Apparently this new Opera browser is a new version from scratch. Started using it yesterday.
I love it. I fucking love it.
Google Chrome has been pissing me off for so long... the worst has been how it handles gifs. I can't browse NeoFAG without gifs being displayed properly.
The other issue I had was the ambiguous new tab button. They got rid of the + sign on that button so now you have this grey, slanted, ambiguous-looking rectangular button. Why get rid of the + sign? Why fucking do that? Just the THOUGHT of someone in charge of Chrome development thinking that shit was a good idea made me not want to use it anymore. FUCK THAT SHIT. Fucking amateur designers. Fuck I hate google sometimes. How many shit products do they have with the few good stuff they have? Lots. Lots motherfucker lots.
Anyways. About Opera 15. It runs reasonably well. It seems to be ever so slightly less responsive than Chrome though. One thing I noticed and thought was ingenious: clicking the x on a tab when it's the only tab doesn't close the browser... it clears the tab. In other words, it makes the only tab you wanted to close into a new tab. Fuck that's fucking
brilliant. So instead of having two buttons that both do the same thing (close the browser), you have that button to close the tab become a new tab, if it's the only tab. It almost makes too much sense. And it's something those shitbirds at Google would've never come up with.
Bookmarks. No bookmarks. Only speed dial. I love it. It's a great idea because it's a natural evolution of bookmarks. I already used bookmarks like speed dial in Chrome, so the transition has been smooth for me.
Another interesting thing about the new tab window is the background. Google Chrome defaults to a white background but Opera has this wallpaper thing going on. I actually like it. I always hate fancy looking shit like this (like how bing.com has a background and google's search homepage doesn't, which is why I prefer google's homepage). But here it makes sense. It's ever so slightly jarring to have a new tab window be completely white, beacuse in all likelihood, you're switching from some web page which has some graphics to that new tab, the new tab that has no graphics... that slight transition is easier when you have graphics on that new tab window. Brilliance. Norwegian brilliance.
Things I don't like yet: preferences is a web page, I hate that shit. The opera menu is a proper menu, so having the preferences part be a page just makes things look inconsistent. I mean why do that other than try to be clever? Fuck that shit. It's no surprise google started that trend. Fuck Google. Firefox has a normal preferences window and it's much nicer.
Extensions. I don't give a shit about these. I don't even use anything to block ads. Learn to block ads with your brains, feggits.
So, yeah. Not perfect. But vastly superior to the steaming pile of ones and zeros that is Google Chrome. Anyone who has been annoyed with Chrome the past few months should give Opera 15 a whirl.
http://www.opera.comI, for one, bow to my Norwegian designer overlords.
