Thiemos Archiv
- Friday, 2014-05-16 01:36
- Why are you still using Opera 12?
There is nothing wrong with using Opera 12. It's a recent browser. It was updated to version 12.17 in April 2014. That's just a few weeks ago.
Using so called »major« version numbers is completely pointless nowadays. The original development team spent 19 years, from 1994 to 2013, to develop Operas first twelve major versions. And as a Opera 12 fan I can assure you it was worth the time. Then they started over, used the product name for something different, even skipped some numbers completely and increased the number to 21 in less than a year.
So hell, no, Opera 12 is not »9 major versions numbers behind«. Even if you do not count the security updates, Opera 12.10 is only one and a half year old.
For comparison: The first non-preview release of Internet Explorer 10 is older.
Sure, Opera 12 starts getting old. So gets IE 10. We all must move forward and even I as a deeply hooked Opera 12 fan had no other choice and started using a Chromium build in parallel. But still, one misconception always annoyed and keeps annoying me: You just can't blame the browser if a website stops working. Hell, the browser doesn't change. It's the website that changes and stops working.
Opera always was ahead of it's time and is still not at a point where it falls behind. Some of it's HTML 5 features are still better than what's in the current Firefox version. Opera 12 supports transparent colors, gradients and transitions, for example. Sure, there is no way to make recent games work in Opera 12. But if we are talking about content driven sites like Wikipedia it's still an absolutely valid, flexible, feature-rich and heavily customizable browser that does exactly what it's supposed to do: Let me edit Wikipedia.
I don't care if a gradient is missing or a transition looks odd. But using and editing Wikipedia in Opera 12 must be possible for at least another year. Kommentare zu diesem Beitrag können per E-Mail an den Autor gesandt werden.
Schon ziemlich unschön daß der einzige Browser der sich wirklich dem Nutzer anpaßt nicht mehr weiterentwickelt wird, zumal die Konkurrenz diesbezüglich allesamt Rückschritte in der gleichen Richtung machen und bald alle gleich aussehen und anfühlen.
HTML-/SVG-seitig ist Opera nach wie vor oben auf, für textlastige Seiten wie Foren oder Blogs wird das wohl auch noch eine ganze Weile so bleiben. Eine überzeugende Alternative hab ich bislang jedenfalls noch nicht gefunden.
Hoffen wir nur daß der Trend zu app-artigen Einseitenwebanwendungen voller skriptbasierter Extrawürste nicht übermäßig um sich greift, denn da merkt man deutlich daß diese praktisch nur noch auf FF und Chrome ausgerichtet werden =P
In case I understand the above entry and comments right, it's actually not a matter of version numbers but a matter of features. No commenter mentioned that he/she has a problem with the new version system. All of them were talking about features and why or why not to use Opera 12. I'm not sure if there's a serious person out there, who believes that Opera 24 is "twice as good" as version 12 is. And if so, well ...
Your previous post relates to politics and decision making in open projects. This is indeed a complicated matter. Especially with Mozilla since they grow from a small team of enthusiastics to a large organization with international influence. Heartbleed has shown us how difficult it can be to run an open project. I guess no one is interested that a similar Fukushima happens to any other free project.
So how to control the millions of ideas, suggestions, wishes, complaints and ... so .. on ... in large open projects? How to decide for a direction and keep that direction for as long as necessary? How to introduce changes since we all know that people are very nervous with that?
I don't know.
Actually, I think there is no global answer. It's politics. And therefore, it's a matter of getting the most supporters, negotiating a compromise and all things like that. But, yes, it will be hard work to get your opinion realized. You want to be a part of that project? These are the rules. Make use of them and get your ideas done. (This reminds me of Lobo's speech (German) were he is asking the community to act like politicians and not like frustrated individuals.)
My advise to every community member in any free project: keep fighting for your interests fairly but learn to accept compromises, that do not match 100 % with your desires. Consider a fork to be the VERY LAST option to go your way.