In the comment section of this post in the Opera Desktop Team blog, critical comments seem to disappear mysteriously within 24 hours. 😕
I’ve been a Opera user for over a decade and paying when they still charged – and up to version 10.50 I would have paid without hesitation. So it’s not like I’m one of those fanboys who will not accept anyone to criticize their favorite “pet”, but I always liked Opera even when some glitch kept creeping up every now and then.
However, the selective bit rot on their blog gets me thinking. It’s as if the Opera marketing department is weeding through the comments every now and then and simply removes (or hides?) those that are pointing out issues. And at that, issues which haven’t existed up until (and including) version 10.50. But Opera 10.51 which squeezed out some more benchmark points really got unstable. In three completely different configurations and different machines in each case, Opera hung or crashed (showing an error dialog). And this happened not just once but several times throughout the day. 🙁
After my first comment had disappeared from the comment section – leaving only one person quoting a small part of my original comment as proof of its existence – I decided to keep a copy of my second comment. Not a bad idea as it turns out, because it disappeared in a similar manner. Interestingly the original post also featured the description of the crashes, but some fanboys couldn’t help but disagree with these facts. I was always under the impression that agreement or disagreement is more or less limited to opinions, but well … ’nuff said … here follows the highly offensive second comment I wrote which was then subjected to selective bit rot:
Hey prd3, no offense, but I didn’t make up those crashes. Glad it doesn’t crash for you, but that’s not exactly helpful or fixes the crashes for me. They really happened. And they happened on XP SP3, 2003 SP2 and on Vista SP2 x64 (yes, different machines not just one) which I never had in over a decade as an Opera user – and yes, I even bought my license when Opera wasn’t free of charge back in those times. And I would again and again, because I love the usability and the speed and the stability.
Oh, but apparently you’re quoting parts of a non-existent comment, because mine must have been let’s say … *too* honest to be left intact?!
Too bad, because I wasn’t really trying to bash Opera – being a great fan of it and long time user – but trying to point out an issue that seems to be much more pressing than to squeeze out more benchmark points.
Again, I’d rather prefer the stable Opera we got. But backing out now that the world has seen those few more benchmark points is of course harder than it would have been without rushing the release and ensuring the stability for which I have known Opera all these years …
@Meridivs: I think you can enable the old-style menu bar by using the menu item right above „Exit“ after clicking the „O“ to invoke the „main“ menu.
So how about Opera sending me a cease & desist letter now for repeating the same words on my own site? Can you censor my blog, too? 😉
Oh yeah, the point of this post? Well, I want my stable and fast Opera back. I’m willing to pay, but stability is an issue for me. And never came up as an issue except during the period when I used M2. A fast browser is nothing without stability, because otherwise it will just be the fastest crashing/hanging browser.
Let’s hope they’ll fix the bugs, not just the critical comments describing them in future. I’d really hate to have to switch from Opera to something else.
// Oliver