A couple of years ago I wrote (here and here) about how I used Google Sidebar and the Opera web-browser as as my main windows on the internet. At the time I wrote those posts Google Sidebar was set to be killed off, and I was wondering what I might find to replace it. Up to that point my use of RSS feeds was primarily news-based, with a few Twitter accounts and 'blog alerts thrown into a simple index of headlines. The demise of Google Sidebar led me to Google Reader and a centralised feed reader experience with all my content delivered on a plate. No longer did I visit sites ad hoc and on the offchance: Google Reader brought the sites to me!
Opera took the burden of other aspects of my Google Sidebar: the notepad and the Twitter feed in particular. I developed and improved the lists I used in Seesmic, and this became my new source of news headlines. When Seesmic was killed off (briefly) in 2012, I jumped to the near-identical Tweetdeck and tweaked my lists some more. My first column contains news, current affairs and silliness. My second is full of librarians (now just active UK librarian individuals, to keep within Twitter's list-length limits). My third is arts and archives, plus library organisations and librarians from further afield (it lights up at night when the Americans wake up). My fourth is a digest of my favourite tweeters (with an extra-special cadre of quiet but cherished twitterers also being redirected as texts to my mobile 'phone)...
On single-monitor computers, I run Tweetdeck in Opera's side-panel, but recently I've been lucky enough to have two monitors, so Tweetdeck often gets one to itself. It has become a great big side-panel of its own.
Google Reader got axed recently, so now I'm using Old Reader, which is pretty much exactly the same. It briefly got axed too, but not for very long.
The linchpin in my internet activities remains the Opera 12 browser. I've been using Opera for over a decade (albeit with a brief Mozilla flirtation when Opera 7 was launched). It is not a browser with a huge market share, which means that some web sites don't work as well as they should, but these issues are substantially less than they were in the early days when you had to carry Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape around with you at all times. It lacks the grinding clunkiness of Firefox and the hectoring twitchiness of IE. It may have lost its speed record to Chrome, but makes up for it by being an infinitely customisable Swiss Army Knife rather than a simple plastic fork. Don't get me wrong, I think Chrome is a fine piece of kit, but it's a bit Fisher Price and it's too hard to get the back off.
The added functionality of Opera is particularly useful at work. Let's take a screengrab (this is of my home set-up, but work isn't too different):
Box 1 contains some bells and whistles I use now and again. Many of these tools have their parallels in other browsers, and most are third party extensions. At work I have less of these and I keep them in slightly different places. There's a pixel ruler (handy when making web-pages), a timer to tell me how long I've been staring at different web sites (Tweetdeck has clocked up nearly 200 hours this year at home), an image indexer (handy when looking at image galleries), a tool that lets me draw red lines about the place (very good for teaching sessions), a translator, my Pinterest pin, and the Talis reading lists bookmarklet tool. There's also an option to enforce my own style-sheet on a page, so for instance if I'm using Old Reader in a small window and want to maximise my viewing space, I have set up a hacked style-sheet that removes the top menu bars:
Opera took the burden of other aspects of my Google Sidebar: the notepad and the Twitter feed in particular. I developed and improved the lists I used in Seesmic, and this became my new source of news headlines. When Seesmic was killed off (briefly) in 2012, I jumped to the near-identical Tweetdeck and tweaked my lists some more. My first column contains news, current affairs and silliness. My second is full of librarians (now just active UK librarian individuals, to keep within Twitter's list-length limits). My third is arts and archives, plus library organisations and librarians from further afield (it lights up at night when the Americans wake up). My fourth is a digest of my favourite tweeters (with an extra-special cadre of quiet but cherished twitterers also being redirected as texts to my mobile 'phone)...
On single-monitor computers, I run Tweetdeck in Opera's side-panel, but recently I've been lucky enough to have two monitors, so Tweetdeck often gets one to itself. It has become a great big side-panel of its own.
Google Reader got axed recently, so now I'm using Old Reader, which is pretty much exactly the same. It briefly got axed too, but not for very long.
