Farewell Opera?
Opera released its first version of Opera 15 via the OperaNext channel. This release was supposed to be the first one with WebKit/Blink as its rendering engine instead of Opera's own Presto engine.
But, as some have feared, it has become clear that Opera developed a completely new browser with a new UI missing almost all the features that made Opera unique. The overwhelming majority of the >1000 commenters on the release post http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/opera-next-15-0-released has big problems with the decisions.
Contrary to what many first thought, this is not a "tech preview" or "Alpha" release - it's the (feature complete) beta of Opera 15. Opera employees make that clear:
- Haavard stated (https://twitter.com/opvard/status/339429877784670209): "Opera 15 is not the final version ever. Future versions will have new features as well." (i.e. this version will not)
- Another employee responded to a user's comment "I want all my features of opera 12 back" with: "I can say for sure that that is not going to happen. Have you seen some of the new stuff? The downloads experience should be much better now, for instance. We’ve focused on the core experience of web browsing."
I (not in any way affiliated with Opera) want to find out more about whether people are really ditching Opera, and if so, why and to which browser they switch.