Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasahle | Hacker News Reader

What's so great about Opera 12?

For one thing, Opera 12 was the last version released for Linux. It was also the last version before they basically completely rewrote the software on top of Webkit.

I was a Linux Opera user since 2007 up until a couple months ago. I finally switched away because Opera 12 was getting on three years old, which is ancient for web browsers. Now I use Firefox full time, and I've heard enough bad things about Webkit Opera that I'm not really interested in even trying it.

"Rewrote" isn't even accurate, from what I've seen. On osx it's like a buggy version of chrome, with few of the things that I liked in the original opera browser.

Supposedly they're working on it, and I'll try this on my linux machine later today, but I'm probably staying with chromium everywhere at this point.

You should probably look a bit closer. It's quite different from Chrome with different features, etc.

It was the last Opera with its own rendering engine. Now it is just another UI for Blink. So sad.

Pretty sad, but as "another UI for Blink" without all the Googleness that Chrome has, it's a pretty damn awesome option.

It still lacks a lot of the features that made Opera 12 nice, but it's also the best browser out there, IMHO - Chrome-like performance and standards support, without so much Google-sauce.

While I would love just to have Opera 12 with the Blink rendering engine, I was rather baffled by Operas decision to drop Presto. I though that their core business was: "Making a small, good and fast rendering engine".

That are they suppose to be selling now?

Their core business was making browsers in general. Being small isn't that much of an advantage anymore. They can now sell something that works reasonably well on most modern hardware.

It has a ton of useful features that never came back when they rewrote the browser using blink.

It's the last Linux version:

http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?os=linux

Reply on news.ycombinator.com