Opera: Please Fix The Opera Extensions Page
If you have followed the news surrounding the Opera web browser lately you know that the upcoming Opera 11 browser features an extensions framework, much like the one used by the Google Chrome web browser. (for the nitpickers, I'm not saying it is the same, I'm saying it looks similar from a user perspective).
The first alpha version of Opera 11 has been released a while ago, and first extensions have been developed and are available at the official Opera Extensions gallery.
The count of all extensions offered is at 40 right now, a manageable number. If you take a look at the extensions page, you notice a few problems that may not be apparent right now, but will prove to be a problem once the extensions count grows in the hundreds or thousands.
Opera users have options to search for extensions, filter by categories, popularity, recommendation, rating or alphabetical order.
The first thing that strikes me as missing is a listing of new or recent extensions. If I want to know what's new I have to look through everything, which is not comfortable at all, even at only 40 listed extensions. Imagine having to discover new extensions when the number has reached 500 or more. I like to discover new things (hej I make a living out of it) and the current layout makes it extremely hard to do just that.
The second problem is the actual display of the extensions on the page. Opera lists ten extensions on the page. If you look closely you notice that the title of the extension gets cut off after 16 or so characters, which means that some extension titles are not displayed completely.
There appears to be enough whitespace to give the title its own row in the listing, and move the description below that.
In addition, there is no indicator of an extension's version on the page, or a changelog or history for that matter. Not everyone may need these on the other hand.
There do not seem to be tags or another form of classifications other than selecting a category for the extension. This makes the search less effective as it could be.
It is likely that the current page is just a temporary solution, to have a location for all extensions that get developed.
If I had to pick one of the missing features I'd like to see a recent filter added to Opera Extensions, followed by the display of the full extension title.
Have you been playing around with Opera 11? What's your impression so far?
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The Opera guys said that, that is not the final extensions page. That is just a temporary page for developers and early testers.
They will be having a brand new nice site with probably shorter and simpler url once Opera 11 final stable build gets released.
Considering Opera 11 isn’t out of Alpha yet this isn’t a bad temporary extensions page. The newer ones are listed at the bottom of the page.
As for banging on about change logs, history and version of the extensions, I doubt much has changed in less than a week of release of the first extensions.
Luke as I said, it currently works as a temporary solution, but once the extension count goes up, and time passes by, it won’t do it anymore, at least for me.
And regarding the extensions framework, just to point out a huge difference, Chrome opens up another instance of Chrome.exe for every extension you have installed. Opera doesn’t.
So, is that good or bad?
Actually, they are collection feedback over here:
http://my-beta.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=776302&abc=&page=1&skip=0&show=&perscreen=50
Most of the points you have mentioned have already been pointed out. The lack of a recent extensions option really annoys me.
it’s the alpha version, END OF THE STORY.
It’s a temporary, alpha page.
But you’re right, and we will fix it.
How did you like the extensions themselves? Did you get a chance to play?
Love,
Bruce from Opera
Bruce I figured it was only a temporary page, great that you will fix it in the future. So far I’m impressed by the implementation, everything works nicely. One thing that seems to be missing are options, at least the extensions that I tried had none (which were only a handful). I’m just waiting for NoScript and Last Pass to make their way to Opera, and it could very well be my browser for the coming years.