Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.
Looking at the course Blink based Opera has taken thus far, it doesn't look like they're focusing on keeping current users happy (any new user base is going to be an uphill climb). It's still new, but as a consistent Opera user for almost a decade, I'm very skeptical of them keeping all the previous customization as well as avoiding "Chromisms" in the UI.
And the IRC client and BitTorrent client?
IMHO they did the correct choice, every new version Opera will difference itself more and more of Chromium. You can continue to use Opera 12.16 until they take the decision to pull the trigger to completely kill 12.16 auto-updating it...
Remember the transition from Firefox 3.6 to the current Firefox, they didn't kill 3.6 until they reached version 12.
Opera sets their own schedule beholden to nobody.
How do you increase you're competitive abilities by removing everything that made you unique when you're already the underdog? :S
But wtf they removed this too?? What is wrong with those people?
On the other side Chrome based Opera is also starting to look pretty good in it's own rights: it's fast and snappy, mouse gestures are there if I'm not mistaken, page stack (or whatever the name is) is cool. If I would to choose between Chrome and Opera 16 now I would go with the latter (also because Chrome really pushes too much Google on the user).
It's one of those features other browsers simply do not have (Opera has a couple more but this one's pretty unique) that I really do use several times a day, and I'm not "upgrading" until I know they won't take that away.
Not that it matters too much, features or not, I'm thinking to switch to Firefox because these are times no longer to be using closed-source software.
Still a shame they dropped Presto, though.
As a geek, I often forget that a shared market can indicate why a company is doing something new, as well as a shared product.
I am thinking Opera want to be acquired?
Possibly. They were uncannily quick in adopting Blink. The series of events seemed to be Opera->WebKit, Google->Blink, Opera->Blink... so perhaps they want to get cosy with Google? Although, I can't see what G would want with them.
I think it's also known that, sometime around IE7, Microsoft tried to acquire them. Microsoft have long since made their bed though... unless they want a better mobile browser.
Either way, it'd make total sense for Opera to ditch their email operation if they were looking to be acquired by a business with an established email product already. Especially when many Fastmail customers are there because of their particular niche in service.
Perhaps it's the new Blackberry group? Dark horse! :P
- Opera has publicly commented it was aware of Google's plans for Blink, and that information was a factor in the decision to switch to the Chromium engine.
As a FastMail user I was very concerned with last year's rumors. Now I don't care because FastMail doesn't have anything to do with Opera anymore.
Not sure what you mean. Just FYI : at least on Android phones, among FF, Chrome, Opera (and the default browser), Opera's text flow is the best by far. You can zoom in and read any article on any site, and it does just the right thing. There is honestly an element of fear when you use Firefox for the same thing: it's absolutely unpredictable what it will do when you zoom in. I can sympathize with the developers since the re-layout of a page, figuring out whether the user wants to zoom in on the text or the image, etc; may be quite difficult. Opera Mobile has seemingly perfected this over years and years.
I don't know what you mean. No Android browser matches mobile Safari for the slickness of zooming into pages, but FF mobile just works fine.
I can understand why they switched and focused on value added features.
But they didn't. They just dropped the browser engine.
My guess is they're trying going for a niche product and are focusing on what's important to them rather than try to get their feet wet in every market.
To spend more time with their family?