Opera 11 browser will finally allow extensions to the browser to be installed. The vast crowd of Firefox Zombies may now pay some attention to Opera, though for the wrong reasons, of course. A commenter at the Opera Desktop Team blog summed up my first thoughts pretty well:
But hey, progress I guess. Even if it’s progress to play “catch up” with other barebones, feature-poor browsers that need extensions to make them complete.
Indeed. I use Firefox and Chrome as much as I can stand to do so, and find them to be clumsy, feature-poor browsers that very obviously need extensions just to emulate many of the basic functionalities already built in (and for quite some time) to Opera. And I have yet to find extensions for those browsers that allow me to easily emulate some of the more advanced features I use every day in Opera.
Oh, well. Maybe folks who simply haven’t looked at Opera because it “doesn’t have extensions” (that it doesn’t usually need) will look at it now that the desktop team has decided to catch back with those “feature-poor browsers that need extensions to make them complete.” (I can recall one loon “tech writer” griping a few years ago because Opera didn’t have an extension for ad blocking or for mouse gestures. Idiot. Those are built in features of Opera.)