gmail to be the default in your browser. If you use Firefox 3, just go to Tools, click Options, select the Applications tab, search for "mailto" and select "Use Gmail" from the list of actions. If you use Internet Explorer, you'll need to download and install Google Toolbar. In Toolbar, just click the wrench icon, go to the Search tab and select the "Use Gmail for 'Mail To' links" checkbox.