I dismissed Opera as a replacement for Firefox because it doesn’t do bookmarks. Now I’ve discovered to my intense irritation that WordPress doesn’t do blogrolls anymore. Fortunately, there is a plugin that restores the capability, but for a while this morning the atmosphere near my computer was sulphurous. I have lots of links on the previous site that I want to include here, but there is no obvious way to export them. It looks like I’m going to have to manually reconstruct the blogroll, grr. This will take a while. I am not happy.
But I really don’t understand. Why deprecate bookmarks? What’s wrong with blogrolls? And while I’m kvetching, why the obsession with magazine-style layouts these days? Sure, they look nice, but they’re a pain to navigate, particularly on a dinky laptop screen.
Because the next “gateway” is to force you to visit *their* site or use *their* program to access links. That’s my guess, anyway.
Unfortunately about 9 months ago Opera decided to rip out their proprietary engine and replace with the same one Chrome uses. This was because they couldn’t afford to continue developing a separate engine and remain in business. Unfortunately in the process, they had to deep-six something like 2/3rds of their functionality, including bookmarks (no I don’t understand why). They’ve been very slowly restoring functionality since, but have a long way to go.
Bookmarks were an oddly controversial subject for them where they thought trends had changed and they wanted to do something different based off of speed dial. It wasn’t a very popular decision and I thought they were rebuilding something closer to bookmark functionality.
Opera was my primary browser for over 10 years. Sulfurous would be a good description of my reaction when Opera ripped itself apart and left an unusable mess behind. I just finished transitioning to FireFox with a crap-load of plugins to address things Opera did well that I depend on for day-to-day usage about 2 months ago. Going through that process again does not fill me with joy.