10 ms·

Faster and better browsing – Welcome Opera 41

92 points by Sykox 10y ago

michaelmior 10y ago
I think [0] is a more useful link [0] https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faster-opera-41-for-computers/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste...
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  Looks like someone failed to change the link (it's now broken), and made the title refer to the wrong blog post. The original title referred to this one: https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faster-opera-41-for-computers/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste... not this one https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/opera-developer-42-0-2392-0-update/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/opera-developer-....
zenincognito 10y ago
I use Chrome , Firefox , Opera all for different reason. The one that I find most appealing even though I am a big chrome fan is Opera.Opera's inbuilt ad-blocker is pretty decent and combine that with the great usable bookmarking engine I find it very usable on 2 - 24 inch screens. Firefox used to be great but rendering webpages just feels faster on Chrome/Opera. Opera has great potential to become a great browser as long as it focuses on adblocking and security by default.
- michalstanko 10y ago
  And Opera is the only one who got tab switching with Ctrl+Tab right. That's the single most important feature which made me use Opera as my default browser. (For dev tools, just press Ctrl+Shift+I instead of F12).
  - thomasahle 10y ago
    Interesting. One of my biggest issues with Opera is its seemingly random tab switching order. If I open ten tabs and want to go through them one by one, I first have to go through all my old tabs. There used to be an option to change this, but they removed it long ago :/
    - jack1243star 10y ago
      I like Vivaldi[1] for its keeping most of the options, such as the one you've mentioned. [1] https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com
    - jakub_g 10y ago
      opera:settings > type "cycle tabs in most recently used order" and uncheck (some text editors also use that by default, hate that)
    - michalstanko 10y ago
      Opera is switching tabs by "most recently used" order, just like Windows does for applications with Alt+Tab. That's exactly what I want, but if it confuses you, you can turn it off in the settings ("[x] Cycle tabs in most recently used order")
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    How does it work differently from Chrome?
    - lepht 10y ago
      It switches tabs in most recently used order in Opera, similar to OS alt/cmd-tab behavior
  - pritambaral 10y ago
    In Firefox, enabling `browser.ctrlTab.previews` makes the Ctrl+Tab behaviour much nicer. Not comparing, just noting.
asdfaoeu 10y ago
86% faster when starting up with 42 tabs open. I'd guarantee 99% of those people with 42 tabs open after startup immediately Close 41 of them.
- V-2 10y ago
  Because it's so slow, perhaps they wouldn't have developed this habit if it wasn't
- fwn 10y ago
  If they do not need them for some reason, why would they leave 40 tabs open in the first place? I believe this to be a rather unlikely assumption.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Other way round. When I'm starting up with dozens of tabs, many of them will be left open but never touched. Sometimes tabs can be months old. I'll occasionally do "cache spill to pinboard", but otherwise they remain open until I get round to them again or I have a "tab bankruptcy" imposed by software failure.
tiku 10y ago
A few months ago i stumbled upon the new Opera, in search of battery saving on my Macbook Pro. My battery lasts longer than when using Chrome, because of the built in power saving. The VPN addition is nice to, for testing purposes or just surfing safely. The only problem i have with Opera for now is that i'm not able to use Chrome plugins.. Not everything is available on Opera.
- vezycash 10y ago
  They would should have made it easy to sideload chrome extensions. Try this app "Download chrome extensions." It'll allow you to download extensions straight from the Chrome store. https://addons.opera.com/extensions/details/app_id/kipjbhgniklcnglfaldilecjomjaddfi https://addons.opera.com/extensions/details/app_id/kipjbhgni...
- jwr 10y ago
  On a Mac, I just use Safari. It is very power efficient, fast, pages scroll smoothly, it's basically the best browser for the platform. I switch to Chrome for web development because of the better developer tools, but my battery life suffers badly when I do that.
  - dictum 10y ago
    On a desktop Mac with a lot of RAM, would you pick Safari over Chrome for general browsing? I've been using Chrome for a while but I'm thinking of switching back to Safari. I no longer have a big need for extensions that are not available for Safari (I miss uBlock, but I think I can make do with a Safari Content Blocker list and dnsmasq) I don't have a Macbook but I might start using it soon, so it'd nice to use the same browser in both devices.
