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I haven't yet tested 12.10, but so far every single version ever since the Qt abandonment has horrible usability. This is due to Opera nowadays using the gtk theme, and my theme being dark, Opera interfaces with it really badly.

For example, Opera takes the button bg color from the gtk theme (dark), but the button text color from the site's CSS (black). You can probably imagine that black on black is hardly winning usability awards

I had a bug open on this, reported way back in the 10.60 days I think, but got no replies. No idea what the number was.

I don't get why people are so obsessed with market share (it always comes up in the comments when there's news about Opera).. We have slightly more than 200 million active users on Opera Mini or Mobile (~20% mobile market btw), around 70 million on desktop IIRC and I don't know how many who use Opera technology in their gaming consoles, tvs and other devices but quite a few, and it generates enough income to pay our salaries. It might sound a bit cheesy, but to me it doesn't matter if we're smaller than Google, Apple and Microsoft, or even Mozilla, as long as it stays an awesome place to work and our users are happy.

@Xilanaz I know what you're talking about, our handling of bug reports could be better. Is there any problem, which still exists in 12.10, in particular that you were thinking of?

There are a few long-standing bugs in Opera/Linux that might be worth looking into. I no longer have the bug id, but there is one particular bug with font-rendering that is driving me crazy: Opera always uses embedded bitmaps in fonts, even if they are disabled in fontconfig and Xresources. Steps to reproduce:

Several text elements are rendered using the heavily aliased _bitmap_ version of Calibri, instead of the proper antialiased version which is seen in Firefox and Chrome. This might not sound like a big deal, but any site using webfonts can potentially display similar problems.

* Embedded bitmaps are useful for East Asian and other complex scripts. They are completely pointless in latin scripts when using modern font rendering techniques.

Another quite annoying bug is that Opera/Mac always enables the discrete GPU when it starts, impacting battery life and increasing temperature. Safari, Firefox and Chrome do not exhibit this behavior, so this is something particular to Opera/Mac.

Disclaimer: These are just my own comments, and I do not speak for Opera as a company.

Originally Posted by uid313

(1) Why is the web open but Opera isn't?
(2) Why is Firefox and Chrome open source, but Opera isn't?
(3) Why isn't Opera open source?

1. You're comparing a set of standards with a piece of software. That's like saying "Why is Linux open but [my pc] isn't?".

2. Google (Chrome) makes money from advertising, Apple (Safari) from selling overpriced hardware and Microsoft (IE) from their crappy OS. Mozilla (Firefox) has always been an open source company and thus formed their business model accordingly. You should be glad that we're not trying to do exactly the same thing as Mozilla, because then we would have to fight for a share of their current sources of income. Instead we try to fill different niches.

3. I'm far from involved in these decisions, but I assume it's because it doesn't fit our current business model.

And since I just looked it up, Opera has more employees and bigger annual revenue than Mozilla btw, so I don't think we're doing that bad despite our small (desktop) market share

Nobody has been able to reproduce this problem here. Have you got Opera Turbo enabled? I know there was a problem with the WebP decoder (Turbo reencodes some images as WebP) which caused similar behaviour.

@Curaga
I'm not a desktop developer, and I just got some urgent stuff I need to work with so I haven't had time to look at it. Have you tried switching to another Opera theme (Appearance... menu)? Otherwise you can try going to Preferences... > Advaced > Content > Style Options and disable "Enable styling of forms". If that fails, try going to "opera:config" and look under the Colors and Interface Colors sections. Also be sure to use the latest version because it might be a fixed bug.

@BlackStar
That sounds quite complicated, I'll look at it when I have more time.

I haven't yet tested 12.10, but so far every single version ever since the Qt abandonment has horrible usability. This is due to Opera nowadays using the gtk theme, and my theme being dark, Opera interfaces with it really badly.

For example, Opera takes the button bg color from the gtk theme (dark), but the button text color from the site's CSS (black). You can probably imagine that black on black is hardly winning usability awards

I had a bug open on this, reported way back in the 10.60 days I think, but got no replies. No idea what the number was.

As far as I'm aware, Opera has not dropped any QT integration. The toolkit integration is separated from the main executable, and on Gentoo it's controlled by the kde and gtk use flags. With kde use flag it installs the /usr/lib64/opera/liboperakde4.so plugin, while the gtk use flag installs /usr/lib64/opera/liboperagtk2.so and /usr/lib64/opera/liboperagtk3.so

If you're missing the kde4 one bug your distribution about it, or check if it's not part of different package. Or if you have all of them installed and the gtk one gets picked you could delete the gtk ones. I'm not sure how to choose the plugin being used as all my installs are KDE only so I had proper integration by default.