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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

> Vivaldi kind of tries to re-create the spirit of Opera, but I think it's going to be too hard to do it.

Oh, it's definitely recreating the experience of Opera. You encounter an annoying bug, you report it to their private bug tracker, and then they'll fix it in two years. Maybe. If you're lucky. And you don't get to know its status in the meantime. And the macOS version still feels like an afterthought sometimes.

Still better than Chrome and by far better than Safari.

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> they'll fix it in two years

Seems pretty quick, at least compared to Chromium / Firefox ;)

> you don't get to know its status in the meantime

Toward the end of Opera's life (pre v15) either an employee or a member of the community (can't remember which) did actually set up a public bug tracker tracking the status of publicly-reported bugs. It didn't show comments or anything like that: just the original bug description, report date & status. So that was... something at least.

They did also give private bug tracker access to a subset of community members, by invite.

Yeah you can still ask people who have access to look up the status of a bug for you[1]. It just feels so needlessly convoluted. Since they're already using Jira, it shouldn't be too hard to set it up with proper access controls so you could see your own tickets, at least. They must have some reason to not do this.

[1] https://habr.com/ru/company/vivaldi/blog/561834/#comment_231... (in Russian)

Amount of years old bugs with zero activity while they keep working on new features.

Opera/Vivaldi CEO is really adamant about hiding both staff and user counts. Vivaldi even removed itself from User Agent string.

If memory serves, they removed the user agent because one of the Google properties was serving it substandard HTML/JS even though they use the Chromium engine.

Yes that is likely the case.

All browsers wants to use a unique user agent.

It is the only way to prove market share => $$$.

But it is ridiculously difficult to modify it without breaking sites.

Take a look at your own user agent.

It is likely it identifies itself as gecko/mozilla/chrome/safari/IE/KHTML all in one.

Think about it for a second. They removed the very most important metric for a product selling content leads and placement (search bar default bookmarks, placement on the start page) because _one_ website had a bug?

They removed it because they claimed Google was sending substandard markup on purpose.

I dunno, I've submitted four bugs. One solved within a day, one after 20 days, and two still unresolved as far as I know. It could of course be better, I don't think it's quite like you describe.

Those two remaining bugs still have the opportunity to be resolved after only 2 years. Or 4.

I guess I had it good, I was using the Windows and Linux Opera versions. The Windows version was always solid.

I used it exclusively for about a year (iirc) on Linux and had only some minor crashes. When they switched to Chromium I switched to Firefox and never had a single crash since. (It's not only luck, I disable all the feature-creep I know of in about:config)

do you possibly have a list of those to share please?

That list would be very long :D

If you have some time you can look through:

- all the .enabled entrys in

- all the .disabled entrys

- https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

I vividly remember how it took them several months to make Opera display Flash content correctly (at 2x scale instead of a blurry upscaled-after-rasterization mess) on retina displays when I just bought my macbook. Other browsers had it done in a matter of weeks, days if you installed a beta build. And that was 2012, back when flash was an essential part of the web.

Well the first release of Opera with chromium was 2013 so it was clearly being abandoned at that stage

Flash was not an essential part of the web in 2012. Maybe, if you had some weird work tool you had to use, some video players on the web but that was mostly it. In 2012 flash for Android was killed and it was very well known that it was going out of the window in the near future.

Many video players were still using flash. VKontakte still had its flash app/game platform going strong, though you did have the option of using an iframe that loaded a web app from your server instead. Flash support was only discontinued there around several years ago.

I personally remember being rather annoyed when our uni project in 2012 had to be built with Flash and AS3 as it was well known that flash would get the axe in a few years.

We had the option to use JS as well but it wasn't in the curriculum and 4 out my 5 person team didn't want to do any of the extra work.

Even if Flash was used, it was mostly video players and some online games (like Newgrounds). I think YouTube came out with their HTML5 player in 2012 so Flash was definitely moving into a more niche status and I don't consider it essential after Flash based sites went out of fashion (which was closer to 2008-2009. HTML5, ECMA5 and CSS3 (or just HTML, JS and CSS as it's known today) largely made flash redundant before 2012.

There;s a difference between still being around and being an "essential part" of the web.

Flash was almost certainly not an essential part of the web. 2012 was 5 years after the iPhone and by then Android and iPhone constituted the majority of web browsing, and neither supported flash at all.

You couldn't very well say something was an essential part of the web if it wasnt supported on those devices in 2012.

That's because Opera (and now Vivalvi) cares more about building as many features as possible than stability or even consistency of the experience.

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