Opera Seeks Developer Input For Opera 10

taskforce writes "Opera Watch is reporting that the folks Opera Software are asking web developers for input on what they think the most important features are which could be added into the next version of the Opera desktop browser. Considering what has been added in Opera 9, what do you think would be most important for the browser from both a developer and a user standpoint?"

Extensions

[slack_prad]

API for extensions !

From a developper point of vue

[yogikoudou]

- More CSS 3 - A Javascript Debugger (including XMLHttpRequest debugging, as with the Firebug extension) - XForms - XUL ? And from a user point of vue: - Extensions

Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[Hank Powers]

It's time for you to stop dissing Opera. There are applications that get news coverage really seldom and even they have their own topics in Slashdot. Opera gets mentioned every once in a while and always gets placed under the general software topic. Do I smell an anti-Opera Software bias among the editors?

Adblock

[Umbral Blot]

Adblock, adblock, adblock. I know you can do something like adblock with Opera, but it doesn't even compare with firefox's version. That's the reason that I still use firefox even though it isn't as small or as fast as Opera; I want my adblock.

Re:Niggling

[Rameriez]

MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where, but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver. What more could you want?

Re:Extensions

[m50d]

God no. Say byebye to being the leanest and fastest browser around if that happens. If there are features people want, just add them to the main browser. The only useful thing I've seen done with extensions is as a trick to reduce your apparent bug count - have hardly anything in the main browser, if anyone asks for a feature say grab the extension, then disavow responsibility for any bugs.

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you can do something like adblock with Opera, but it doesn't even compare with firefox's version.

What's missing? Right-click on the page, select "Block content", and the page gets greyed out, with the blockable items highlighted. Click on everything you want to block, and it automatically sets up wildcard rules to block those ads. That's easier than Firefox's Adblock.

Integration.

[Anonymous Coward]

Human Interface Guidelines, native widgets, integration with the host OS. Opera is completely unusable because it refuses to behave like all other applications, be it in Gnome or Windows. It doesn't matter if that way might be better, because the problem is switching between paradigms.

Well...

[gall0ws]

Open source.

I would use Opera instead of Firefox if it was free (as in speech)

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[tibike77]

Although I'd positively love to see most "popular" downloads automatically BitTorrented when I download with Opera (by the way, I don't use a download manager, I just use Opera for most of my HTTP downloads), I am having a hard time imagining HOW you could do it in ways that don't breach any laws AND is beneficial to the user WHILE keeping the user anonymous (among others, not having to "phone back home" each time you do a hybrid HTTP/BT dowload).

Well, the "challenge" would be to have a tracker that you can access for those HTTP downloads, and also the tracker would have to (have a companion system that would) download the file first so it can hash it.
This means only "popular" downloads would be worthy of this, as any other download wouldn't benefit from anything... you HAVE to have some seeds online or else it's useless... and probably having Opera's tracker also double as "last seed" would break a few copyright laws.

There are a lot of other issues here, so basically UNLESS most companies get away from the "we host stuff on HTTP" mentality to "we HTTP host the .torrent and we have a BT superseed of it running and our own tracker", there's not much you CAN do. IMHO.

Only one thing needed

[eebra82]

I think Opera is a great browser (although I personally prefer Firefox because of all the plugins), but it is also the most feature-packed browser. That's a good thing, but too much is crammed into into this thing. Most people use only the most fundamental basics of a browser. What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed, or at least scalability in the full version.

Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top. That's great if you want more space for viewing web sites and such. I personally prefer compact applications. When I look at Opera, I don't see that. I see a lot of cool stuff but I don't really need most of it and would prefer to add these nifty things once that I need them.

Re:Adblock

[trifish]

As I expected, the list blocks Google ads. If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die. In case you did not know it, 99.99% of Google's income is from Google ads, based on their public reports for share holders, etc.

Blocking obtrusive ads is justified. Blocking any other ads is not. Did you ever stop to think who's going to pay the bandwidth costs of sites that depend on income from ads? The more popular a site is, the more incredible bandwidth fees they pay (popular sites can't use free hosting, mainly due to their bandwidth needs, etc). Without ads, sites like SourceForge.net or Slashdot.com would have to charge everyone for reading or die too. Think twice before blocking unobtrusive ads. Mass selfishness could bring many popular free sites to an end.

