[sc:internet-category ]Opera has released their first preview of their Chrome based browser. The next day they also posted a follow-up to answer some outstanding questions.
First off, let me just say I’ve been a fan of Opera for a long time, back when it was not free software I PAID for it, happily. I’ve been using it ever since and looked forward to each new release. Opera 12 is great software.
Opera 15 looks to be a disaster.
It looks more like version 1.5 than 15 and that’s obviously due to the work required to move to WebKit. Let’s start with the obvious deficiencies:
- No bookmarks
- No Opera Link
- No home page
- No history list
- No status bar
- No customization of the menus
- No theme’s
- No Dragonfly
- No customization of the backgrounds in settings and speeddial
- No search engine customization (can’t add or remove them)
This makes it impossible for me to use in day-to-day browsing and it doesn’t look any of those items will be addressed in the full release. The comment in the follow-up post of “more features will come in future versions” could be interpreted either way, future versions of the beta or future versions of Opera (aka 16, 17, etc.).
If they don’t get their act together before 15’s release, I won’t be upgrading and might even drop Opera altogether. After all, why choose Opera 15, with its anemic feature list over Chrome when they use the same engine?
P.S. Yes, obviously Chrome has its issues too and that whole, let Google track everything you do on the web, thing is a problem, but at least it’s matured to the point of usability.
