- Cookies aren't remembered properly.
- The font cache corrupts and requires restart of the browser at regular interval (unless you like Chinese Unicode squiggles taking the place of your normal page text).

Works fine here, and I haven't seen anyone else with these problems.

The original coding team were ditched, the replacements were all new - the forums/blogs describing this were purged but you can still find them if you try really hard.

No, the original coding team is still there. There were several hundred developers. A handful left when they switched to WebKit. Some people were making up stories about entire teams being let go, but that turned out to be a lie.

That means that a tiny percentage of developers are actually new, which happens to be something that happens naturally.

By the way, if you can prove that the original team is gone, please do so. But it's weird that you claim the original team is gone when members of the original team are still at Opera, saying that they weren't.

People who start on new versions? If there are less of those than your ENTIRE existing customer base, you're losing out.

Maybe short-term but not necessarily long-term. The new Opera is apparently getting new users at a much faster rate than the old one and fewer people stop using it than the old version as well.

See replies to this post - a lot of old-time supporters, people who were buyers of the software over a decade ago and still using it, have left it behind.

Not really "a lot." When there are millions of users, a handful of people is not really relevant. Also, as they reported to their owners, the new Opera is growing faster than the old one ever did.

Bug reports used to be answered. Your snarky answer is precisely the problem - nobody cares about replying to them now. And most of them are literally WILLNOTFIX.

Bug reports did not get answers back in the day either. In fact, if you had read the forums you would have known that this is something people have been complaining about for years.

They removed the entire mail and chat clients, the integrated Bittorrent download, the bookmarks, the entire UI customisability (the strongest point of Opera), the kiosk modes, all the stuff that made them unique. Go download a 12.16 and look how many features there are that just aren't there.

They still weren't removed. Removing is taking something away. They made the new Opera from scratch so there was nothing to take away.

Nobody knows that the Desktop version grew. The only numbers you have are from Opera themselves. It was already a niche player.

Actually, Opera is required by law to report accurate information to its owners. The numbers from Opera are also audited. So yes, there is actual documentation on the growth.

The dev team CHANGED. It was announced several times on the forums. The old ones were shown the door, the new ones only broke the old codebase and couldn't advance it.

This is a lie. No such thing was announced on the forums. Why on earth would they announce something like this on the forums anyway?

If the old team was shown the door, how come all those people from the old team are still posting as Opera employees on the blogs and forums?

It was part of the reason they "started again" - they didn't know how to do anything else (and Linux, etc. clients were left in the wake of the change).

This is yet another lie. The old team is still there. In fact, the first Opera patch for WebKit was made by a developer who has been there for more than a decade, IIRC.

Breaking it? See bugs at top of page - not present in 12.13 (before the dev change), present after and getting worse until 12.x branch was abandoned.

What? Those "bugs" that you mentioned at the top (that no one else is seeing) were supposed to be for Opera 15. We're talking about Opera 12 now.

You can't even keep your own lies straight...

And I used Opera since before 3.6. The number of bugs that weren't replied to, fixed in the next minor and never affected much (except the occasional rendering bug) were few and far between... or I wouldn't have paid for it, wouldn't have used it, wouldn't have fought for it, wouldn't still be mourning the loss of it.

Another lie. Had you read the forums you would have seen tons of unhappy people because of bugs.

Opera dev team were shown the door, new dev team can't get close to replicating their functionality even after - what - a year or so with NO HTML engine to worry about (Chrome handles all that now)?

Again, this is a lie. People from the original dev team are still posting as Opera employees on blogs and forums. Also, Opera is one of the main Blink contributors, so claiming that they have no engine to worry about is another lie.

If you don't know this stuff, you probably weren't using old Opera or weren't on the forums at the time all this was announced (before the new versions even existed).

It's clear that it is you who never used either of them.

You're correct: I'm currently not a salaried employee. I also hope to never be salaried again, let alone work for a company that bars me from overtime simply because I'm considered a "computer professional" in the eyes of the government.

As an aside, I can definitely empathize with those who are salaried employees. I had to deal with being labeled a salaried employee all throughout graduate school, despite my contract saying otherwise, and basically miss out on $100k to $125k/year (USD) in overtime; pretty much everyone else in the EECS department was in a similar situation. Suffice to say, when I had the chance to join a start-up company as a fairly compensated employee, I jumped at the opportunity.

"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is, and should remain, the law of the land. Especially when it comes to political speech."

"Replace the word "especially" with "except" in that, and I agree."

In other words, you'd turn the First Amendment on its head when it comes to political speech. Fortunately, the entire history of First Amendment jurisprudence as applied to political speech disagrees with you.

This is as it should be. There is NOTHING more important in our society than the freedom to speak about political issues. Anything else eviscerates the First Amendment.

"If Sheldon Adelson wants to buy the entire newspaper and then run whatever he wants, fine. What I don't want to see is him giving a politician a bucket of money, or spending money to run ad or smear campaigns."

If you see no difference between Sheldon Adelson buying an ad in the NYTimes and buying the NYTimes itself and ordering it to run his positions, then there is no hope for you. All banning the first and permitting the second is raising the cost of the ad.

