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Opera is Reborn

blogs.opera.com

201–210 of 303 posts

Re: Opera is Reborn

#201
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on OSX and it magnetically snaps windows together as they get close. Makes it easy to divide ad hoc. As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.

This. So much this. I want an app that remembers which of the messaging apps each of my friends prefers, and routes messages appropriately. If I block someone, it blocks them on all the apps I've ever talked to them on. I think I use over 5 messaging apps (including sms) on a regular basis. Too many.

Considering most apps these days are a closed api that sounds terrible to code.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I don't know many people who would be in your situation I do think that an offline, indexed data store could be very useful. Bookmarks even to this day are dreadfully implemented on all of the major browsers.

Bookmarks are obsolete and badly implemented for decades now. Bookmarks are subject to link rot, having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage, bookmarks are useless when you are offline,... the list goes on and on and I have yet to see any browser even try to do something to address these.

These are UI complaints that can be addressed with a bit of investment and thought, but it's unfashionable work - Mozilla even tried to outsource it to Pocket, sorta...

> Bookmarks are subject to link rot

That can be fixed pretty easily: when the user bookmarks, submit a job to the Internet Archive, then use it whenever you get an error page from that link. FF already does half of it with the experimental no-404 extension. Alternatively, you can have your own InternetArchive-like service to do that, which is basically what services like Pocket and Pinboard do.

> having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage

You don't really have to manage them - these days they show up as soon as you type in the address bar. Ideally you'd have some sort of AI-powered categorisation system auto-filing them in dedicated folders, which could probably work with a bit of specialized meta tags. It's basically the age-old problem with filing documents of any type.

> bookmarks are useless when you are offline

Yeah well, a browser is also kinda useless when offline...

Re: Opera is Reborn

#203
post #128
post #40

I don't dare to use this since Opera got bought by that Chinese consortium of companies I'm not accustomed with. Not sure if I'm overly cautious? I'm thinking of especially Opera Link (which had a recent security breach to boot!). Wouldn't that leave out my passwords to China? And I do want to use some sort of syncing, I'd go crazy without anything there or some iffy third party addon. It's not even just about a trus…

Let's say, worst-case scenario and this consortium of companies is heavily linked to the Chinese govt. So what? Why would a foreign govt care about me, a citizen in a Western country? For what purpose (other than to maybe sell me stuff)? It's for this reason I have considered using a Chinese/Russian email service rather than Gmail, at least there is a chance they won't cooperate with the local authorities if they eve…

Do you own a business? Perhaps have some closed source software product? Many state actors would happily lift it from your inbox and pass it to some local startups.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#204

I really like the concept of bringing i3-style tiling management to the browser space, but why is it specific to messengers? Since most well-designed websites work at any size, couldn't you just have a permanent tab at the side of the screen of, say, twitter, or some browser-based IRC client? Admittedly, I'd probably use facebook messenger as this tab anyway, so my needs are covered, but it seems like a missed opport…

Vivaldi's "Web Panels" are doing this with a lot more flexibility - you can add any site you want as a custom panel in the sidebar and resize the width to adjust the ratio with your main window. Granted, a lot of people use it for social/messengers, but it's also super useful for resources and tools like Stackoverflow or Google Translate.

I like Vivaldi as a whole. Very nice browser and a lot more flexible then chrome and firefox (at least in the UI sense).

Re: Opera is Reborn

#205
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on OSX and it magnetically snaps windows together as they get close. Makes it easy to divide ad hoc. As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.

This. So much this. I want an app that remembers which of the messaging apps each of my friends prefers, and routes messages appropriately. If I block someone, it blocks them on all the apps I've ever talked to them on. I think I use over 5 messaging apps (including sms) on a regular basis. Too many.

I second this.

And no, just because on mobile those messengers are all "apps" doesn't make it any more bearable. In fact, switching between messaging apps all the time is simply annoying.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you trust Google/Apple/Firefox more? It's pretty outrageous to lump these three together. 1) Google is an advertising company that makes its money selling user data/impressions to advertisers. 2) Apple is a hardware company that makes its money selling gadgets to consumers. 3) Firefox is free/libre software produced by Mozilla, a nonprofit foundation that champions the interests of users.

Turns out firefox is a product of the for profit mozilla corporation the twin of the non profit mozilla foundation, clever way to play both sides. Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel, firefox pocket, talkback, etc. Then again a free license is not a guarantee of no wrongdoings. Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there…

> Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel

Renaming Firefox in Debian had nothing to do with it being only "mostly" free software. If you fork the Linux kernel, modify it and then call it "Linux", Linus Torvalds has the right to ask you to change the name because he owns the trademark. Perfectly fine with the GPL.

As Debian stable doesn't ship bug fixes this reflects back on Firefox / Mozilla, because user will complain about it. See https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop... for another example.

> Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users [...]

Please prove that these are the majority of their users. Because I'm perfectly fine with removing the status bar for example or showing KDE users (which are in the minority btw) the middle finger (aka the stupid GtkFileChooser). Also for extensions: Users who still use XUL extension are in a minority (Mozilla did an analysis about this). I know many people who are even using Firefox without any extensions, most people I know only use an adblocker.

So everything this shows that Mozilla doesn't listen to ALL its users, but I guess it's impossible to satisfy everyone. The majority of Firefox users have already switched to Chrome anyway :(

Re: Opera is Reborn

#207
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, since we all have widescreen monitors (and often multiple monitors) you could just have your messengers in a window next to the browser instead of a sidebar within the browser. Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks, and solution like this is barely usable (hard to keep the windows properly aligned, hard to have them simultaneously on the foreground when other windows co…

I'm on OSX and it magnetically snaps windows together as they get close. Makes it easy to divide ad hoc. As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.

Until messenger apps start using the same, open, protocol, we won't see this.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#208
post #14

Hey opera folks who might be reading this - work on simplifying offline access to web content. I want to be able to maintain ~100 GB of offline data store, full text searchable. Wikipedia, stackexchange\stackoverflow, khan academy, zealdocs and whole bunch of other sources of useful browser renderable web content provide dumps of their data. And then they end up having to build spl apps and extensions and other garba…

There was a time when Opera was not a google chrome skin and offered indexed full page search of local cache of visited page. This was incredibly useful and practical. It also had the option to save the whole web page in a single file. Sadly this kind of feature disappeared when opera moved to a quarterly profit based strategy. The kind of feature you want is achievable today but requires a set of tools beyond a web…

are you talking about the 12.x versions? the pre-Chrome era?
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