    - jwr 10y ago
      Yes, definitely. Safari is more responsive, scrolls better and is overall faster.
  - Sylos 10y ago
omarforgotpwd 10y ago
62 seconds to start my browser if I had too many tabs opened before previously? Why is that even saved between launches by default then? It takes less than that amount of time to switch to chrome
- pjc50 10y ago
  Browsers losing my tabs on shutdown is unusable for me, that's one of the reasons I stopped trying to use Edge.
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    Yes same here. I normally leave my workstation running overnight so I can come back to it in the morning but given Windows 10 and its propensity to restart at 3am, losing all the open tabs is not an option. (And no, I can't reschedule this as I am under a group policy at work so it is out of my hands). So saving tab state is ideal. I too stopped attempting to use Edge. It weirdly presents its own custom menu for right-clicks, which means there is one for Edge, one for the Start menu, and then the normal native one. Seems Microsoft likes making work for itself with 3 different menu implementations to maintain.
chw9e 10y ago
I can't find the VPN option in Settings, even when I search... but the help page says it should be available under Privacy and Security..
- babayega2 10y ago
  Edit>Preferences> Private&Security > VPN. Don't you have those ?
  - chw9e 10y ago
    I'm on Mac, and no. All I have is a link to the VPN provider's website where I can purchase their VPN. There is no option to turn it on in the browser, even with 'Show Advanced Settings' selected.
    - chw9e 10y ago
      The VPN is blocked in China. To get around this you have to set your computer's location to the US (or a country where the VPN is permitted), then reboot Opera. The computer's location can be changed in the System Preferences menu of a Mac.
halflings 10y ago
Good to know, but nothing to make a fuss about: Looking at the video, it seems that they are now simply loading the currently open tab before the others (starting by the ones adjacent to it) instead of loading all tabs at once. Other browsers have had this for a while
- oblio 10y ago
  > Other browsers have had this for a while Hilariously, Opera itself used to have this! I think it was one of the first browsers that had this :) (at least that's what I remember from back in the day, maybe my memory is deceiving me)
  - trextrex 10y ago
    Well, the new Opera already had an option to load tabs on demand when you switch to it after starting up. I guess now they're adding an option to load them in the background. In terms of performance the load tab on demand works reasonably well.
  - john_reel 10y ago
    Are you thinking of cooperative scheduling? If so, Presto did pioneer this.
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  When did Chrome get it? For the longest time, Chrome has had the bad habit of consuming all available CPU when starting with many tabs (a couple of hundred), essentially making your system unusable until it has loaded all tabs. It's pretty sad, really. Back when Opera 12 was discontinued, this worked well there - tabs were loaded sequentially, but you could still open new tabs while it was doing so. Even now the experience is sub-par in the major browsers (Chrome and Firefox. I can't speak for Edge). I mentioned Chrome already, but Firefox is also awfully slow to start up with many tabs, even when lazy-loading (i.e. a tab is not loaded until you select it) enabled. I've yet to try Opera 41, but at least it seems to be a step in the right direction.
  - 10y ago
V-2 10y ago
...and mouse gestures still aren't customizable again (they already had this long, long ago).
- immigrantsheep 10y ago
  I suppose that was while Opera was still it's own thing with it's own engine (Presto) and before they became just another Chrome fork
- cm3 10y ago
  They are customizable in Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/162-mouse-gestures-to-the-rescue https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/162-mouse-gestures-to-the...), another browser, which is made by ex-Opera folks, include the CEO and former core devs. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but Vivaldi is also Blink-based and has been restoring other Opera 12 features than Opera Opera has.
  - V-2 10y ago
    Customizable, yet not very usable - if the gesture you want to set already exists, Vivaldi doesn't let you overwrite it (unassigning the other one). Hell, it doesn't even tell you which one has taken it : ) Gotta find it on your own. Did they test it?
babayega2 10y ago
I had my Ubuntu 14.04 freezing a lot when Chrome is launched. I switched to Opera and no more freezes. Beside, living in a sub-African nation, Opera VPN helps me access some restricted shows. I use Firefox for downloading stuffs over the net : the DownthemAll extension is what makes me use Firefox. Nothing else.
floatboth 10y ago
