Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 18th Sep 2009 18:51 UTC
You all know that I don't particularly like Opera. I find the product to be lacking polish, over-complicated and without the marketing pizazz that has made Firefox a household name. That's just my personal opinion, and that opinion has garnered many complaints of unjustness. To that end, to present a fairer discussion I would like to put a simple question to the community: "What should Opera do?".
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Member since:
2005-07-12
Well, lemme run down some of the features it does that make me use it as my primary on all systems.
Opera Link - I can install opera anywhere and instantly have access to all my bookmarks and settings from one unified online location.
Flip navigation - hold the left button, click the right one, you get forward. Hold the right, click the left one, you get back. I wish every application worked that way.
Favicon buttons - rather than the big fat ugly 'personal toolbar' crap I turn that off, and drag and drop favicons onto the address bar for my most frequently accessed sites.
Custom buttons - I have several custom buttons installed, including launchers for legacy versions of IE, FF, Safari and chrome which makes cross-browser testing of websites easier. Being a web developer it just makes life easier - Another change I make is turning off the close button on each tab, and adding to the top of my tab bar the "close current tab and go to previous" and "close current tab and go to next" buttons - making navigating tabs while closing them a LOT easier.
http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons
Ability to show tabs in portrait left or right - With websites still designing for narrow screen widths and sitting here at a 1920 widescreen, it's nice to get more height and more useful tabs by moving the tabs to one side of the display as a column. It makes it easier to tell what tab is what since the titles aren't chopped off as much. You turn on the new thumbnail feature and it's even more useful. It's also nice to do on netbooks since they too are really pressed for vertical space. I run my win7 taskbar on the right and my opera tabs on the left, status bar off, personal bar off.
The wand and notes - The notes feature, basically an indexed searchable clipboard you can use to quickly fill out forms is a great feature, and being able to put all my usernames and passwords behind a single password in the wand is great too.
... and there's speed dial, which used for the keyboard shortcuts (ctrl 1-9) is great for pulling up reference pages. (WDG, Sitepoint's CSS references, etc)
Built in torrent client - while on my workstation I use uTorrent, every now and then on my laptop I want a small file and not having to go install some other software is great.
Dragonfly - the first time Opera ever copied a major feature, Dragonfly started out as a pale copy of Firebug, but has grown into a more robust package that can do many things Firebug can't... Which is why when working with other people's code I end up using BOTH dragonfly and firebug.
undocking tabs - while chrome and safari can do this, Opera allowed you to do it before konqueror was a twinkle in a floss fanboy's eye. Being a multiple display user, being able to simply drag a tab out of the program window and into it's own is a must-have.
Robust download manager - Every other browser I've used the download manager is usually this half-assed train wreck. IE is obviously the worst in this department, but FF is no winner either opening it in a separate window, routing every damned save even images you are already viewing through it - which was 90% of where the 1.x branch seemed to have stability issues in the first place.
Now I realize, most everything I've said is available in one form or another in Firefox using extensions, but given how stable FF extensions are (not), the increase in memory footprint, that almost every FF extension has multiple security holes (since well over half the secunia advisories the past three years are for FF extensions and not FF itself) - it's nice to have everything in one small fast efficient package.
Which is why the people who call Opera 'bloated' need to GAFC, given it has built in what would take a dozen or so FF extensions to accomplish... all for a distro that's three fourths the size of firefox and half the memory footprint by the time you add all those extensions.
-- edit --
In a way, I wonder if that's also amongst it's problems... It's too feature rich, and most people don't take the time to learn what it can do that other browsers can't.
Edited 2009-09-20 23:47 UTC