I don't know why I would ever switch from Chrome or Safari to Opera. On a Mac, Opera still has text rendering issues (http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j), scrolling stutters, and there's a noticeable difference in page load speed (Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer).
For me, it is because it simply works straight out of the box, with all the features I use all the time.
For me, it is several of the following reasons:
* mouse gestures.
* the speed dial.
* the ease to create custom url-bar searches.
* thumbnail images of tabs (to check a potentially nsfw link at work).
* in page link or text search using ',' or '.'
* the ability to search for links in the sidebar, and select all of them (e.g. to copy to a wget script, etc.)
* the ease to customize the content block.
... and probably other stuff, which doesn't come to mind.
Also, and this is important: I'm not trying to convince you here. Just pointing out that some will say the exact thing on the switch from Opera to Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with good reasons of their own. Whatever floats your boat.
Also, mind you, I have firefox and chrome installed. Firefox I almost never use, and chrome is useful to see shiny WebGL stuff, which has a lot more support. Sometimes also to see new CSS-demos that are broken in Opera (mostly because of lazy developers who don't include the -o- extensions).
Awesome feature. I hate that other browsers ask you to resubmit a form when navigating back. Opera just shows you the cached page that it bad before. Combining that with the mouse flip gesture, browsing is a breeze. In Chrome you have to click BACK or use BACKSPACE (or a mouse with a dedicated nav button). In Opera, I click the right then the left mouse buttons and I'm back at the previous page. Alternate to go back forward.
This might also be a font-issue. Most of the time websites embed different font-types like eot, ttf, woff and svg. But some types lack font-hinting. It depends on the order in the CSS file which supported font browsers will use.
Care to expand this? A quick look at the linked page shows a bunch of under the hood improvements that will appeal to web developers, but as a user I remain ignorant of why people use Opera.
To be clear I used to use Opera back when they where the only browser with tabs, but that was close to a decade ago.
Features that has been there for ages. It's not like they are essential to have in a good browser but once you get used to them it's painful to switch.
For me it is configurability (if that's a word). Primarily ability to configure controls out of the box. For keyboard, mouse and mouse gestures. This includes dozens of custom actions, even javascript, all of which can be combined using logical conjunctions. No other browser I tried allows you this, not even close.
Configuring the UI is pretty straight forward as well, and if there is anything not available through the UI you can always dig into config files.
Some other features it's hard to browse without: global and per-site configuration of: blocked content, pop-ups, javascript, cookies, plugins, on demand plugins, images, custom layouts, .... edit: and back button actually works as expected
That's just a small subset of dozens of features I miss in other browsers. I don't use any of those extra apps (reader, mail, torrent, irc, ...) but they don't bother me either.
And what I miss in Opera? Switching tabs by their position (alt/ctrl+number in many tabbed applications). That's it. What bothers me is that many sites do not work properly or are completely blocked in Opera. The former is due to low market share of Opera, the latter is because people are dicks (hi google). Just write that it's not supported and I won't call your support line, don't make me change my user agent all the time (luckily I can configure this per-site :P).
edit: Totally forgot this but other comment pointed it out: Opera can handle a lot of tabs, no other browser I tried could do this: memory, performance and UI wise.
Not really. I've told countless people about how Opera really is the best browser, by far, and how people using Chrome and Firefox are stuck in the stone-age of Internet Explorer 6. I'm getting tired to repeat it.
Screw it, I'll do a quick run. Depending on how good your computer is, Chrome will buckle (freeze your computer, in my case) sooner or later after you keep increasing the number of tabs, due to the one process per tab design flaw. That does not usually happen with Opera (unless you have some very demanding pages, which doesn't usually happen to me), it will keep going as long as you have the RAM to supply it. Right now opera:cpu shows me a round number of 115 tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage, plus the plugin wrapper grabbing an additional 400 megs. Given that this particular computer has 12 GB of RAM I think it's very reasonable.
Of course, I don't have a rocket computer at home but the performance is very good as well on a mediocre laptop.
Now, what good does it do to have 115 tabs if you can't see them or switch between them at your wish? In Chrome you have one line of tabs that keep pushing against another, and at 115 tabs you could not select your tab properly, nevermind reading the tab title.
In Opera I just configured my tab bar to wrap to multiple lines and aligned it vertically on the left side. I also have tab groups that work very nicely to minimize unnecessary clutter.
I can also turn the tab bar off altogether and move between tabs with ctrl + tab or right mouse button + wheel, or hold ctrl + tab + mouse click.
The possibilities for customization are so numerous I can't be bothered to describe them all. Opera is a true browser and it has all these features out of the box without getting in your way.
You're a hacker? Where's your curiosity? Explore Opera's features (like mouse gestures, keyboard navigation, and so on) and see for yourself.
And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked (and if that didn't change it's retarded, although I would understand the reasoning, they don't want to encourage you to keep your tabs open because the browser might buckle under the pressure of 10 open tabs). So really, feel free to keep open as many tabs as you like.
You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware.
I have enable 'plugins only on demand', so no Flash player will be loaded without my explicit consent. Again, this is out of the box. Also, content blocker. And so on and so forth.
Apparently my Firefox looks very similar to your Opera, everything from left-handed tab bar with groups and plugins on demand to scrolling through tabs with RMB+mouse wheel. I'm literally using all of the features you mention. I think you can set up Chrome in mostly the same way.
Of course you need to use extensions while Opera does it all out of the box. I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem. If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.
I think I usually use only between 30 and 60 tabs, though it's easy to lose count with tree style tabs and I've certainly never hit a ceiling where things seemed to slow down. But maybe Opera really shines in super-heavy browsing loads. Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.
> Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.
Not so. Firefox and Chrome come out of the box with more or less the same features as Internet Explorer 6, which is stone-age browsing for me. Sure, you can add extensions and add-ons but they (at least for Firefox) slow down your browser, take time to set up (unless you use a portable version you carry everywhere with you), may be a security risk (as history has shown) and are nowhere near as refined as what Opera provides (I really disliked the All-in-one gestures add-on in Firefox, although you can still customize it until it somehow behaves like Opera's implementation, sort of). And really, Opera has so many features that I like it would take a very long time to have an identical setup for Firefox. Maybe someone should develop an 'Opera' extension.
> I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features
What does it matter if you don't use those features and they don't get in the way? For instance you have a torrent downloader embedded in Opera. I don't use it, I never see it, it does not slow down my browser. What is the problem?
> If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.
Chrome and Firefox have the option option to sync your extensions, as well as bookmarks etc. and settings. I just have to login to Chrome or Firefox on a new computer and it's pretty much identical.
Contrast that to Opera Link, which as far as I can find doesn't sync extensions or settings, so I'd have to configure it and change all the default settings I don't like.
I'm pretty darned sure IE6 doesn't have the ability to sync settings.
Can Chrome display your bookmarks at the side in "split view", with bookmark folders and bookmark folder contents in their own pane? Really? Thought so...
> "I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem."
Well sure, and Opera has extensions, too. It just does some things out of the box that you can't even do with extensions for other browsers, OR for which you have to pay the prices of longer startup and constantly checking for extension updates before starting up.
FF (and Opera, and all browser) extensions are great; as long as you don't have many dozens of them. Then you really really want those features done in core code, not in Javascript and what have you.
Depending on how good your computer is, Opera will buckle sooner or later if you have very demanding pages. That does not usually happen with Chrome (unless you have a huge number of tabs, which doesn't usually happen to me).
Our usages differ quite significantly. Why does that make Chrome stone-age?
"You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware."
Plugins that are available to pretty much every browser aren't a compelling argument for superiority (http://www.ghostery.com/download), just developer awesomeness. I notice that under Opera it says "/Almost/ full detection", so it's not even as fully featured as on other browsers.
If you're allowing plugins, I'm not sure I can think of a feature in Opera that you can't acheive in Firefox. But of course the argument is that Opera gives you all of them out of the box (whether you need them or not), in which case you can't use widely cross-browser plugins to try and bolster your argument.
"And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked"
I almost never want to restore the last session, and when I do Firefox and Chrome (and Opera if you change the default settings) give me the option to without forcing it upon me.
A lot of the defaults in Opera seem to be geared around managing a large number of tabs. I don't have a large number of tabs. I have a few windows with max. a dozen tabs each and I use bookmarks and other tools to manage things I want to keep around long term. I know lots of people who do the same. Yours and my use cases differ. That doesn't make Opera or Chrome or Firefox poorer, it just means different design trade-offs have been made.
I used Opera almost exclusively from version 5 up to around version 11. Now I switch between the Opera Next preview builds and Chromium nightly builds.
As a heavy user of both browsers, I can say for sure that all of the things you mention work as well or better in Chromium.
It's also funny to me that you tout Opera's customization ability, then deride the other browsers for having plugins. What's a plugin if not a convenient form of customization? It's even more funny because Chrome can be customized so much better than Opera. There's no Opera equivalent of Vimium, for example.
And "You're a hacker?" Well, Chromium is open source, it doesn't get more hacker friendly than that. Not that I care.
I switched to Firefox a year or so ago, because Opera (both on Windows and Mac) became too unstable for me with 150+ tabs open. Since then, I have become accustomed to some Firefox extensions, mainly NoScript and RequestPolicy. Also, Firefox has an option to only load tabs when they are clicked on, which makes startup a lot faster (and more stable). If Opera has such an option now, I might switch back.
> And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked
Chrome's shortcut for 'reopen recently closed tab' is ctrl-shift-t. If you open a fresh browser window and do that, you get your tabs from the last session.
I use tabs instead of bookmarks. Opera also has tab groups, so I can drag one tab to another to create a collapsible group of tabs related to a particular project. It's not unusual for me to have a handful of tab groups with a dozen of tabs in each, plus half a dozen of regular tabs for what I'm currently reading. The only down side with this is that browsing is slower when I just have started my browser and I'm waiting for all the tabs to load, but I don't close my browser that often. [Edit: apparently there are startup speed improvements in Opera 12 specifically for the many-tabs-open use case]
I also use the tab stacking feature, so many related tabs are grouped together. Right now I have 2 full column of tabs and groups on the left side of my screen. It's actually very comfortable, although sometimes I clean up a lot of them. Like another user said here, I use them as bookmarks, or in my case as "read-later" lists, so I never completely forget about something I want to do or read.
I think it's a matter of habit. You can't use so many tabs if you don't have (at least) a multiline tab bar, preferably one aligned vertically.
Download manager, BitTorrent support, very good email application included, feed reader, Opera Turbo speeds up browsing if you are on a slow connection by compressing everything on Opera's servers (optional), integrated IRC client.
The bookmark management, hands down. Other browsers are for testing and sites that don't work well in Opera; while Opera is for organizing all of the things, especially with things like nicknames for bookmarks and created searches. It also has plenty of themes which actually change how much space stuff takes up... hmm, it's kinda like KDE versus Gnome, with Opera being KDE ^^ There may be apps for Gnome to make it more configurable, but that's just not the same...