Wow, Opera has a built-in video pop-out feature. That's very nice. I wrote a script to do that in X11 a while ago: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c42c929f10cee9edea0e42fb/x11/floatyoutube https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c... after I saw a Mac app that does this.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Cute script.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Mozilla is also currently working on something like that, although it's not yet clear, if they'll include it in Firefox: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I've always wanted a fill-tab feature for video. The video fills the view port of the tab and removes all the other content but remains just a regular tab. Does it do that by any chance?
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Firefox has an extension called watch in mpv which allows you to click on a given video or a button for the page and open the video in mpv. If your window manager allows tabbing various apps together you can even keep this in its own tab with firefox in the other. Being its own app you can of course have this window floating and on top of your firefox window off in the corner. You could even designate a hotkey to move and resize this window to that position if you so desired.
  - ijanos 10y ago
    Hi! I've created a really simple Chrome extension that does this for YouTube, check out it out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fulltube/nmabgnejfbfgjdifjflceagbglmllefe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fulltube/nmabgnejf... source code: https://github.com/ijanos/fulltube https://github.com/ijanos/fulltube
krige 10y ago
Is Opera still running webkit, or did they switch to something else in the past few years?
- batuhanicoz 10y ago
  As far as I know, they are using Blink (Google's WebKit fork), rather than WebKit.
cm3 10y ago
I wish Chrome would adopt Vivaldi's and Opera's feature to not close the window if you're closing the last tab. This works nicely in Firefox, Opera and Vivaldi, and I always accidentally close Chrome. I've seen Chrome extensions for this, but they don't do this properly and take up considerable memory for something that should be a core feature.
- jve 10y ago
  Well, I actually enjoy that feature, especially using mouse middle click to close tabs & browser. Why do you want browser to stay open when you are actually closing it?
  - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
    Because I'm not closing it. I'm closing the tab. Opening chrome takes a few seconds to open which is annoying when I want to quickly google something without loosing focus.
    - jve 10y ago
      Ok, I understand. But you can press ALT+D, type your google text, hit enter. No need to close tab, no need to open home page, no need to move mouse.
      - lmm 10y ago
        The point is that I want to close my current tab - I'm done with it. I just don't want to close the whole browser - I want it hanging around with no tabs in it so that I don't have to take the time to launch it again. Like closing all files in an IDE or Photoshop.
      - V-2 10y ago
        Alt+D, Ctrl(/Cmd)+L, F6, many ways to skin that cat ;)
    - adambratt 10y ago
      Just do Command+W, Command+T really fast on the last tab
dingdingdang 10y ago
Cold start Opera 40 - 63 seconds Cold start Opera 41 - 8 seconds Both values are so much slower than anything recent by Firefox or Chrome..? Who waits over a minute for their browser to start?
- m45t3r 10y ago
  If you swap the video, they're counting the time to cold startup to fully load the page from your last session. And sure, I have dozens of tabs in Chrome, and while Chrome itself starts fast, fully load a webpage can take a long time.
Mithaldu 10y ago
Now if only they'd deliver on the marketing talk about actually getting Opera v12 features into Chromera, or at least do the human thing of opening up the source of v12. Till then, quite a few people will stick with v12 as main browser. Also, beware: The browser part of the Opera company was sold to chinese malware producer Qihoo 360, after they failed to buy the entire company.
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  The problem with sticking to 12 is that it's not really an option any more. You lose out on newer web technologies, and at least on Windows you run into security issues, since enabling newer TLS versions makes Opera prone to crash.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    Incorrect. With these customizations you can make it very easy to open any page/link from inside Opera in any other browser: https://gist.github.com/wchristian/9a479b6969ba653681f50b415dcc89e4 https://gist.github.com/wchristian/9a479b6969ba653681f50b415... It is in practice entirely viable to keep using Opera as the main browser and punt troublemakers to other browsers as necessary.
    - IsmaOlvey 10y ago
