The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/the-vision-behind-opera-15-and-beyond/

by richtr • 13 years ago

47 35 13 years ago

brucelawson.co.uk

ziyadb• 13 years ago

"That leaves us with the riddle that every software developer faces at some point: how best to make a UI simple enough to be intuitive for a consumer who wants a solid, fast browser that just works, and yet is customizable and extensible so that power users can add the features they want?"

You don't. Taking both user groups into consideration and weighing them equally assumes that they have the same bearing on the usage of your product. Once it reaches mass market, the tinkerers (occasionally referred to as the early adopters or evangelists) are no longer the largest nor the most profitable segment of your user-base.

Therefore, you can theoretically afford to disregard them--however, in practice, this has implications that can prove disastrous. For instance, they could seek out an alternative and start the disruptive cycle all over again, increasing its appeal and reducing yours, which propagates and ultimately ruins your perception, though this can probably be avoided.

Jare2• 13 years ago

I can't imagine a world where the unsophisticated "consumer who wants a solid, fast browser that just works" doesn't just use the default browser that comes bundled with the OS. Safari and IE are more than capable to fill that role these days.

fpgeek• 13 years ago

Some of those unsophisticated consumers are still using Windows XP (or Android Gingerbread or ...).

PommeDeTerre• 13 years ago

GNOME 3 is a perfect, and very recent, example of what you're describing.

It was open source programmers who made GNOME 2 and earlier a successful, usable desktop environment. These were very technical users who created software that generally worked well for their purposes, but incidentally also worked well for other, less-technical users, too.

Yet at some point, we saw the number of "designers" and "UI experts" start to grow, and eventually overwhelm the number of programmers. The "make it usable by everyone" mantra took over, but without the skill and sensibility we saw from programmers alone.

The end result has been GNOME 3. At best, it can be considered one of the worst open source disasters of all time. Its designer-driven development process and subsequent lack of usability and quality has alienated many programmers. These are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't be alienated, because they did things right in the first place. Aside from a few odd cases here and there, GNOME 3 is generally hated by anyone who uses his or her computer to do real work.

And what you say about seeking alternatives, or even creating them, is very true. KDE and Xfce benefited immensely from the GNOME 3 debacle, accepting many of the talented and valuable GNOME "refugees". MATE and Cinnamon have been born to try to fix the problem, as well.

GNOME 3 isn't the only example. Firefox is another good example, and obviously quite relevant to Opera. It has been systematically dumbed-down basically every release starting with Firefox 4, which has rendered it far less useful than it once was, causing many advanced users to abandon it.

Opera does indeed appear to be following this same path, unfortunately. Opera 15 has the same feeling that GNOME 3 does, in that it is a regression from the previous versions. Discarding so many things that make Opera 12 and earlier such a great browser just isn't a good way forward.

cuu508• 13 years ago

GNOME 3 is a perfect, and very recent, example of what you're describing.

Agree, in a sense that it has abandoned tinkerers and focused on mainstream users. I'm not sure the result is disastrous, though. In Google Trends GNOME has maintained its position relative to KDE:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gnome+kde#q=gnome%2C...

If you have more relevant stats, please share!

brusch2• 13 years ago

I don't know - the longer GNOME 3 is around, the more people like it.

Sure they've lost some people ("I can't install compiz fusion any more") - but in the last 6 month I'm reading lots of "it's fine - first it was a big change, but now I really like it".

I like GNOME3 and would never want back to GNOME2. But everyone his own's.

Sprint3• 13 years ago

Right, so it seems like they changed their target audience.

The list of extensions for "power-users who miss previous features" is a slap in the face. A half-broken bookmarks extension and then two extensions that are using data-hungry web services. Replacing the simple notes functionality with evernote? What the hell happened to my privacy and my data being local on my machine.

dgesang• 13 years ago

The NSA already knows anyway.

mih• 13 years ago

Notes were still synced with Opera link so there never was any privacy. Still using Evernote to save little snippets is like using my 4WD to visit the neighborhood shop when my bicycle would do.

Sprint3• 13 years ago

I never used Opera link as it was optional and off by default as it should be. :)

bru• 13 years ago

Notes were still synced with Opera link so there never was any privacy

I prefer giving my data to a Norwegian company rather than an American one, especially in the light of the recent events.

Moreover, Opera has a clean track record of the matter of privacy, while they were times when they could have abused their power: a substantial part of mobile traffic[1] was going through their servers due to Opera Turbo technology, and AFAIK they did not try to exploit it.

1: They still owned more than 20% of the market in 2011. I do not know which part of the users were using Turbo regularly, but I believe they were a lot in the pre-smartphone times.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

Yup, I think it's safe to assume whoever the clever people were who made Opera what it was, have long since left the building. This guy is like a blind man talking about a painting; I can't shut him up, but I won't listen to it either. RIP Opera, and thanks to all the unknown people with all those little and big smart ideas.

plorkyeran• 13 years ago

Always sort of distressing to have one of your favorite features (Fit to Width in this case) described as "confusing rather than helping". I guess I should give up on hoping that Blink-based Opera will become worth using.

grotos• 13 years ago

I'm bitter-sweet about recent Opera (both browser and company strategy) - I've been using Opera for 8 years. I'm really happy to see some developments, because Opera browser always seemed somehow stalled (except for investing resources in strange technologies - e.g. widgets, unite).

I'm afraid that Opera vision is becoming a company serving ads, so the browser will be no longer best choice for power users.

The old Opera (till 12.16) just didn't have many users, but with new engine Opera could take some users from Chrome. I think this is a step for being attractive for advertisers.

Just take a look at Opera business page [1] - the "technology" part just gives historical context, whereas ads/content takes prominient place.

I think we'll see some innovations from Opera such as mentioned Stash, Discover (another way of promoting partners' content), etc. But I think in the case of web browser we really need faster horse.

