What power users?

Any power users that used Opera for that aspect are still using v12, which is unaffected by this, entirely; and no power user would use the chromium fork they put out with v15 and upwards, because all it offers is a dearth of features.

I became a huge fan of Opera Mobile in the last few months. It's the only browser that feels fast on my Android device and I'm actually a fan of the proxy as well as the possibility to block ads and omit images. It is a godsend for the notoriously small german data packages. I'm not checking my mail with it but it's great for a fast Google search here and there.

Surely there aren't enough US based "power users" for it to matter.

I use Opera regularly, but I think many of the 'power users' preferred Opera 12 to the WebKit/Blink versions, as there was a feature cull during this transition. Vivaldi is the spiritual successor to Presto-based Opera.

https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en

Spiritual successor in the sense that it is highly customizable with lots of shortcuts?

From a technological perspective, it seems quite different. One of Opera's great strengths was how "native" it felt on every platform, plus a full suite of Internet tools. This doesn't seem to do chat, email, bittorrent, etc.

It does email at least, and maybe bittorrent and chat.

The native feel seems largely to have been Opera 12's downfall; they just didn't have the resources/manpower to maintain their own (very brilliant) internals/rendering engine/etc. on top of the power-user UI + featureset.

Vivaldi looks to be attempting to recreate the latter (poweruser UI+features) and dropping the former (by relying on Chromium/ReactJS for internals), so it's very much a large compromise if you like Opera 12.

Overall, the main criticism I would have is not opensourcing it. This is an old tired argument, but in this specific case it's painfully relevant given the huge resources that went into creating Opera 12's internals which then couldn't be community-forked.

> The native feel seems largely to have been Opera 12's downfall; they just didn't have the resources/manpower to maintain their own

Nope.

What happened is that they started getting more and more into the ad business as a way to make real income, and they got very successful in the mobile area with that, to the point that they didn't need the browser anymore. All it took after that was a bunch of MBAs to have the smart idea to convert the browser to a token marketing effort, edge out the founders' ideas, and pivot towards the ad business full force.

I don't see email on their feature page, but I also am not going to download it to see.

But I agree, the lack of opensource seems very unfortunate in this case, since closed source is part of what got you stuck here. I guess I'm not power user enough to want to add what just seems to be more or less a different version of Chrome, but I'm glad it exists because I'm glad that some projects still dedicate themselves to a power user base.

Ah yes, you're right. Mail is still an upcoming feature. They're calling it "M3"...

> "Spiritual successor in the sense that it is highly customizable with lots of shortcuts?"

Spiritual successor in the sense it's targeted at power users, has aims to revive some of the classic Opera functionality, and because it's developed by ex-Opera personnel.

I'd recommend taking a look at the Vivaldi Wikipedia page for some of the background into how it came to be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)

It's very popular in countries and continents like India, Asia and Africa. Specifically on small, cheap phones.

Mainly the Opera Mini I think.

Do these phones typically run Android? Or older OSes that have a mobile JVM?

Mostly Android nowadays, far as I'm aware.

So are you going with them, Geoffrey?