Re:Extensions

[Chris Graham]

The Opera devs couldn't possibly add everything everyone wants, for time concerns and other reasons. An example is as a webdev I like to be able to right-click on an open page and say "View in FireFox" or "View in IE", but placing information about other browsers into Opera for all users would be an uglification for most of them. Making it optional for that kind of thing would result in option explosion. Therefore it makes most sense if someone like me goes out and finds an extension for what I need, so that the majority aren't disaffected.

Re:Extensions

[jgrana]

What can be done in Opera with extensions that can't be done with widgets, its own internal ad-blocking system, and UserJS, which supports most Greasemonkey scripts? I'm just thinking of the extensions I was using before switching to Opera full-time from FF. ForecastFox is covered by a widget in 9, AdBlock's replaced by the ad-blocker, and I've gotten the GM scripts I'd been using running with very little trouble.

Re:Integration.

[laffer1]

Your one person. He meant everyone. Without following HCI guidelines, it makes it difficult for someone new to start using the program. Let me give you an example. I used to work on a coworkers computer in my spare time for a little extra money. She only liked Mozilla (and later firefox). Her husband only liked Opera 6. (literally one version) He would not switch off opera or let me upgrade it. He complained that anything other than the browser he knew was too hard. His wife just thought it was a piece of crap like IE. She was able to use IE, Netscape 4, Mozilla 1.x and Firefox without me telling her much. She just needed to know how to organize bookmarks and change her homepage. She could not use opera, but every other browser was ok. Why is that? Could it be the odd layout in opera? Yes. Now I realize that is the charm of opera for some, but the masses hate it. Its similar to Mac OS X that way. Its different enough that some fear or hate it. This could be applied to anything thats different like gnome, kde, etc. People are used to certain widgets in certain places with a certain look and feel. Unlike the web, conventional user interfaces must follow strict guidelines. (games are the exception to some degree) Even on the web there are certain conventions like RSS icons for instance.

Some suggestions from an Opera user

[Saosome]

1) Tab behaviour
More customisability should be given. For example, we should be able to make our searches from the search box open in a new tab, in the foreground or in the background. The back button should work with middle-click so that we can open previous pages in new tabs without losing the current one. Middle-clicking should also work with bookmarks in the drop-down list.

2) Adblock
The current content-blocking in Opera is much inferior to Firefox's adblock extension. I like to right-click directly on a unwanted ad and choose to block it, then be able to modify the blocked link immediately using wildcards for comprehensive filtering. In Opera, the entire screen is blanked out, and then you have to scroll through the page and shift click on each ad you don't want. If you want to modify the blocked link, you have to go through a few additional steps.

3) Scrolling
The scrollbar shouldn't become nearly invisible when I try to use it. Also, when scrolling using middle-click, I would like the scroll cursor to stay where I left it, rather than jump right into the middle of the page in a disruptive fashion.

4) Search
Opera should emulate Firefox and allow the search box to open at the bottom. Currently the search box opens right in the centre and blocks a significant portion of the screen, making it even harder to see highlighted words. Also, it would be nice if each search engine had their own icon graphic, so you can see at a glance what search engine you want. Currently search engines like wikipedia don't have its own icon in Opera's search bar, even though it has it in Firefox's.

5) Bookmarks management
Bookmark management in Opera is confusing. A "create new folder" option is not immediately apparent, and instead is buried among the right-click options. It also took me very long to find out how to add bookmarks to my personal bar (the only way I know of currently is drag and drop, which is quite a clumsy way of doing it).

All in all, I really like Opera and find it far smoother and faster than Firefox. Firefox trumps Opera in terms of the features provided by its extensions. However Opera can catch up with Firefox even if it does not want to implement extensions - it could just implement features from popular extensions.

My list

[Tofflos]

1. Remove popup (immediate switch) when using right mouse-button & mouse wheel to switch tab.
2. Trails when performing mouse-gestures.
3. Beagle support http://beagle-project.org/ [beagle-project.org].
4. Privacy-mode (No records are kept while enabled).
5. Strict-mode (While enabled pages have to be perfect to be displayed).
6. Native Look-And-Feel.

Re:I find firefox more configurable (screenshot)

[eddy]

It's an argument over like 16 pixel lines of >1024. It's stupid. Really, it is. I just can't take it seriously that a) it can matter in the real world (improving readability), and b) someone would actually want to turn their GUI into widget-soup by combining button widgets and menus in the same 'line'.

If this is a deal-breaker for you guys, alright, but it't can't be taken seriously as something worthwhile to fix. I especially liked that comment about my request for a server-client response tab being to esoteric. Cause yeah, I can see how all users are freaking out over the in-ability to cram buttons into the menu row to save themselves one row of text out of fifty or so.

