Opera 18.0 - Avoid!

[ffutures]

I'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

Comments

[gonzo21]

That's not good. I'm finding the recent versions of Firefox to be pretty awful too.

[ffutures]

It's nowhere near as bad as the new Opera.

[robertprior]

Sounds even worse than iOS7 and the new iWork, which I've been avoiding.

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.

[ffutures]

Wonderful.

[philmophlegm]

When it comes to software and hardware, I'm rarely a fanboy. The one exception for many years was web browsers. I was close to being an Opera fanboy. I even own an Opera t-shirt. Old Opera was just so much slicker and quicker than anything else out there, that I could forgive it not working with the occasional badly-designed site. Easy enough at that point to quickly switch to IE etc.

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

[ffutures]

Same here - I actually registered for the ad-free version of Opera back when it was shareware, and until about six months ago I never regretted it. But it's become increasinbly unstable and incompatible with many sites, and the new version is horrible.

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.

[philmophlegm]

I reached the same conclusion and switched to Firefox as my main leisure browser. (I still prefer Chrome for work, but that's largely because my work is Google stuff like AdWords and Analytics.) Mind you, I spent hours configuring Firefox to look less like Firefox and more like old Opera.

For info, I use the following Extensions to make Firefox behave more like old Opera:
Speed Dial
Tab Mix Plus
and the FXOpera theme.

[ffutures]

I'm using Speed Dial, Space Next (lets you move to the next page of a multi-page document by pressing the space bar), and ViewSourceWith to let me open source pages with my favourite HTML editor. I'll have a look at FXOpera, have't come across it yet.