On stability

Posted Sep 10, 2010 23:43 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

A new release may add features, but the web being what it is, it's rare for browsers to break compatibility with existing sites or web applications.

Actually Opera 10.60 sometimes crashes on gmail, so I went back to 10.10. Bug report was sent.

I assume accidental incompatibility, which this surely is, isn't what the OP had in mind when complaining of compatibility-busting updates.

One thing I thought of when I read that is compatibility with user procedures. If the user knows how to use Opera 59, will he be able to use Opera 60 the same way? In the eight years or so I've been using Opera, both on Linux and Windows, I've upgraded two or three times and each time features I used disappeared. Sometimes they disappeared for good; other times they went into hiding, bound to a different key or something. Consequently, my policy now is not to upgrade. If I were using a system where updates were essentially mandatory, I'd be pretty bothered.