Very unhappy with the new Opera 10.5x
Hi all,
I have been a committed Opera user since version 6.0. I liked Opera enough in those days to purchase a licence for it. Opera has come a long way since then: through the unlovely but overdue updates that 7.0 brought, more of the same with 8.x, and then the supreme stability and near-ultimate usability that came along with 9.x and the even better 10.x.
Until now. I am very, very unhappy with 10.5x.
I'm not going to complain about stability or performance issues - frankly, I don't know whether these exist in 10.5x or not, and I'll never find out unless and until the user interface is fixed.
Here, try a little experiment with me.
1: Start up Opera 10.5
2: Switch the tab behaviour to the standard behaviour pioneered by Opera all those years ago and still not improved upon - that's where you have a single close-tab "X" and it is always in the same place, near the top right of screen. (This was always the default behaviour until about Version 10.0. Now you need to set it yourself with tools >> preferences >> advanced >> tabs >> additional tab options >> untick "show close button on each tab".)
3: try to close a tab. You can't. There is no way to close a tab in 10.5x unless you go through the menu (file >> close tab) or use a keyboard shortcut.
I'm sorry, but this is simply unacceptably poor user interface design. It is unusable. It presents me with the following options:
1: Use the Firefox/IE style tab-close-X-on-every-tab interface option (which isn't broken in 10.5x). That's a bad choice. (a) it wastes space on a crowded tab bar; (b) it's ugly; (c) by far the most important, it takes away consistency - to close a tab, you have to click in various different places along the tab bar instead of simply clicking in the same place every time you want to perform the same action. Same place, same action - that is good ergonomic design, fast and simple, and Opera got it right many years ago. Why break it now?
2: Dump Opera and go to a browser that does have a non-broken interface with a single-location close-tab button. The obvious choice is SeaMonkey. (For those unfamiliar with SeaMonkey, it is the new name for the old Mozila all-in-one browser, which is still updated and still going strong.) SeaMonkey takes longer to start up than Opera, is very stable but not as good as Opera (nothing beats Opera for stability), and is clunky and practical rather than good-looking. Still, it does at least have a user interface that isn't actally broken, and I'll take ugly-but-works over pretty-but-broken every time.
3: Given that Opera 10.5x is going to inflict a Google Chrome/Firefox style user interface on me, why not just use Firefox or Chrome in the first place?
4: Stay with Opera 10.10. This is by far the best choice right now, but sooner or later, security issues are going to make 10.10 unusable. Especially because 10.10 isn't going to be an unusual choice - just running my eye over the front page of this forum, I see other users planning to do the exact same thing. So, sooner or later, 10.10 will be targeted, and I'll need to migrate to another browser well before them.
5: Fix the interface! Best answer by a mile. Please, please give us back our close-tab "X".
A little more about me. I run a small computer shop in south-east Australia. For many years now, we have had a policy, anytime we build a new machine or do any significant work on an existing one, of loading safe, modern browsers and a modern email client. Unless the customer requests otherwise, we always set the default browser to whichever one the senior technician (that's me) judges, all things considered, is the best at any particular time. Many years ago that was Netscape, then we went to Opera 6.0, then Mozilla when it came out, and then back to Opera again when the big improvement happened after the unlovely 7.0 and 8.0. Was it 8.5? Or 9.0? 8.5, I think.
Ever since then, we have been setting Opera as the default browser on all the machines we work on. Customers are, of course, welcome to chance the default to whatever they please. We discourage them selecting IE on security grounds, and used to find that some stayed with Opera, a few preferred SeaMonkey, and quite a lot wound up using Firefox - probably because it gets more publicity and their friends recommended it.
But since Speeddial came along, many more people are staying with Opera as the default. It has been really, really noticable. No two ways about it: users love speed dial.
Unfortunately, the new Opera interface is too significantly broken for us to be able to honestly recommend it or set it as default browser anymore. I had hoped and expected that the broken close-tab function was just an oversight which would be fixed in the first 10.5x bug-fix release. But it is still broken in 10.51, so it looks as though it's permanent.
We'll give Opera a bit longer to see if they fix it, but if it is still broken in the next minor release, we will have to switch our standard browser over to SeaMonkey.
For myself, I'll keep on using 10.10 for a bit longer, and keep on waiting for a fix in 10.5x, but it looks as though it's goodbye to Opera for me as well. This makes me very sad: Opera has been a fantastic browser for a long, long time and I'll miss it. Indeed, I care enough about this issue to have taken time I can't spare out from my busy working day to join up here and write this long post, in the faint hope that someone at Opera will read it and do something to fix the broken 10.5x close tab function. It's only one function, but it is one of the most frequently-used functions of all and very important
) where some Mod said they are aware, and are considering/working on a solution?
