I always thought the selling point was the e-mail /rss / irc etc. The things Opera came bundled with. I am sure these will still be available via extensions but then again I don't see the point of Opera now. It is now the same as Chrome.
Each browser has its own selling point. I feel that Opera has lost its by stripping out email and providing no news on other features. I always interpreted these features as the differentiators, the soul of the Opera browser. Opera users were people who embraced these things. Opera used to ship with a built in bittorrent support.. how sweet was that!?
I moved away from Opera when I used IRC and bittorrent far less. I also realized I could test less if I built a site testing as I go in a popular browser rather than a fringe one.
I probably could have done everything I did in Opera using extentions in another browser but Opera just did it out of the box. Its features had consistency and were easy to access. The reason I would choose Opera is because of what it used to be packaged with.
In it's current form it is an alternative version of Chrome.. I guess I could develop in it and have Chrome covered but realistically it would be simpler to just use Chrome. I just don't get it.
> I always thought the selling point was the e-mail /rss / irc etc
None of these are 'selling points'. There is better software available for Email, RSS and IRC. If you don't want many tools, ok, you might like Opera more, but they are no reason to choose Opera over any other browser.
The reasons I choose Opera for my daily work are:
- awesome UI (yes, it actually *is* better than Chrome or FF)
- feature-rich
- fast
- smart caching
- best incognito mode integration
- superior integrated download manager
- pages actually do scroll smoothly
- stable with dozens of tabs, see http://i.imgur.com/Z55rPDh.png
Also, Opera has always brought innovation with it, e.g. tab-sessions, Speeddial, Tabgroups, Opera Link, Opera Unite, reloading tabs on startup, etc ...
At the end of the day a browser is a tool and you have to pick the right one for your task. For browsing, Opera clearly wins - at least it does for me. See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176327
@Topic: Opera Next is currently just another Chrome skin. Lets hope they don't forget to implement what makes them special.
I always thought the selling point was the e-mail /rss / irc etc. The things Opera came bundled with. I am sure these will still be available via extensions but then again I don't see the point of Opera now. It is now the same as Chrome.
Each browser has its own selling point. I feel that Opera has lost its by stripping out email and providing no news on other features. I always interpreted these features as the differentiators, the soul of the Opera browser. Opera users were people who embraced these things. Opera used to ship with a built in bittorrent support.. how sweet was that!?
I moved away from Opera when I used IRC and bittorrent far less. I also realized I could test less if I built a site testing as I go in a popular browser rather than a fringe one.
I probably could have done everything I did in Opera using extentions in another browser but Opera just did it out of the box. Its features had consistency and were easy to access. The reason I would choose Opera is because of what it used to be packaged with.
In it's current form it is an alternative version of Chrome.. I guess I could develop in it and have Chrome covered but realistically it would be simpler to just use Chrome. I just don't get it.