I’ve got one pretty interesting problem which is highly annoying in my opinion. As a fan of Opera, I have of course upgraded immediately to Opera 9.50 when it was released. Experience so far was always good. Not so this time.
First off, I disliked the fact that they have this dark glassy skin as a default now. Well, it may be stylish and nice and all – I don’t like it anyway. Here a comparison (click to enlarge).
Luckily there is a “classic skin”, but it doesn’t come with the installation package anymore. Too bad 😕
But there are two things that completely freaked me out:
- The keyboard shortcut for the file transfer tab was changed from Ctrl+Alt+T to Ctrl+J. I almost never use the right Ctrl key, so this is really inconvenient as it is much further from the left Ctrl to J. Apart from that it was and is one of the most used shortcut in my usage profile. Luckily I can customize it.
- When a download is being stopped or ends with an error, previously you got – upon right click – the options to handle the file, similar to the usual context menu. I.e. copy, cut and most importantly delete. Nowadays I have to go to the location of the interrupted download and delete the file from my file manager. This is definitely something I will miss a lot. One of the reasons, by the way, that I might switch back to 9.27 for the time being.
I liked:
- The improved download dialog.
- The improved status bar (see screenshot above).
But one thing seems to be a true bug and I shall report it to the proper people. On my Windows Vista Ultimate x64 I am used to switch to full screen (F11) when reading some pages (zoomed in) while leaning back on the sofa or so. However, other tabs are usually still open in the background. It seems like the new Opera completely freaks out, if some kind of popup is being opened (by default into the background) and the popup has some Flash stuff on it while I am looking at another page in full screen mode. What happens then is more than unpleasant. The whole screen starts flashing white and it is basically impossible to switch to another program, because this alleged bug is stealing focus. You can only get some rest for your eyes by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del. From there you should launch the task manager – but be prepared to get the white flashing desktop again. Now you need some patience. Use Alt+Tab to win back focus to the task manager and wait. At some point it will stop flashing, but the desktop will not get repainted (even if you used Win+M or similar at any point before). Now it’s time to kill Opera the hard way, by going to the respective tab and killing the process. Make sure not to give up focus by using the “Applications” tab and focusing Opera, it’ll just start flashing again. Instead use the “Processes” tab, look for opera.exe in the list and kill it. That’s one nasty issue …
I had it several times already and the only common thing was that I was looking at some page in full screen. But it doesn’t seem happen always, but especially it doesn’t happen right away.
// Oliver
PS: As a software developer I know how much work usually goes into products of this complexity. Nevertheless this is my opinion on the changes from 9.27.