Posts by Frith

I'm Switching To Firefox

I've used Opera for about 3 years but am now installing Firefox 3.6 since everything about 10.50 is a total disaster. As many people have pointed out it has been rushed out and is very buggy. If I upgrade from 10.10 all I get is a blank window so clearly it's not handling my profile correctly, even though the beta versions worked fine when I upgraded from my 10.10 profile. There are a considerable number of people experiencing equally critical issues on the Opera forum so things really don't look good.

The default interface is an abomination and mirrors closely the design principles of Windows 7. I cannot understand why they're trying to mimic the Windows 7 interface when Windows XP has eight times the number of users Windows 7 has. From the number of users it seems that the vast majority of the people prefer XP so it makes little sense to aim your product at the minority using Windows 7.

Usually I don't care what they do with the interface since one of the key features of Opera is that the interface can easily be customised to your preferences. Sadly 10.50 seems to have abandoned this principle and many of the new features are forced upon you and cannot be changed back to how they were:

- The recent search results cannot be disabled (just who is this feature aimed at? Do people really search for the same thing over and over again?)

- The old style drop down search list with the more densely packed list and no "customise searches" is gone

- Search and password manager can't be changed so it they appear in a window rather than in a bar

- Side panel button can no longer be put in the tab bar (the outline appears like it should work but after you drag it there the button doesn't stay)

I haven't used Opera 10.50 that much and would likely find more if I used it for longer. It may be that they never had time to add these customisations while rushing 10.50 out the door so I'll give the next release after 10.50 a try to see if they've fixed the bugs and improved the interface customisation. For now I'm going to switch to Firefox since Firefox 3.6 is far better than Opera 10.50 in terms of stability and usability.

I wonder how much damage Opera has done to their brand with this botched 10.50 release. I for one have lost a lot of faith in them.