The linchpin in my internet activities remains the Opera 12 browser. I've been using Opera for over a decade (albeit with a brief Mozilla flirtation when Opera 7 was launched). It is not a browser with a huge market share, which means that some web sites don't work as well as they should, but these issues are substantially less than they were in the early days when you had to carry Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape around with you at all times. It lacks the grinding clunkiness of Firefox and the hectoring twitchiness of IE. It may have lost its speed record to Chrome, but makes up for it by being an infinitely customisable Swiss Army Knife rather than a simple plastic fork. Don't get me wrong, I think Chrome is a fine piece of kit, but it's a bit Fisher Price and it's too hard to get the back off.
The added functionality of Opera is particularly useful at work. Let's take a screengrab (this is of my home set-up, but work isn't too different):
Examining a similar image in a previous blogpost using Dragonfly
Box 1 contains some bells and whistles I use now and again. Many of these tools have their parallels in other browsers, and most are third party extensions. At work I have less of these and I keep them in slightly different places. There's a pixel ruler (handy when making web-pages), a timer to tell me how long I've been staring at different web sites (Tweetdeck has clocked up nearly 200 hours this year at home), an image indexer (handy when looking at image galleries), a tool that lets me draw red lines about the place (very good for teaching sessions), a translator, my Pinterest pin, and the Talis reading lists bookmarklet tool. There's also an option to enforce my own style-sheet on a page, so for instance if I'm using Old Reader in a small window and want to maximise my viewing space, I have set up a hacked style-sheet that removes the top menu bars:
Box 2 contains my trusty search engines. At home these are Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and Google (plus a host of others on a dropdown tab). At work I have Wikipedia, the library catalogue, Google Scholar and Google, (plus various specialist catalogue searches on the dropdown: I've made particular use of the "periodicals by title" search).
Box 3 is my side-panel: very handy for keeping notes (the one depicted appears to be full of code I've been using while working on the university's LibGuides). It can also display web-pages (usually Tweetdeck). I've dabbled with using Opera for email and RSS too, but it's a bit too basic for my tastes!
And then there's Box 4 on the screengrab: Opera Dragonfly. I've been using this a lot, lately, while I've been working on prettifying the LibGuides. Dragonfly is Opera's built-in DOM inspector, and it allows me to peel apart a web page, component by component, to see what makes it tick. If I want to know what colour this font is, for example, I can just right-click and look at the relevant code in Dragonfly (it would appear to be #B4A7D6). It's very very useful.
Google killed the Sidebar and the Reader, but at least they've not killed Opera...
And then came Opera 15. Due to reasons practical and doubtless economic, Opera have ditched their Presto engine (the gubbins inside Operas 7 to 12) in favour of Blink (the gubbins inside Google Chrome). This necessitates something of a tabula rasa at Opera, and Opera 15 is a completely new browser: a rebadged Chrome with all the simplicity that that implies. You can't alter the browser layout. You can't even bookmark properly. It is a very different sort of browser to Opera 12: from one extreme to the opposite.
A trawl of the Opera forums demonstrates a significant dismay being aired by long-term Opera users like myself. Moaning is inevitable when faced with any change: we hate our routine being disturbed. I mentioned earlier that I briefly left Opera after they launched Opera 7, and that was in part because it was different (though mainly because they were doing naughty things with their advertising). Likewise, I only came to Opera in the first place because I didn't like the look of Netscape 6. But these differences were nothing to the difference between Opera 12 and Opera 15 (Operas 13 and 14 are lost to the fevered imaginings of developers). They are completely opposed in their philosophies. Beneath all the fan dismay is a sense that perhaps even the developers are not so keen. They have been saddled with a corporate decision and would rather have been playing with their own baby than with Google's. Regardless, the consequence is that Opera 15 has none of the features that make me use Opera. None of them. This is a sad thing for me, and for many of the 1% of all web surfers whose board of choice is Opera. But perhaps Opera are thinking that this 1% of geeks and Norwegians might be traded against an as yet untapped market of people who just want a Fisher Price browser upon which to point and click (and they are probably mathematically safe in this belief). It's Windows 8 all over again...
