14 DAY TRIAL // Opera has finally backtracked on its plan to ditch bookmarks after complaints from a lot of users. Since Opera 15 is built from scratch, so to speak, from Chromium source code, the company wanted a fresh start and got rid of the features that most people didn't use.
The aforementioned browser version shipped without any support for bookmarks. Instead, it urged users to rely on the more powerful Speed Dial and the new Stash feature.
Those two features combined offered much of the functionality that bookmarks provide in a way that makes more sense.
This wasn't some random decision, based on usage data, as Opera knew that 90 percent of users had never added a single bookmark. Most of the ones who did simply used them to store some pages they would need later, saving all of them in the root folder.
But plenty of people, the few who actually used the feature like it was intended, made quite a fuss about its being gone. So much so that Opera decided to bring it back.
"But we understand that removing bookmarks entirely for the people who actively use them is a big change, so we are going to build bookmarking functionality as a priority," Opera's Krystian Kolondra wrote.
"I can't give you a date, and it won't be a clone of Opera 12, but I wanted to tell you that we are listening to you, and that I realize that not having bookmarks as people are used to makes it harder to switch to Opera, whether you are coming from Opera 12, or from any other browser," he said.
There's no deadline for bringing the feature back, but it is now a priority, so it should be landing in the next versions of the new browser. Incidentally, Opera 16 Next should be arriving soon.