My Opera will be shut down on March 1, 2014
Norwegian company Opera Software made a bold -- some critics might say foolish -- move when it decided to switch from the company's own Presto engine to Chromium.
The company is currently still in the transition period from Opera 12.x to Chromium, even though some Chromium versions have already been released. Currently, both the old and new version of Opera are available.
That is going to change in the future so that only new Chromium versions of Opera will be supported by the company.
The change affected not only the web browser, but also other parts of Opera Software as well. The mail client for instance, integrated in Opera 12.x, was released as a separate product as it has not been integrated into the new Chromium versions of Opera.
And Fastmail, the company's mail service, has been bought back by the original owners,
Opera Software announced today that it will shut down My Opera as of March 1, 2014. Originally created as a support forum for the web browser and other products in 2001, it quickly became a social meeting place for Opera users.
In 2006, My Opera was improved by allowing all users to maintain their own blog on the site and the service has provided the functionality to all My Opera users ever since.
Note: The shutdown affects My Opera mail accounts as well.
Why is My Opera shut down?
Opera offers two reasons why the service is shut down. The company notes that other social media and blogging services offer "more and better" features, and that it cannot keep up with that. In addition, the resources needed to maintain My Opera have changed the company's "outlook on My Opera".
Time to export your data
If you operate a My Opera blog or have an account, you have until the shut down date to export your data.
Opera has created several help guides that walk users through the necessary steps.
Opera blog owners can move their blog to other blogging services such as WordPress, Squarespace, Typepad or Moveable Type.
To do so, they need to perform the following operation:
- Log in to the My Opera website
- Hover the mouse over the wrench icon and select account.
- Click on Blog settings
- Click on export your blog there.
To download all files that you have uploaded to My Opera, perform the following operation:
- Hover the mouse over the wrench icon and select files
- Select Zip your files and click Start.
Other changes
The desktop team blog will be moved to a new blogs subdomain on the Opera website where you can access it.
Opera Link, the company's data synchronization service will also be moved to a subdomain on the Opera website.
The forums will be moved to Opera.com in the future as well, with the most important threads migrated to the new destination as well.
My Opera users can continue to use their login information to sign in on the Opera website to participate in the forums just like they have done before.
Closing Words
It is clear that Opera Software is trying to streamline its portfolio after the move to Chromium. While services such as My Opera or Fastmail may not have been profitable, or worth the effort in the eyes of Opera Software, long standing users may see this in a different light.
My Opera was the place to hang out for Opera users and to meet like-minded fellows. Removing that option may impact the strong sense of community in a negative way, which may have consequences that Opera Software did not anticipate.
Advertisement
The best thing to happen is for open source developers to come out with a browser that is like Opera. But does it better. Even with version 12, it sucked. Yes. It was better than other browser in many ways. But that tells you that we really have no choices when it comes to working browsers. They are like cars. They can build a billion different ones and still not out one out that works right. Why? Because they don’t want to. They design them broken so that they can string us along, continuously finding ways to make profits that never end. We cannot trust any of them. The only ones we can seem to trust are the volunteer developers that do it because they have a passion for it. And aren’t evil minded like the ones with corporate mentality. Opera, Firefox, IE, Chrome. They all stink. Because they don’t listen to us.
We need a new, free alternative that works. One that doesn’t act politically.
Oh…and one that gives us the personal bar and ability to use whatever buttons we want.
I was very disappointed to see they are closing My Opera in March. I spent ages looking for something that would allow me to deal with emails only – I’m not interested in having access to the social sites etc through my email provider and this was about the only program I could find that allowed me to do this. I’m a pensioner and needs things to be simple and easy to find!! If I want Facebook, I log onto it I don’t want it attached to personal emails.
The task of backing up ALL the My Opera blogs should be accomplished, preferably by the team behind the massive GeoCities backup.
@ChrisPearton,
You might enjoy Palemoon as an alternative to Firefox.
Much lower on system resources.
Just a tad less flexible than Firefox.
I used Opera for five years in concert with Firefox, When Firefox became too bloated (including plug-ins) to run on my old machines. I used only Opera. When I was invalided out of employment, I no longer had to use Windows. This was in the middle of Opera’s U.D.I. Under my new Ubuntu (Classic Gnome, naturally), I found FF often froze the machine, while Opera dradded down the whole system when restarting all its previous tags.
In the end I used SlimBoat. It is not perfect by any means—I wish I could select it to start up with one active tab, rather than all; that it had a drop-down tab-list; and that it had working session control—but It doesn’t consume all my system’s resources, and that means a lot.
Somebody said you could only worry about ecology with a full belly. This applies to a great number of computer-users who have old or ageing systems and whose needs are marginalised by the Buy-new-and-faster-machines-and-OSs-every-year segment of the population. I got pissed off by Chrome, not for ideological reasons, but for the fact that it was developed by people who expected their users to have, as a matter of course, a 50 GB/s fibreoptic connexion with the internet.
This took one and a half hours to write because I had three tabs open.
The internet ecology concerns only those with full wallets.
I personally don’t care a lot about the shutdown. Up to and including Opera 12 I was posting bug reports to their developer blog and the two times I needed help with the browser, I went to their forums without receiving a helpful answer both times. I didn’t maintain a blog there, neither was I interested in their free mail address.
