The burning occurs because once all the water has evaporated from the top of the crust, it'll burn incredibly quickly. Typically it's difficult to gauge from a quick glance how much moisture is remaining in the top layers of the bread - although much easier to gauge the amount of steam you see when you open the oven door.

Easiest solution to tackle the evaporating of water is to brush a little oil over the top. Water evporates, oil soaks in instead, the hot oil helps the crust brown quicker and prevents it drying out as quickly yet makes it very crispy. If you want the bread cooked more evenly, re-wrap the whole thing in foil - the inside will stay soft but the crust will be more pliable too.

This isn't the sort of thing you can do in advance - if you apply oil to soon-to-be-pre-packaged garlic bread, it'll soak throughout the bread, negating the effect, so if you must use the premade stuff, crack open the foil and get busy with the pastry brush. Lots of people will say use olive oil, but at 200ÂC rapeseed or groundnut oil will cook better and won't spoil the taste of the garlic butter.

Can't believe I just had a minor geek-out about garlic bread, something I don't even like that much. But I've done it this way for others and none of the survivors have complained yet :)

Most people I know that use no-ip are people setting up their own minecraft servers its not a hotbed of criminal activivty like MS claims.

I looked up this "minecraft" of which you speak, and it seems to be some crudely archaic simulation where you wander round indiscriminately smashing rocks together and killing animals - basically a terrorism simulator. I fail to see why anyone would support the use of this software.

Lots of terrorism-simulator apologists say it's something called an Indy game, but it bears absolutely no comparison with any of the Harrison Ford films (and in any case, an Indy game would require royalty payments to LucasArts which we can find no record of). It doesn't have a proper company behind it like EA or Zynga but only a nebulous cloud of anonymous people known as "notch".

Not only that, it seems that the hacker group "notch" had their paypal account suspended several years ago due to money laundering and other suspicious activities.

Frankly anyone who uses this simulator or supports the filth behind it deserves everything they get.

Richard Domingues

- 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.

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.

Real, proper, mozzarella di bufala campana, even spelt correctly this time :) There's a couple of other restaurants that get it fresh as well but they're very pricey.

As a brit with an italian SO, that's about the size of it. In London at least there are lots of good (and some great) pizzerias, almost all of which are owned and run by italians. The superb Franco Manca in Brixton is quite probably the best pizza I've ever had, and this includes some truly excellent pizza restaurants in and around Naples (pizza napoli is, to me, the only style of pizza worth emulating; the SO is from rome and dislikes the "local" style of pizza as well). That said, they're also one of the few places in London where you can consistently get proper fresh mozarella (I can virtually guarantee it's a completely different beast to all the mozzarella you've ever had). Residents of Campania will rarely eat a mozarella more than a day old.

Never been too keen on the other styles of pizza - as you mention, I find chicago style too bready and too greasy and bears quite a resemblance to pizza sicilia. Pizza romana/lazio is, once again, too thick for me. Sure, there's plenty of places that do perfectly passable thick-crust pizzas but not really to my taste. When I eat pizza I want to taste the ingredients, not bread.

And then you have places like pizza hut and domino's. Not only do they have a heavy, pre-cooked breadlike crust but they also use heavily processed ingredients, and unsurprisingly they're very popular with people who are more used to the taste of processed foods and ready meals than people who make pizza with fresh ingredients. Given that they don't require fresh food and can be easily thrown together and into an oven, they're also ubiquitous and cheap since they're so much easier to store and prepare and so many people think of this as pizza than the traditional styles.

That said, we're snobby enough to keep a sourdough culture in the fridge so we can throw some pizza dough together and have a passable pizza from scratch within an hour if we like. Damn, I'm hungry now.