      That it's easy to work around doesn't mean it's incorrect. That aside, the SSL/TLS issues alone make it unusable. Changing the settings to make it use the newest TLS version it has support for makes it crash, and even if it did there are no updates at all any more. That means no security fixes, no support for new cipher suites, etc.
      - Mithaldu 10y ago
        You said: "not an option anymore" This is incorrect in various ways, if only because there exists at least one example of someone using it successfully as the main browser, while also being employed as a web dev: Me.
a-no-n 10y ago
I hate to sound mean, but Opera feels somewhere between the Moller Skycar and a Dyson Hairdryer. To be fair: Chrome is fast and adopts tech fairly quickly but kills your battery and your privacy. Firefox is private and supports new things, but wastes your time. Safari is battery-efficient, but waste your time and tech lags. (IE is shit.) --- Conclusion: Pick your poison for the appropriate task and time.
- jmkni 10y ago
  What about Edge?
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Do anyone use Safari on Windows these days?
    - lostgame 10y ago
      It's no longer a thing. [1] [1] https://9to5mac.com/2012/07/25/apple-appears-to-currently-be-passing-on-safari-6-0-features-for-windows-pcs/ https://9to5mac.com/2012/07/25/apple-appears-to-currently-be...
    - Kexoth 10y ago
      I don't think so, Apple stopped supporting Safari on Windows since v5 & right now Safari is at v10.
  - a-no-n 10y ago
    Refer to IE.
rhlala 10y ago
The only thing i want from opera now is open source, I enjoyed opera for years now, and it is my favorite one by far, But i am a little concerned about it is not opensource, witch make forefox a better choice for privacity...
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  TIL. I always assumed it was open source and was about to try it. Oh well.
  - aikah 10y ago
    Nope, you even had to pay to use it in the past.
the_duke 10y ago
I haven't used Opera for a long, long time. How does it stack up currently against Chrome? Anyone here using it as their main browser?
- Sylos 10y ago
  Well, in case you managed to ignore the news in 2013 (a lot of people did), it uses Chrome's Blink-engine now, instead of the Presto-engine which they previously developed. So, it's very much identical to Chrome for the most part.
  - colbyh 10y ago
    In fact, you can use Chrome plugins for Opera. It's basically Chrome with a slightly different feature set.
- nxrabl 10y ago
  I used it for a while when Chrome's UI was broken on high DPI screens. I loved it; it did basically everything Chrome did with a bit more polish, and as a bonus all of my Chrome extensions were compatible. Of course, I didn't have that old pre-Blink baseline to compare it to, so you might be disappointed coming back to it. I went back to Chrome after the Qihoo buyout.
- andywood 10y ago
  I was a long time Chrome user, and was driven to Opera as Chrome got slower and slower each year. Now I find Chrome basically unusable, in that pages take far too long to become scrollable, and suffer from other kinds of unresponsiveness. Opera has been perfect. Always fast and responsive.
jaspervdmeer 10y ago
They finally got rid of the 1px space above tabs. They also logged me in on Reddit instantly upon new install, which is, at least, kinda odd as I never gave 'em permission to harvest my Firefox data. So uninstalling.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Is it possible it remembered your login from the last time you tried Opera?
  - penetrarthur 10y ago
    Just let him uninstall it.
ticktockten 10y ago
Just installed it! Visibly faster for me, they seem to have done good work in this release.
known 10y ago
I'm happy with http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
ksec 10y ago
I really wish I could use Opera, but without Tab Overflow, having more then 15 tabs means the tabs are so small, and you cant read the title of the Tab. This is espeically important when i have multiple Tabs open on the same site, and therefore same site icon showing. Mouse Traveling to Tab List and select is just annoying. When you know the Tab you want is somewhere in here right next to it. I really want to use Opera, it is so much faster, but for power ( many Tabs ) users It seems the only choice right now, ( and for the past years ) is only Firefox.
- cgrinds 10y ago
  Vivaldi with vertical tabs work well for this too, coupled with the keyboard shortcut to bring up a fuzzy tab selector. It's pretty awesome. Plus you get tab cycling in recently used order - the only sane option.
Endy 10y ago
Not bothering to read - is it still a reskin of Chrome and thus not Opera? Or are they moving back to an updated Presto engine? Because if not, SeaMonkey remains my primary browser; since Opera 12 is "unsafe".
- Veratyr 10y ago
  How is Opera "unsafe" exactly? Are there any serious bugs or vulnerabilities?
  - Endy 10y ago
    I've been told that Opera 12 is unsafe now. I don't remember the details.
ekvintroj 10y ago
I really miss the tab stacking feature, but also the integrated email and rss readers. :'(

