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Comment by jarcoal | Hacker News Reader

I don't think many people used Opera because of it's rendering engine; they used it because of the GUI and high-level features.

Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.

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The Myopera forums are rife with users complaining about missing features in the Opera 15+. Any unique features which distinguished Opera have been axed and most solutions seem to point towards using browser addons to accomplish what was previously in-built. They might have gained a few users, but it appears the majority of the current userbase will be sticking with Opera 12 for the time being.

Yes, but from what I understand their plan is to bring back most of the features in the future (I remember them mentioning specifically bookmarks, opera link and tab thumbnails), until then: Opera 12.

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).

I heard that they ditched the fit-to-width feature (ctrl-F11), do you know if this is true?

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.

Fit-to-width did all kinds of magic at a layout engine level — it's not that simple to just reimplement on top of a new engine. And then there's the question as to whether Google would let an implementation would ever get upstreamed to Blink.

Why would Google not want such a cool feature?

It'd be a deep, pervasive runtime option across a lot of code.

I think you're generally correct about users not caring about the rendering engine for the most part. I wouldn't care at all that they ditched Presto if it meant they retained all the previous features and user interface they had before transitioning. However, I am worried that is unlikely to happen.

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.

I still use Opera 12 because of the lack of features in the new version. My biggest pet peevs: Ctrl+Tab behavior (Opera default was 'previous tab' now it's 'next tab') and no thumbnails tabs on the left, and they removed the email client.

Yeah, I dislike both of those changes as well. I have a pretty long list of things Opera needs to add to versions beyond 12 before I will update to their Blink version. Until then, I'm still using 12 as well.

I'm also sticking to Opera 12, missing quite a lot of features in the Blink version...

http://operabrowser.wikispaces.com/Features

> and they removed the email client.

And the IRC client and BitTorrent client?

While it's lacking the menu, there is at least opera://flags/#activation-order-tab-cycling now.

I agree the rendering engine isn't important, but when they threw out Presto they also threw out most of the features and innovations they created and turned Opera into a sort of half-assed Chrome.

Porting features usually mean to redesign them to match the new codebase/paradigm. It's not as simple as copy/pasting code...

Nobody said it was simple. The problem is that they shouldn't have tossed out the old code if they weren't going to be able to replace it.

So you are suggesting them to maintain two different codebases during the transition rather than focus all their efforts to the new version to make the transition as short as possible?

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.

There was literally nothing to stop them delaying the release by 1 - 2 months and delivering more than a bare-bones Chrome.

Opera sets their own schedule beholden to nobody.

They didn't just switch to webkit, they killed the product and made a chromium fork, and called it "Opera."

I used to use Opera because of it's privacy features. Being able to have different configuration of javascript, cookies, referals, content blocking and so on. Now with Opera 16 all these features are gone.

How do you increase you're competitive abilities by removing everything that made you unique when you're already the underdog? :S

You forget to mention that they are "per site" preferences.

But wtf they removed this too?? What is wrong with those people?

Per-site preferences will be returning to Opera in a future version, so don't lose hope.

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