Opera 18.0 - Avoid!
Nov. 27th, 2013 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesI've been having some trouble with the Opera 12 browser (crashes etc.) and went to check if there was a later version. It turns out that they've jumped from 12.16 (I think) to 18.0 without any immediate versions. Unfortunately the change is not an improvement.
First, there's no bookmarks menu. Yes, you read that right - you can save a few sites in a phone dialler thingy, but that's about it. To make matters worse, the download site lies about this and says you can use your bookmarks - then doesn't let you access them once you've "upgraded".
Second, you can't set up other programs to open files. You want to open ebooks with Calibre? Tough luck, all you can do is save the files. You want to open torrent files? Opera will do that for you - but it won't let you use uTorrent or another half-way decent torrent client, and Opera's built-in torrent client is not good. If you want to use an email client that isn't Opera's add-on program you're out of luck. It doesn't even seem to want to let me open PDFs directly, but that may be because my PC is set up to use Actobat to open PDFs, not Adobe Reader. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Third, there's no "open file" menu. You can save web pages but you can't re-open them, you have to navigate to them in Windows explorer, click on them, etc.
There are other problems, which seem to amount to a massive amount of dumbing down to make the program easy to use with tablet pc's and mobile phones. It's pretty, and appears to be fairly stable, but the problems are bad enough that I'm changing to Firefox as my default browser
Bottom line, I'd strongly recommend steering clear of this monstrosity unless you find sites that won't open with anything else.
later - forgot to say that there apparently were intermediate versions which weren't rolled out automatically to users. I think it's safe to assume that they knew the reaction in their existing user base would not be good!
First, there's no bookmarks menu. Yes, you read that right - you can save a few sites in a phone dialler thingy, but that's about it. To make matters worse, the download site lies about this and says you can use your bookmarks - then doesn't let you access them once you've "upgraded".
Second, you can't set up other programs to open files. You want to open ebooks with Calibre? Tough luck, all you can do is save the files. You want to open torrent files? Opera will do that for you - but it won't let you use uTorrent or another half-way decent torrent client, and Opera's built-in torrent client is not good. If you want to use an email client that isn't Opera's add-on program you're out of luck. It doesn't even seem to want to let me open PDFs directly, but that may be because my PC is set up to use Actobat to open PDFs, not Adobe Reader. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Third, there's no "open file" menu. You can save web pages but you can't re-open them, you have to navigate to them in Windows explorer, click on them, etc.
There are other problems, which seem to amount to a massive amount of dumbing down to make the program easy to use with tablet pc's and mobile phones. It's pretty, and appears to be fairly stable, but the problems are bad enough that I'm changing to Firefox as my default browser
Bottom line, I'd strongly recommend steering clear of this monstrosity unless you find sites that won't open with anything else.
later - forgot to say that there apparently were intermediate versions which weren't rolled out automatically to users. I think it's safe to assume that they knew the reaction in their existing user base would not be good!
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 01:07 am (UTC)Dumbing down seems to be the new fashion. Because all the cool kids don't understand why us old fogies don't want to turn our desktop computers into imitation smartphones.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 01:47 pm (UTC)However, I fell out of love quite abruptly with the transition to 15 this summer. See my post here: http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/276697.html
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 03:08 pm (UTC)I missed 15 onwards completely. The fact that they've gone through three revisions and still not fixed something that a large majority of users say they want (on their forum etc.) means I can no longer be bothered - Firefox works well for my purposes, it just became my default browser.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 03:25 pm (UTC)For info, I use the following Extensions to make Firefox behave more like old Opera:
Speed Dial
Tab Mix Plus
and the FXOpera theme.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 11:14 pm (UTC)