92 points by Sykox 10y ago

I think [0] is a more useful link [0] https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faster-opera-41-for-computers/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste...

IsmaOlvey 10y ago
Looks like someone failed to change the link (it's now broken), and made the title refer to the wrong blog post. The original title referred to this one: https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faster-opera-41-for-computers/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste... not this one https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/opera-developer-42-0-2392-0-update/ https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/opera-developer-....

zenincognito 10y ago

I use Chrome , Firefox , Opera all for different reason. The one that I find most appealing even though I am a big chrome fan is Opera.Opera's inbuilt ad-blocker is pretty decent and combine that with the great usable bookmarking engine I find it very usable on 2 - 24 inch screens. Firefox used to be great but rendering webpages just feels faster on Chrome/Opera. Opera has great potential to become a great browser as long as it focuses on adblocking and security by default.

michalstanko 10y ago
And Opera is the only one who got tab switching with Ctrl+Tab right. That's the single most important feature which made me use Opera as my default browser. (For dev tools, just press Ctrl+Shift+I instead of F12).
- thomasahle 10y ago
  Interesting. One of my biggest issues with Opera is its seemingly random tab switching order. If I open ten tabs and want to go through them one by one, I first have to go through all my old tabs. There used to be an option to change this, but they removed it long ago :/
  - jack1243star 10y ago
    I like Vivaldi[1] for its keeping most of the options, such as the one you've mentioned. [1] https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com
  - jakub_g 10y ago
    opera:settings > type "cycle tabs in most recently used order" and uncheck (some text editors also use that by default, hate that)
  - michalstanko 10y ago
    Opera is switching tabs by "most recently used" order, just like Windows does for applications with Alt+Tab. That's exactly what I want, but if it confuses you, you can turn it off in the settings ("[x] Cycle tabs in most recently used order")
- wingerlang 10y ago
  How does it work differently from Chrome?
  - lepht 10y ago
    It switches tabs in most recently used order in Opera, similar to OS alt/cmd-tab behavior
- pritambaral 10y ago
  In Firefox, enabling `browser.ctrlTab.previews` makes the Ctrl+Tab behaviour much nicer. Not comparing, just noting.

asdfaoeu 10y ago

86% faster when starting up with 42 tabs open. I'd guarantee 99% of those people with 42 tabs open after startup immediately Close 41 of them.

V-2 10y ago
Because it's so slow, perhaps they wouldn't have developed this habit if it wasn't
fwn 10y ago
If they do not need them for some reason, why would they leave 40 tabs open in the first place? I believe this to be a rather unlikely assumption.
pjc50 10y ago
Other way round. When I'm starting up with dozens of tabs, many of them will be left open but never touched. Sometimes tabs can be months old. I'll occasionally do "cache spill to pinboard", but otherwise they remain open until I get round to them again or I have a "tab bankruptcy" imposed by software failure.

tiku 10y ago

A few months ago i stumbled upon the new Opera, in search of battery saving on my Macbook Pro. My battery lasts longer than when using Chrome, because of the built in power saving. The VPN addition is nice to, for testing purposes or just surfing safely. The only problem i have with Opera for now is that i'm not able to use Chrome plugins.. Not everything is available on Opera.

vezycash 10y ago
They would should have made it easy to sideload chrome extensions. Try this app "Download chrome extensions." It'll allow you to download extensions straight from the Chrome store. https://addons.opera.com/extensions/details/app_id/kipjbhgniklcnglfaldilecjomjaddfi https://addons.opera.com/extensions/details/app_id/kipjbhgni...
jwr 10y ago
On a Mac, I just use Safari. It is very power efficient, fast, pages scroll smoothly, it's basically the best browser for the platform. I switch to Chrome for web development because of the better developer tools, but my battery life suffers badly when I do that.
- dictum 10y ago
  On a desktop Mac with a lot of RAM, would you pick Safari over Chrome for general browsing? I've been using Chrome for a while but I'm thinking of switching back to Safari. I no longer have a big need for extensions that are not available for Safari (I miss uBlock, but I think I can make do with a Safari Content Blocker list and dnsmasq) I don't have a Macbook but I might start using it soon, so it'd nice to use the same browser in both devices.
  - jwr 10y ago
    Yes, definitely. Safari is more responsive, scrolls better and is overall faster.
- Sylos 10y ago