But if the NYTimes publishes an editorial supporting a candidate, how is that different from someone buying the same space in the NYTimes to run an ad? You either have to ban that as the NYTimes making a campaign contribution, or else allow it and leave a giant gaping loophole that lets corporations give to campaigns as long as they can do it in something that can be labeled "news media". This inconsistency is at the heart of Citizens United, and the reason that the decision came down as it did.

Not all contributions are money, though many are just as valuable.

Further, you talk about campaign contributions of cash, but ignore contributions of cash to such things as issue advertising, not related or coordinated directly with a campaign. Are you proposing to outlaw that kind of speech as well? If so, where do you draw the line? And how do you do so without putting a faceless, unelected bureaucrat in charge of deciding what is political and what is not? If you don't, doesn't that pretty much destroy your carefully crafted regime?

And this exposes the fundamental problem: governments cannot regulate speech and do it fairly. Political speech, especially, cannot be regulated without the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Supreme Court jurisprudence is recognizing that fact at long last, and this is to be encouraged, not stifled.

"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is, and should remain, the law of the land. Especially when it comes to political speech. Don't like what someone says? Reply to them. Don't like how loud they say it? Say yours louder. Get help if you need to.

Anything else strikes at the very heart of our country's freedoms, and is not to be borne.

So are you willing to tell the New York Times they can't weigh in on an election, either?

And why should a million people be able to send $100 to a candidate but Greenpeace not be able to send that same $100 million from its members?

And how do you define "politician"?

The same rules must apply to all. Anything else leads to governments deciding what is and is not acceptable speech. That is simply unacceptable, period, end of discussion.

I wonder which Opera Execs received the goodies from google for them to fold their companies uniqueness/any reason to exist.

Sites not working and a mess of confusing features and slow growth is a reason to exist? Remember, after they dumped Presto they've started growing users again.

once it became a chrome re-skin

A skin is just a bunch of visual elements. Opera actually coded a new interface. Calling it a re-skin is just silly.

When exactly was it IE or nothing, pray tell? Was that before or after Netscape devolved into Mozilla? Was this on some magical timeline where Opera 2.0 was never released?

I think he's referring to sites blocking other browsers or not working. Mozilla and Opera weren't even relevant at all early on (no users = no compatibility). For a while after Netscape died there was basically just IE if you wantes to be able to actually browse the web.

they had the smallest, faster, most portable, most customisable browser which was *sold* as part of the Nintendo Wii launch (you call it The Internet Channel

And guess what, Nintendo dumped Opera when choosing a browser for the Wii U. Being small, fast and the most portable doesn't matter anymore. The hardware is fast enough to run just about anything anyway.

I'm suggesting that a company that makes MONEY by having users use it, should strive to keep those users. Rather than become yet-another-Chrome that even less people use.

Yeah, except Opera's reports to its owners indicate that the new Opera is growing faster than the old one ever did, and people who try it out are less likely to stop using it again.

They got bought out, they shipped off the developers that knew how to program, they ended up with a Windows-only Chrome frontend dependent on someone else to do the hard work of making them money.

Opera was never acquired. It's still an independent commpany.

They didn't ship off any developers, as most of the people who used to do development are still working for Opera.

Opera is not Windows-only. It was also released for Mac. and now Linux. And of course iPhone, Android, etc.

Someone else is not doing the hard work. Opera is one of the biggest contributors to the Chromium project.

But let's ignore the facts shall we...

And in the process lost a LOT of users, who are really their only revenue stream now that they DON'T pump out versions for other platforms like the Wii any more...

They didn't lose a lot of users. And besides, the new Opera is growing faster than the Presto-based Opera ever did anyway.

And of course, Opera's revenue has never been higher than it is now.

there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff

What stuff was broken with updates after 15?

They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have.

If they hadn't changed, they would have lagged more and more behind. At least now they get the latest web tech.

The coding team has changed. The company has changed.

The coding team hasn't changed more than a team normally changes in a couple of years according to the teams themselves. The company has changed? All companies change.

There is no interest in preserving users any more.

Really? Because switching to Blink seems to be preserving users in a better way than the old version. Opera's report to its owners indicates that people who start using the new versions are less likely to move on to something else than versions before 15.

Bug reports get answered with "We haven't got around to that yet" or "We never intend to put that functionality back in.

You get answers to bug reports? That's new. When did they start doing that? Sounds like a massive improvement. On the other hand, bugs seem to be fixed at a much faster rate now than they used to.

They removed every major feature that did something useful, so it's now a very, very poor Chrome clone.

They didn't actually remove any features. They just started from scratch. It's far from being a Chrome clone. Just becase it's a simple browser doesn't make it a Chrome clone.

We hoped the company would see sense and start re-using that codebase after they realised their catastrophic mistake. It never happened.

A "catastrophic mistake" which made the desktop version grow faster in number of users than any versions before it? Right.

The only patches they ever put out to the "real" Opera codebase broke it along the way, presumably because they just don't understand the code at all.

Why would they suddenly stop understanding the code they wrote? Most of the same people who worked on Opera 12 are still working for Opera.

How did they break it when patching it? Got any examples? Or are you just making up things.

Funny thing is, simple changes in the old Opera often broke things. You know, when all the developers you mistakenly thought had left were still working actively on Presto.

Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.

Opera has been profitable for a long time. They've had tons of cash in the bank most of the time as well.