There's obviously an appetite for simplicity. Of course there is. Most people will never right-click on the internet. It's not a question of dumbing down because they were never "up" in the first place. I accept that what I do with Opera is a very niche pursuit, and a consequence too of my age and background. But it doesn't lessen the sense of outrage when a range of possibilities get taken away from you: when freedoms are removed.
For now, Opera 12 is being kept going by a development team that realise their new product is not yet a fit successor. But I fear that this will be Eudora all over again. A web browser is the scrying glass through which you see the internet, and all glass distorts to some extent. I've always admired the clarity of Opera in spite of certain imperfections, and to be forced into a new prescription will be a terrible strain for me. I fear it will be like using the internet with blinkers.
But to return to the sentiments of the paragraph before last... to the sense of loss for something being axed: not something used by a majority of the population, but cherished by that minority who do... Only 1% of web traffic is through Opera, which pales in comparison to the 35% of the population the Society of Chief Librarians claims pop into a library once a month. By accident or design, the erosion of freedoms is very much in vogue.
I'm not quite sure where to go with the analogy between Opera 12 and libraries. It's too late on a Sunday. But for a moment there I saw something at the corner of my eye. I should make the most of such things while I can...
Google killed the Sidebar and the Reader, but at least they've not killed Opera...
And then came Opera 15. Due to reasons practical and doubtless economic, Opera have ditched their Presto engine (the gubbins inside Operas 7 to 12) in favour of Blink (the gubbins inside Google Chrome). This necessitates something of a tabula rasa at Opera, and Opera 15 is a completely new browser: a rebadged Chrome with all the simplicity that that implies. You can't alter the browser layout. You can't even bookmark properly. It is a very different sort of browser to Opera 12: from one extreme to the opposite.
A trawl of the Opera forums demonstrates a significant dismay being aired by long-term Opera users like myself. Moaning is inevitable when faced with any change: we hate our routine being disturbed. I mentioned earlier that I briefly left Opera after they launched Opera 7, and that was in part because it was different (though mainly because they were doing naughty things with their advertising). Likewise, I only came to Opera in the first place because I didn't like the look of Netscape 6. But these differences were nothing to the difference between Opera 12 and Opera 15 (Operas 13 and 14 are lost to the fevered imaginings of developers). They are completely opposed in their philosophies. Beneath all the fan dismay is a sense that perhaps even the developers are not so keen. They have been saddled with a corporate decision and would rather have been playing with their own baby than with Google's. Regardless, the consequence is that Opera 15 has none of the features that make me use Opera. None of them. This is a sad thing for me, and for many of the 1% of all web surfers whose board of choice is Opera. But perhaps Opera are thinking that this 1% of geeks and Norwegians might be traded against an as yet untapped market of people who just want a Fisher Price browser upon which to point and click (and they are probably mathematically safe in this belief). It's Windows 8 all over again...
There's obviously an appetite for simplicity. Of course there is. Most people will never right-click on the internet. It's not a question of dumbing down because they were never "up" in the first place. I accept that what I do with Opera is a very niche pursuit, and a consequence too of my age and background. But it doesn't lessen the sense of outrage when a range of possibilities get taken away from you: when freedoms are removed.
For now, Opera 12 is being kept going by a development team that realise their new product is not yet a fit successor. But I fear that this will be Eudora all over again. A web browser is the scrying glass through which you see the internet, and all glass distorts to some extent. I've always admired the clarity of Opera in spite of certain imperfections, and to be forced into a new prescription will be a terrible strain for me. I fear it will be like using the internet with blinkers.
But to return to the sentiments of the paragraph before last... to the sense of loss for something being axed: not something used by a majority of the population, but cherished by that minority who do... Only 1% of web traffic is through Opera, which pales in comparison to the 35% of the population the Society of Chief Librarians claims pop into a library once a month. By accident or design, the erosion of freedoms is very much in vogue.
I'm not quite sure where to go with the analogy between Opera 12 and libraries. It's too late on a Sunday. But for a moment there I saw something at the corner of my eye. I should make the most of such things while I can...
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