omarforgotpwd 10y ago

62 seconds to start my browser if I had too many tabs opened before previously? Why is that even saved between launches by default then? It takes less than that amount of time to switch to chrome

pjc50 10y ago
Browsers losing my tabs on shutdown is unusable for me, that's one of the reasons I stopped trying to use Edge.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Yes same here. I normally leave my workstation running overnight so I can come back to it in the morning but given Windows 10 and its propensity to restart at 3am, losing all the open tabs is not an option. (And no, I can't reschedule this as I am under a group policy at work so it is out of my hands). So saving tab state is ideal. I too stopped attempting to use Edge. It weirdly presents its own custom menu for right-clicks, which means there is one for Edge, one for the Start menu, and then the normal native one. Seems Microsoft likes making work for itself with 3 different menu implementations to maintain.

chw9e 10y ago

I can't find the VPN option in Settings, even when I search... but the help page says it should be available under Privacy and Security..

babayega2 10y ago
Edit>Preferences> Private&Security > VPN. Don't you have those ?
- chw9e 10y ago
  I'm on Mac, and no. All I have is a link to the VPN provider's website where I can purchase their VPN. There is no option to turn it on in the browser, even with 'Show Advanced Settings' selected.
  - chw9e 10y ago
    The VPN is blocked in China. To get around this you have to set your computer's location to the US (or a country where the VPN is permitted), then reboot Opera. The computer's location can be changed in the System Preferences menu of a Mac.

halflings 10y ago

Good to know, but nothing to make a fuss about: Looking at the video, it seems that they are now simply loading the currently open tab before the others (starting by the ones adjacent to it) instead of loading all tabs at once. Other browsers have had this for a while

oblio 10y ago
> Other browsers have had this for a while Hilariously, Opera itself used to have this! I think it was one of the first browsers that had this :) (at least that's what I remember from back in the day, maybe my memory is deceiving me)
- trextrex 10y ago
  Well, the new Opera already had an option to load tabs on demand when you switch to it after starting up. I guess now they're adding an option to load them in the background. In terms of performance the load tab on demand works reasonably well.
- john_reel 10y ago
  Are you thinking of cooperative scheduling? If so, Presto did pioneer this.
IsmaOlvey 10y ago
When did Chrome get it? For the longest time, Chrome has had the bad habit of consuming all available CPU when starting with many tabs (a couple of hundred), essentially making your system unusable until it has loaded all tabs. It's pretty sad, really. Back when Opera 12 was discontinued, this worked well there - tabs were loaded sequentially, but you could still open new tabs while it was doing so. Even now the experience is sub-par in the major browsers (Chrome and Firefox. I can't speak for Edge). I mentioned Chrome already, but Firefox is also awfully slow to start up with many tabs, even when lazy-loading (i.e. a tab is not loaded until you select it) enabled. I've yet to try Opera 41, but at least it seems to be a step in the right direction.
- 10y ago

V-2 10y ago

...and mouse gestures still aren't customizable again (they already had this long, long ago).

immigrantsheep 10y ago
I suppose that was while Opera was still it's own thing with it's own engine (Presto) and before they became just another Chrome fork
cm3 10y ago
They are customizable in Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/162-mouse-gestures-to-the-rescue https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/162-mouse-gestures-to-the...), another browser, which is made by ex-Opera folks, include the CEO and former core devs. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but Vivaldi is also Blink-based and has been restoring other Opera 12 features than Opera Opera has.
- V-2 10y ago
  Customizable, yet not very usable - if the gesture you want to set already exists, Vivaldi doesn't let you overwrite it (unassigning the other one). Hell, it doesn't even tell you which one has taken it : ) Gotta find it on your own. Did they test it?

babayega2 10y ago

I had my Ubuntu 14.04 freezing a lot when Chrome is launched. I switched to Opera and no more freezes. Beside, living in a sub-African nation, Opera VPN helps me access some restricted shows. I use Firefox for downloading stuffs over the net : the DownthemAll extension is what makes me use Firefox. Nothing else.

floatboth 10y ago

Wow, Opera has a built-in video pop-out feature. That's very nice. I wrote a script to do that in X11 a while ago: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c42c929f10cee9edea0e42fb/x11/floatyoutube https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c... after I saw a Mac app that does this.