But the sad thing about Opera is, that their streamlining is very premature. You can only do that successfully if you have an abundance of tools and features, for example when their maintenance is taking up too much staff. Soon there won’t be anything left of Opera however, if they continue down that path. When Opera announced their new browser lineup early this year, they also promised us, that more people would be working on enhancing the browser than ever before. Well, they either lied or their developers can’t string together a dozen lines of code. Their browser can hardly be called Opera with a straight face anymore, seeing that so many features from v12 are missing. Its development speed has been disappointingly slow, given the fact that they have taken to use the under-build of the application from Blink. Instead they have added existing Chrome technologies back into the browser (v16: geo-location, form-filling, flags; v17: tab pinning, start-up options; v18?: favorites bar).
My conclusion of all this: Opera is in dire need of success. They’ve been scraping at the 1 to 3 percent mark in desktop browsers for a decade, despite having a piece of software with some ingenious features. I think they jumped ship from the desktop market because of an increasingly grim outlook and concentrated on their mobile solutions. It’s too bad that their once shining star Opera Mini, which even comes pre-installed on some devices, has been declining steadily for the past months [*]. That’s probably less of a trend of users leaving the Opera browser and more of an indication of declining sales on devices where the browser was pre-installed. With the loss of market share for feature phones and Android/iOS dominating every market for Smartphones and tablets world-wide, there’s little space for yet another browser like Opera.
[*] http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpcustom=Opera+Mini&qpcustomb=1
You’re being too much dramatic at the end…
The forum will be moved to opera.com and the users will be able to share links and swap contact information easily there. The My Opera website blogging platform is dead but the community is still alive.
The Norwegian government should nationalize Opera Software ASA, shut down the Chrome disgrace, open-source and resurrect Presto.
K-Meleon- dead
Safari for Windows- dead
Opera- dead
Firefox- quickly becoming another Chrome clone
It becomes harder and harder to surf the web.
I would rather switch to IE than use the Chrome nuisance.
What about alternatives like Avant Browser or Maxthon? Both use one or more of the existing browser engines from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, yet they offer a (somewhat) customizable user interface and some built-in options you’d otherwise need extensions for.
These browsers have been around for almost a decade now and have consistently become more useable. Avant even supports Firefox and Chrome extensions, although that is still a work in progress with the lack of extension icons in the user interface.
People have been customizing the big browsers and have re-branded the software and possibly affected some minor changes and improvements. Some examples are the Firefox fork Waterfox or the SRWare Iron and Comodo Dragon forks of Chrome. Others have their own design philosophies, like the Firefox fork Pale Moon, or have created their own user interface, like Opera and QupZilla do on top of the Blink engine of Chrome/Chromium.
The Opera guys have taken the unfortunate step of largely imitating Google’s Chrome browser, but other alternatives – like the already mentioned QupZilla, Avant Browser or Maxthon – offer some hope for a brighter future.
I think that this could be the way to go from now on. Let the big companies develop and maintain the browser engines (be it Microsoft, Google or the open source way of Mozilla), let them offer generic browsers most people would be happy with and then let other developers wrap user interfaces around the ready-made code.
This solution could fit certain usage scenarios much better than a browser fully decked out with extensions can ever be.
I’m on the same boat with you. Given I do like palemoon and use it rather than firefox, but I would switch back to IE before I switch back to chrome.
So they are trying to go from 2% market share to 0.5% in one go? But this shouldn’t surprise me seeing how Firefox devs keep removing important features bloating the browser with things like social API and personas instead.
Thank God there are forks that will keep Firefox australis and bloat free. Shame Opera Software didn’t release Opera 12.16 source code for the community to keep it alive when they killed the browser by turning it into Chrompera.
For me, Opera is dead, and no matter how many changes they will do, it will stay dead. I will continue to use 12.16 (the last version before Chrome) as a secondary browser until most sites will no longer work, and then it will fade into history…
as many others have done in the past…..it is what it is…Hopefully they will employ the good things from it into the next iteration of Chromium.
But they are showing with every release that the things which differentiated Opera for the better will NOT be included. I still download and check each version that comes, but am sorely disappointed, even when things included purport to work as they once did [ with the last version, the page zoom feature was ostensibly included, but it is broken, so it is still of no use ].
I have maintained that the programming team is not the same, and that the new team of junior programmers simply doesn’t have the expertise to build a browser in the same way as the Presto-engined Opera, but whenever this opinion is put forth, it is quickly attacked by many – most notably the mouthpieces for the new Opera.
It’s always a shame to see a community shut down. Given that I never really used myopera, I know quiet a few people did, and the comments shows a lot of people are unhappy with this as well as the whole direction that opera has gone. Opera really had a lot of potential, with their browser and unite. It’s just sad…
I used opera for my email because I enjoyed the fact it wasn’t gmail or AOL or yahoo. I feel that google will have too much power and access to information which I think will be an open security breach for hackers in the future. I wanted something that was not going to be connected in that during its downturn. With myopera mail closing I’m disappointed and have to setup a gmail account. I only kept one to pay for games or apps with google play. I don’t like one company having all of my information and its sad because MyOpera was unique in its features. I felt like on the verge of a new frontier, and now I must bow down to the conglomerate giants and move everything over after I shunned everything to move to Opera. Its so sad.
If you don’t have enough users to justify the support, then you must make decisions to bring a greater population to the innovation you are trying to make work?……All things end badly, otherwise they would not end….
I think the decisions that they make are a bit shortsighted.
I agree completely. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming years, but given that their community and their innovations were (from what I seen) what gave them the desktop market share that they had, I am not sure what they have left.
Well, I guess they still do have the low end phones and Nintendo market still…