good news

I don't like the new version of Opera (that's a browser)*, I did like the old version, in the days when MS was giving I.E. away for free I paid for Opera! Yes Paid for an internet browser. I'm not alone, it seems that Jon von Tetzchner, founder and former CEO of, errr, Opera, agrees with me. In fact he's already on the case. Yay! There is hope. Not just hope there's a beta out, I'm using it to write this. Its a bit early for a review but...

OK so I had to enable the "single key shortcuts option" when Playing with the Beta. It immediately enabled 0 and 9. These were the old old old opera zoom keys. My fingers will remember. This is a great start, old skool Opera behavior is fine by me. (zooming is a particular bugbear of mine, I have a trackpoint with no mouse wheel and a trackball with no mouse wheel.

[EDIT: Backspace however doesn't work which is annoying, and can't be assigned as it merley deletes existing shortcuts.]

[EDIT: I pressed F4 and it worked woo! Yay Hoopla!]

Its not got its own engine, old opera had its own "presto" engine. Vivaldi like new opera uses blink, the google chrome engine. The Web is a bit of a mess, and writing an engine to make it display properly is tricky, ask Microsoft they've never been able to do it. Since the demise of old Opera most browsers inducing mobile browsers use either webkit or blink, Firefox has its own as does Microsoft's Impotent Explorer, though its possible this is actually powered by cat sick. Goodness knows what M$ edge browser uses, I'm and advocate of freedom of speech, but Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to write a browser. it caused too much trouble last time.

On the negative side it seems to have taken its design ethos from Windows 10, you know how much I like that. [Edit: one up on Windows 10. You can set a Dark theme and still read it, Windows 10 can't do that]

Any way I digress, if Opera Jon can do again what he did before and make Vivaldi what Opera was I will cheer him on. In fact shut up and take my money. Where's the donate button.

You can download the “browser for our friends” here.

More on Vivaldi from theRegister here.

* If you don't know what a Browser is this post is not for you.