agumonkey 10y ago
Cute script.
Sylos 10y ago
Mozilla is also currently working on something like that, although it's not yet clear, if they'll include it in Firefox: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid
jasonkostempski 10y ago
I've always wanted a fill-tab feature for video. The video fills the view port of the tab and removes all the other content but remains just a regular tab. Does it do that by any chance?
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  Firefox has an extension called watch in mpv which allows you to click on a given video or a button for the page and open the video in mpv. If your window manager allows tabbing various apps together you can even keep this in its own tab with firefox in the other. Being its own app you can of course have this window floating and on top of your firefox window off in the corner. You could even designate a hotkey to move and resize this window to that position if you so desired.
- ijanos 10y ago
  Hi! I've created a really simple Chrome extension that does this for YouTube, check out it out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fulltube/nmabgnejfbfgjdifjflceagbglmllefe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fulltube/nmabgnejf... source code: https://github.com/ijanos/fulltube https://github.com/ijanos/fulltube

krige 10y ago

Is Opera still running webkit, or did they switch to something else in the past few years?

batuhanicoz 10y ago
As far as I know, they are using Blink (Google's WebKit fork), rather than WebKit.

cm3 10y ago

I wish Chrome would adopt Vivaldi's and Opera's feature to not close the window if you're closing the last tab. This works nicely in Firefox, Opera and Vivaldi, and I always accidentally close Chrome. I've seen Chrome extensions for this, but they don't do this properly and take up considerable memory for something that should be a core feature.

jve 10y ago
Well, I actually enjoy that feature, especially using mouse middle click to close tabs & browser. Why do you want browser to stay open when you are actually closing it?
- fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
  Because I'm not closing it. I'm closing the tab. Opening chrome takes a few seconds to open which is annoying when I want to quickly google something without loosing focus.
  - jve 10y ago
    Ok, I understand. But you can press ALT+D, type your google text, hit enter. No need to close tab, no need to open home page, no need to move mouse.
    - lmm 10y ago
      The point is that I want to close my current tab - I'm done with it. I just don't want to close the whole browser - I want it hanging around with no tabs in it so that I don't have to take the time to launch it again. Like closing all files in an IDE or Photoshop.
    - V-2 10y ago
      Alt+D, Ctrl(/Cmd)+L, F6, many ways to skin that cat ;)
  - adambratt 10y ago
    Just do Command+W, Command+T really fast on the last tab

dingdingdang 10y ago

Cold start Opera 40 - 63 seconds Cold start Opera 41 - 8 seconds Both values are so much slower than anything recent by Firefox or Chrome..? Who waits over a minute for their browser to start?

m45t3r 10y ago
If you swap the video, they're counting the time to cold startup to fully load the page from your last session. And sure, I have dozens of tabs in Chrome, and while Chrome itself starts fast, fully load a webpage can take a long time.

Mithaldu 10y ago

Now if only they'd deliver on the marketing talk about actually getting Opera v12 features into Chromera, or at least do the human thing of opening up the source of v12. Till then, quite a few people will stick with v12 as main browser. Also, beware: The browser part of the Opera company was sold to chinese malware producer Qihoo 360, after they failed to buy the entire company.

IsmaOlvey 10y ago
The problem with sticking to 12 is that it's not really an option any more. You lose out on newer web technologies, and at least on Windows you run into security issues, since enabling newer TLS versions makes Opera prone to crash.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Incorrect. With these customizations you can make it very easy to open any page/link from inside Opera in any other browser: https://gist.github.com/wchristian/9a479b6969ba653681f50b415dcc89e4 https://gist.github.com/wchristian/9a479b6969ba653681f50b415... It is in practice entirely viable to keep using Opera as the main browser and punt troublemakers to other browsers as necessary.
  - IsmaOlvey 10y ago
    That it's easy to work around doesn't mean it's incorrect. That aside, the SSL/TLS issues alone make it unusable. Changing the settings to make it use the newest TLS version it has support for makes it crash, and even if it did there are no updates at all any more. That means no security fixes, no support for new cipher suites, etc.
    - Mithaldu 10y ago
      You said: "not an option anymore" This is incorrect in various ways, if only because there exists at least one example of someone using it successfully as the main browser, while also being employed as a web dev: Me.

