And at SXSW they had a new flyer that was similar to the image found at dragonfly.opera.com, only it had another teaser on the back. It pretty much tells you exactly what it is…if it is what I think it is

w2 = Opera hater and troll.

w2 is imaginging that because Opera’s isn’t telling everyone what Dragonfly is withing two weeks, it has “backfired”

w2 is also a self-contradictory troll:

“Why Opera previews are first released to press”

Wasn’t w2 the one whining about Opera’s marketing? Releasing to the press” is marketing! They are getting press! That’s what w2 allegedly wanted Opera to do.

But apparently not!

This is not the first time w2 has been caught lying and contradicting himself.

Again, I’ve been very happy that Opera has become more open, and again i hope it continues. The population that bothers with beta testing and trying nightly/weekly releases is probably a small minority in the grand scheme of things.

And don’t use Microsoft as an example of being open. Although they, like Opera, have become more open as of late, there was zero word about IE8 until a few months ago. That was about a full year after IE7 was released to the masses. And they only released a beta we could play with this month, almost 1.5 years after IE7 was made available.

There simply is no comparison outside the OSS world to Firefox’s openness in development. Maybe, in order to compete with Firefox, they should be even more open, as you contend. But I still believe that the actual user-base that cares for such things is rather small. Unlike the typical firefox user, Opera users don’t want to have to deal with extension compatibility issues or quirks. They prefer to download a 4-5mb download that includes a browser, mail, newsgroup, irc, bittorrent, rss feed reader, download manager, client that includes features of all seamlessly connected into an elegant solution. Beta testing is for us geeks who love to be on the cutting edge.

As for Opera Mobile 9.5, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. When it is released, there will simply be no comparison to it, even within the OSS world. Opera Mini is an amazing browser, but I look forward to a more fully featured browser for my smart phone. These mini reviews have only wetted my appetite and the second it is released for beta testing, I will start trying it out. Can’t wait. (yes, I’m in the minority of those Opera users that like to beta test. )

BTW. Why Opera previews are first released to press, not to community members (well-know ones)? I think that press reviews are rather shallow and tend to be rather loss of time instead of being real review and feature summary. But it is Opera’ choice it seems.

It’s always nice to see how he always polutes and diverts discussions with all the drivel about his beloved Firefox. Yet another discussion that goes to the toilet just because the Troll wants to let off steam.

And btw. Opera could do the same - copy features as fast as they come out - IF extensions were present. They are not. It backfires now, Opera feature set development is now the slowest on market. What is good, is that it is quite wide set of features, but lack of on-time adaptation starts to hurt (PicLens anyone?). And with each day it is going to hurt more.

And btw. it backfired by simply upsetting and annoying the most loyal userbase Opera has. Userbase Opera cant afford to loose if it want to survive when FF3 hits the market.

BTW Secrecy in development is so 20th century. Even Microsoft is more open with IE8 than Opera is with it’s current develpoments. Firefox 4 pre-alphas are open to d/l, with full, open, set of planned changes/features. You can’t ask for more. It is Opera that is closed (for no good reason) not ‘most companies’.

For the desktop browser, it was announced in June of 2007 that an alpha would be forthcoming. We finally received said alpha in September. They obviously did not account for some major bugs cropping up, otherwise, it would have been released soon after they first announced it.

I think, in light of both the experience with the Alpha release, and the mozilla team waiting to steal another new idea, they are being more cautious about Mobile 9.5 and Dragonfly. Trying to keep people interested, but not giving away too much is a tricky thing.

I myself have been very happy with Opera being so open as of late and hope the trend continues. We just have to remember that with them being so open, we are having a glimse at their internal development time tables that most companies would rather keep secret until a final version is released.

The teaser site was set up two or three weeks ago. Announced early? You don’t even know what it is. How can you say that it’s been announced early?

Vaporware? How do you even know that it’s a piece of software?

And besides:

We did say some more about Opera Dragonfly at SxSW.