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I've used Opera as my main browser for a very long time. It hasn't always been the most compatible of browsers, but it's been the slickest. Much of the functionality you now see in IE, Chrome and Firefox started out in Opera. I was an Opera fan. I even own (and yes, this does make me sound quite sad) an Opera t-shirt.
But woah, Opera 15 is a mess. A horrible, horrible mess. It hasn't just jumped the shark, it's done it dressed as a bad Fonzie impersonator.
The neat right click Paste-and-go has gone (I used to use that all the time). Buttons aren't customisable. You have to use a combined address bar / search bar (I'd much rather have these separate). You can't group tabs (important for those of us who often have 30 or 40 open tabs). There's now a silly little Downloads popup like Firefox uses, not the more sensible Downloads tab that previous versions of Opera had. The Settings menu seems to have far fewer options than it used to. Speed Dial has a mind of its own.
And there are no bookmarks. According to the developers, "nobody uses them". Who doesn't use bookmarks? You can import them into Speed Dial, but that's no use if like me, you've got a decade's worth of bookmarks nested in deep trees. Speed Dial is for the sites you look at every day, but you still need a way of saving pages that you may need to refer to in future.
So I need a new browser of choice. I use IE, Chrome and Firefox already on occasion. Chrome is the one I use the most after Opera, but that's mostly because I'm using Google services professionally. It's not very customisable. I'd still tend to have Opera open on another monitor if I'm messing around on Analytics or AdWords in Chrome. Firefox seems old-fashioned and clunky (but since it's very customisable, is it easy to make it look nice and new and not clunky?) IE seems pretty good, but I've never quite got into how it works, and again it seems a little clunky. Should I try something a bit more exotic? Sleipnir? Seamonkey? Lunascape?
But woah, Opera 15 is a mess. A horrible, horrible mess. It hasn't just jumped the shark, it's done it dressed as a bad Fonzie impersonator.
The neat right click Paste-and-go has gone (I used to use that all the time). Buttons aren't customisable. You have to use a combined address bar / search bar (I'd much rather have these separate). You can't group tabs (important for those of us who often have 30 or 40 open tabs). There's now a silly little Downloads popup like Firefox uses, not the more sensible Downloads tab that previous versions of Opera had. The Settings menu seems to have far fewer options than it used to. Speed Dial has a mind of its own.
And there are no bookmarks. According to the developers, "nobody uses them". Who doesn't use bookmarks? You can import them into Speed Dial, but that's no use if like me, you've got a decade's worth of bookmarks nested in deep trees. Speed Dial is for the sites you look at every day, but you still need a way of saving pages that you may need to refer to in future.
So I need a new browser of choice. I use IE, Chrome and Firefox already on occasion. Chrome is the one I use the most after Opera, but that's mostly because I'm using Google services professionally. It's not very customisable. I'd still tend to have Opera open on another monitor if I'm messing around on Analytics or AdWords in Chrome. Firefox seems old-fashioned and clunky (but since it's very customisable, is it easy to make it look nice and new and not clunky?) IE seems pretty good, but I've never quite got into how it works, and again it seems a little clunky. Should I try something a bit more exotic? Sleipnir? Seamonkey? Lunascape?