a-no-n 10y ago

I hate to sound mean, but Opera feels somewhere between the Moller Skycar and a Dyson Hairdryer. To be fair: Chrome is fast and adopts tech fairly quickly but kills your battery and your privacy. Firefox is private and supports new things, but wastes your time. Safari is battery-efficient, but waste your time and tech lags. (IE is shit.) --- Conclusion: Pick your poison for the appropriate task and time.

jmkni 10y ago
What about Edge?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Do anyone use Safari on Windows these days?
  - lostgame 10y ago
    It's no longer a thing. [1] [1] https://9to5mac.com/2012/07/25/apple-appears-to-currently-be-passing-on-safari-6-0-features-for-windows-pcs/ https://9to5mac.com/2012/07/25/apple-appears-to-currently-be...
  - Kexoth 10y ago
    I don't think so, Apple stopped supporting Safari on Windows since v5 & right now Safari is at v10.
- a-no-n 10y ago
  Refer to IE.

rhlala 10y ago

The only thing i want from opera now is open source, I enjoyed opera for years now, and it is my favorite one by far, But i am a little concerned about it is not opensource, witch make forefox a better choice for privacity...

jasonkostempski 10y ago
TIL. I always assumed it was open source and was about to try it. Oh well.
- aikah 10y ago
  Nope, you even had to pay to use it in the past.

the_duke 10y ago

I haven't used Opera for a long, long time. How does it stack up currently against Chrome? Anyone here using it as their main browser?

Sylos 10y ago
Well, in case you managed to ignore the news in 2013 (a lot of people did), it uses Chrome's Blink-engine now, instead of the Presto-engine which they previously developed. So, it's very much identical to Chrome for the most part.
- colbyh 10y ago
  In fact, you can use Chrome plugins for Opera. It's basically Chrome with a slightly different feature set.
nxrabl 10y ago
I used it for a while when Chrome's UI was broken on high DPI screens. I loved it; it did basically everything Chrome did with a bit more polish, and as a bonus all of my Chrome extensions were compatible. Of course, I didn't have that old pre-Blink baseline to compare it to, so you might be disappointed coming back to it. I went back to Chrome after the Qihoo buyout.
andywood 10y ago
I was a long time Chrome user, and was driven to Opera as Chrome got slower and slower each year. Now I find Chrome basically unusable, in that pages take far too long to become scrollable, and suffer from other kinds of unresponsiveness. Opera has been perfect. Always fast and responsive.

jaspervdmeer 10y ago

They finally got rid of the 1px space above tabs. They also logged me in on Reddit instantly upon new install, which is, at least, kinda odd as I never gave 'em permission to harvest my Firefox data. So uninstalling.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
Is it possible it remembered your login from the last time you tried Opera?
- penetrarthur 10y ago
  Just let him uninstall it.

ticktockten 10y ago

Just installed it! Visibly faster for me, they seem to have done good work in this release.

known 10y ago

I'm happy with http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

ksec 10y ago

I really wish I could use Opera, but without Tab Overflow, having more then 15 tabs means the tabs are so small, and you cant read the title of the Tab. This is espeically important when i have multiple Tabs open on the same site, and therefore same site icon showing. Mouse Traveling to Tab List and select is just annoying. When you know the Tab you want is somewhere in here right next to it. I really want to use Opera, it is so much faster, but for power ( many Tabs ) users It seems the only choice right now, ( and for the past years ) is only Firefox.

cgrinds 10y ago
Vivaldi with vertical tabs work well for this too, coupled with the keyboard shortcut to bring up a fuzzy tab selector. It's pretty awesome. Plus you get tab cycling in recently used order - the only sane option.

Endy 10y ago

Not bothering to read - is it still a reskin of Chrome and thus not Opera? Or are they moving back to an updated Presto engine? Because if not, SeaMonkey remains my primary browser; since Opera 12 is "unsafe".

Veratyr 10y ago
How is Opera "unsafe" exactly? Are there any serious bugs or vulnerabilities?
- Endy 10y ago
  I've been told that Opera 12 is unsafe now. I don't remember the details.

ekvintroj 10y ago

I really miss the tab stacking feature, but also the integrated email and rss readers. :'(