What is interesting, Opera published their commits to Chromium and Blink [2] - it seams that only 8 Opera developers work with browser, at least with adopting engine.

By the way, Opera 12.16 was released, but you will not find it easily[3].

[1] http://business.opera.com/company

[2] http://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/

[2]:windows: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S... http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S...

mac: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/mac/1216/Opera_12.16-1860.x86...

linux: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/

inthewind5• 13 years ago

If Opera do focus their attentions on the UI (not the rendering engine), then that's a good thing. And there's so many ways the web browser could be improved.

I used to like Opera's bells and whistles. I loved no image mode, tabs, fit to width, it's zoom, mouse gestures, url keywords, toolbar customisation and alternative stylesheets. And some of the keyboard shortcuts (which became confusing over time.)

But the menu system, and backend was klunky. The app didn't integrate well into the Linux desktop well either.

Unite was interesting (they should have waited for IPV6 to go mainstream...) Tab stacks didn't go far enough. Speed dial - really - What's the point? I'd rather they polish up the bookmarking and history interfaces. Stash looks like it's just a lifo ordered stack, which is good, but lends no context to the stashed page. Does a stashed page retain it's history? How do I group pages/bookmarks - why is this so shitty across browsers? A stash could just be a temporary/ephemeral bookmark.

Is their any point in having graphical snapshots of pages and thumbnails? These just take away screen real estate. They bring nothing for me.

I think there should be focus on: reading aids, bookmarking/tabs, privacy, developer tools, and a very clean configuration - with sensible defaults. An easy way to flip the browser into an intermediate/advanced mode would be nice.

Bring back a slice of innovation to the browser. It needs to be more than a Chrome clone. I can think of loads of nice features that could be roled into the browser rather than end up as a stray extension.

Anyway I hope the clean core and fresh start is a good jump off point for them, I'll be watching this space.

Where's the Linux version?

Tomis022• 13 years ago

Speed dial - really - What's the point?

I use speed dial all the time, it's hard for me to believe that when it was first announced my first reaction was "meh, I don't need it". But it's extremely useful/comfortable, at least for me.

inthewind5• 13 years ago

Could you say why? Are you using it on a touch device?

janlukacs• 13 years ago

I used Opera for years but now i really don't see the point. They simply won't be able to innovate enough in UI to justify using it vs Safari or Chrome.

vivekjishtu• 13 years ago

They should have just named it "<New Browser Name>" by Opera. It would set the expectations right. When its the same name and a higher version number with most of the features missing it just alienates the existing users.

This would give time to add new features to the new browser while keeping the existing users happy with what they already have. The existing users would not crib about missing that one obscure feature that no one else uses.

In the current scenario the power users who normally jump to the next version end up missing the features they are used to. The best example in this case would be Phoenix/Firefox which rose from the ashes of Mozilla Suite. The stripped out all the fat and made a lean browser. What happened to Firefox after version 4 is another story.

lovskogen• 13 years ago

Hmm.. so it was too hard to keep the same UI because of Presto, and then the reasoning for the new UI is because they wanted a 'fresh start'? Seems like creating a vision in retrospect because of the time restraints.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

I really liked Opera. I've used it for as long as I can remember to pretty much the exclusion of all else. Best mouse gestures, integrated mail and RSS client, notes that were easily searchable and right there alongside all my web stuff, nice speed dial for regular sites, first people with tabbed browsing (though they managed to screw that up to an extent by stopping the tabs overflowing so they shrunk into unclickable icons instead.)

But, honestly, you strip out mail, you strip out notes - that's a lot of the advantages that it had going over other browsers gone. It's no-longer something you can really use to manage information. You're almost in a position of saying, "Well, I mean - why not use Firefox? It's stolen most of the other features anyway." Pretty much the only thing Opera has going for it at this point is the nice mouse gestures. Everything else it is basically the exact same thing as Firefox. They've even stripped the easy access bookmarks out so they can't claim they've an advantage there anymore either >_>

At the moment I'm still using Opera 12 - but there's only so long you can stick around on a browser that's not being updated anymore.

I think, in retrospect, the point when Opera went wrong was when they stopped charging for it - at that point it was grow or die, and it never did grow that much.

exterm• 13 years ago

Opera 12 will indeed be updated with security patches for some time. "You can expect that we will keep Opera 12.x up to date and secure." http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2013/07/02/opera-15

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

Good to know, I'd turned auto-update off in fear of getting forced into Opera 15. Thanks :)

azakai• 13 years ago

When we took the decision to switch to Chromium, compatibility was one reason — but most importantly, we wanted to spend our time on browser innovation, rather than competing on building a rendering engine.

This seems to be saying that "browser innovation" can only be done in the UI? That seems misguided.

Innovating only in the UI has been tried many times: Flock, RockMelt, Dolphin, etc. It's never worked in a significant way. Not to say it never will, I suppose anything is possible, but it seems highly unlikely - what is different this time?

fiffig• 13 years ago

Here's my wish list for Opera 15 and beyond:

  1. Linux support.
  2. Don't break my bank (dnb.no) like Chromium
  3. Single-key shortcuts
  4. Ability to close browser windows with C-w (or C-q without it killing *all* windows)
  5. Ability to start browser windows without tab bar

Single-key shortcuts and a tiling window manager recently brought me back to Opera after only using it for banking a while. It's far from a perfect TWM browser, but the keyboard navigation really is worth it.

Faithfully yours,

2003-2008, 2013-present

coldtea• 13 years ago

I would feel a little ashamed to go and tout my employer after it has laid out tons of hardworking people that made the company and the product what it is.

I can understand the economic pressures that drove the decision, but at least a little solidarity for those left behind would need to be in order.

The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond

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