~bohwaz/blog/

I tried to migrate to Chromium, but it's really not usable, I had some crash, I have to install loads of extensions just to do some basic stuff, I can't change the keyboard shortcuts (come on, an application in 2011 where you can't change the shortcuts? you must be kidding), and there's plenty of stupid bugs. When bugs are reported, they're just dismissed (though they have a public bug tracker we can see they dismiss the bugs, for Opera you just never know what happens to your bug report). One example of a bug that lost me a couple of hours. Let's say I had this PHP code:

<h3>Hi <a href="<?php echo get_user_url(); ?>"><?php echo get_user_name(); ?></a></h3>

Right this code is a bit ugly that's just an example. Now let's assume you have some error, like get_user_url function isn't declared. In Opera you would get:

<h3>Hi Fatal error on line 1: ...

On Firefox you'd get:

<h3>Hi

And on page source you would see the error. On Chrome you will get:

<h3>Hi

And the page source will just display that. The <a> element is not displayed, nor the error it contains. Great isn't it?

So now that I just decided to forgot about this alpha-grade browser, I just tried to migrate to Opera's new version, again. My previous upgrade test was based on 10.60, and it was a total mess, with a lot of bugs (reported more than one year before the 10.60 release...), now they have a 11.01 available. I hoped they worked a bit to improve the awful experience users would get.

Well, they have on one point. The interface is not as messy as it was in 10.60, thanks to the hidden X11 mode option, it now integrates better with dark-colored Gtk/Qt themes, forms dont have black text on black background anymore, good point. Another good thing is that we can now access IPv6 websites. Yeah, for some years Opera decided to remove their IPv6 stack instead of fixing it... No comment.

But then there's a lot of existing bugs still not fixed (like horizontal scrolling with my mouse) and a whole package of new horrible mess they brought. First they had this genius idea to make the address bar newbie-proof by hiding the protocol, the query and the hash parts of URLs. Well that's probably one stupid idea because since 20 years nobody ever made any complaint about seeing a full URL, but btw they decided to add an option to allow people having back the whole URL again. That's right kids I have to check an option in a config dialog just to have the full normal internet experience everybody had since 20 years. Wow, genius. Oh, they also removed the favicons from the address bar, another excellent idea to lose track of what website you're actually on.

Secondly there's this annoying idea that when you type a hostname without a TLD at its end, it goes straight away to Google to search the hostname and display a tiny dialog asking "Did you mean http://hostname/? Yes/No". I don't really want that an internet website knows when I'm trying to reach a local server. There's no way to disable that.

And then another annoying thing is the dropdown appearing in the search field when you type something. This dropdown displays: Google suggestions about what you're typing, history of previously typed searches, and list of other available search engines (no they still don't support OpenSearch...). I'd like to get rid of the first two features (because I don't find suggestions useful and I don't want Google to know what I'm typing, and I don't want the browser to remenber my searched terms), or just disable the dropdown. But I searched in vain because there is no fucking way to disable either one of the features or the whole dropdown. That's right, you don't have the choice. I'm really annoyed here because I don't find either of the features useful and I hate that my data is going in the databases of Google. And it never occured to them that a lot of people would want to disable those things. I had to help a friend migrate to Firefox because she hates when browsers save things about her activity, and there is no way to disable the search history in Opera.

And now, I'm getting back to Opera 10.11 with the bitter taste that the Opera company that I loved so much for all those years, since the version 3.50 on my Windows 95, is just gone and have sold its spirit to marketing devils and other gurus that just don't care about users. Sad story.