(Finally, in that screenshot much of the miniscule difference is due to the theme on the Opera installation. Find one which isn't so "fat" and you'd be down to Firefox height, without the widget-soup!)

Re:Faith-based UI, instead of ease of use?

[mdwh2]

So, Opera should follow some rule someone invented, instead of being easier to use?

Wait, isn't that what you're asking? You want it to follow the rule IE invented, instead of being easier to use.

At the least, I don't see how pressing down instead of tab is harder, and this has the advantage that I can still use tab to switch to the next UI control (is there a way to do that in IE/Firefox?)

I think it's a bad idea to have to duplicate IE's behaviour just for the sake of it. And elsewhere people have been criticising Opera for not following UI standards (though they fail to explain what), so either way, it can't win. If Firefox followed a standard and did things better, but Opera did things the IE way, there'd be people saying Firefox was better, and laughing at the suggestion it's better to be like IE.

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[hkmwbz]

There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but your post is misinformed and your arguments are illogical or simply wrong.

Firefox's success has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Firefox had a major marketing push, as a completely free browser. Opera could obviously never reach as many users as Firefox since it was adware/payware.

Opera's mistake is not the UI at all. Rather, it is the failure to do a major marketing push when everyone was looking at an alternative to IE, and while Firefox wasn't finished yet. Firefox came almost exactly at the right time: While everyone was focusing on IE's shortcomings, especially regarding security.

In both browsers, if I enter "vmware", for example, I see a drop down list of all the pages I have viewed recently at www.vmware.com. But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse.

Not at all. Simply press the down key on the keyboard. So, wrong.

Opera shows how mis-management can reduce the profit of a software company.

Huh? Opera is making more money than ever! Most of Opera's income has come from mobile phones and devices for several years now anyway. So, wrong.

Opera cost $30 previously. That's an amount I would easily pay, if there were advantages instead of disadvantages in the user interface. I spend a lot of time with a browser, and $30 would be a tiny amount of money per hour.

It was $39, and you are just one single person. Most people do not want to pay for a browser.

The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways, in my opinion: First, Opera failed to recognize that the user interface design of a successful product is a huge intellectual challenge, and that, when competing products work fairly well, the user interface determines which will be most popular.

This is vague nonsense. I've already demonstrated that you are wrong about why Firefox is more popular than Opera, and shown that you are not representative of most users.

Second, Opera, like all software companies of which I am aware, thinks of product support as a very low-level job, and assigns it to people with a teenage sense of responsibility.

Wrong, and also irrelevant. Firefox doesn't even have any tech support (unless you pay $50 or so per incident), and yet it's more popular than Opera. So, you are contradicting yourself.

For example, someone who seemed that she was only working until she could find a man to marry and have babies answered my suggestion about tab-key autocompletion with nonsense.

Well, I've shown how you are the one talking nonsense :)

Third, Opera, like most software companies, has poor marketing.

Yes, Opera has poor marketing.

Good marketing requires someone who is very skilled at communication and who is also willing to understand how to structure product support so that it is both efficient and useful in guiding the development of the product. At Opera apparently there has always been a lack of understanding of communication, and a lack of connection of the communication with the technical details of the product. There have been many subtle and not-so-subtle mistakes.

This is yet more vague and irrelevant nonsense.

There are other unfortunate choices. Opera's excellent ability to save the current browsing session is ruined by the fact that the session files are now buried deeply in the Opera folder structure, and cannot be saved elsewhere. That's a mistake that is recent; with version 6 session files could be saved anywhere.

And this is completely irrelevant to just about everyone else. The old way to save sessions sucked. Thew new way is far better UI because it doesn't confuse the heck out of the user. It's Firefox UI design in Opera!

Re:Only one thing needed

[hkmwbz]

too much is crammed into into this thing

Not at all. Everything is disabled and/or hidden by default, so if you don't want to use those features just don't activate them.

What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed

Opera is already lighter and faster than the competitors, and your request is rather useless. What features should be removed? Bookmarks? Bookmark nicknames? Everything except back, forward, reload and the address field?

or at least scalability in the full version.

Yes, and that's what Opera does today: It starts off as a plain and simple browser, but you can activate stuff if you want to.

Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top.

It's extremely easy to remove buttons in Opera, and to turn toolbars on and off. But Opera has far fewer buttons visible by default than IE anyway, so...