Stylehack

I never thought I would say this, but DO NOT UPGRADE TO OPERA 9.5.x of any version or flavor.

Opera PTB and Dev Team, I have one thing to say to you:  It is dangerous to buy into your own legend and think you know better than your users what they want. When you buy into your own legend you may find that it is simply a figment of your imagination — i.e., that you are a legend in your own mind and nowhere else.

If I wanted a dumbed down browser for the masses, there are two that pop to mind (Firefox for the wanna-be-geeks, and IE for the typical apathetic mass user). Why did you have to ruin Opera for the rest of us????

I have been a faithful user of Opera since its inception, yes I even paid for each new version. But 9.5.x is beyond the pale. For the same reason I feel almost violent when I think about Firefox and its development team (notice the all lower case letters), I am now feeling ill thinking of how badly Opera has mangled a beautiful, clean product.

Yes, I noticed that a very recent version was a bit of a pig and was a bit slow to load/unload, but I thought it was just something that would be fixed in the next version. These things happen. Little did I realize that the same bloated-ego, narrow-minded, “my way is the only way” [cough] programmers [cough] that ruined Firefox have now infiltrated Opera.

Okay, enough hyperbole. What has me so upset that after 1/2 hour using Opera 9.5.1 and another 2 hours Googling up possible fixes, I’ve uninstalled that version and dropped back to an earlier version? Basically just two issues, but they are actually 2 big issues with regard to the way I use Opera — I never bothered to look further than these issues:

1. The cache. I want to see the cache outside of Opera, see the files, see the extensions, save what the hell I want when I want it.

   I don’t want to scroll through some freaking list kept internally under the guise of “it will be faster for those 2GB caches and virus programs won’t give you false positives”, and then have to RE-DOWNLOAD whatever I want to grab. (Do I look that stupid?) You can forget about that “most sites are delivered in gzip format and you can’t see the files in cache anyway” line you fed users; maybe the developers at Opera should try using their own product once in a while? And while we’re on it, what ignorant person has a 2GB browser cache going anyway? They deserve to be bogged down.

   Oh and lest we forget, the old “it’s easier to reconstruct the cache after a crash”. Um, what about those of us that want the cache dumped and if Opera does crash I usually have opened/closed it just to clean things out?

2. The history in the address bar.

   No matter how I sorted it in the panel, it did not affect the history when I pulled down on the address bar. I use that to jump to sites, I want it in the order in which I visited, not whatever the hell order those fools at Opera think it should be in now.

I’ve always been an Opera tinkerer, I have all kinds of mods done to menus and navigation, etc. That’s one of the things I liked about Opera, that I could tinker with it. But it’s getting out of line when I have to start adding JS to multiple files just to make Opera functional again. Not gonna do it.

And so I’m not recommending Opera anymore. I’m turning in my Opera Ambassadors hat. I’ll still require (or at least strongly urge) my students in Build Your Website II to install Opera and test their pages for cross-browser compatibility, but I’ll no longer mention it to clients or employers. Opera just put itself behind Firefox on the list of browsers to recommend. Believe me, that really hurts. Have I said lately how much I hate Firefox? “-)

I will continue to use Opera myself, but an older version. I will no longer actively support Opera and the path it has chosen. Unless of course they get back on the path of righteousness. Note to self: do the research to see what reported security flaws they were fixing as part of 9.x and rip hair out, one strand at a time. Then find the least insecure version and drop back to that one. And let’s not forget to renew that AV/security license. sigh.

Will my writing this post have any impact? Not on your life! I realize I’m a little fish in a big pond, a voice in the wilderness. But at least I feel better for having said it.

[Edit:  You might think this reaction is a tad over the top in and of itself, considering the two issues that threw me into a tizzy. The straw that broke the camel's back was the attitude of the Dev Team members in the Opera forums when they were fielding questions about changes to this newest version and requests to add some functionality back in the future. I swear, they are plants by Mozilla and the Firefox dev team. Jackasses all. If I wanted to be treated that way, I'd be a Firefox user.]