Today we are announcing the beginning of the end for two of our current Add-on platforms. Starting with the upcoming Opera 12 release, Opera Unite, Widgets and Voice will be turned off by default for new users. The two Add-on platforms will be completely removed in a later release expected before the end of this year. Read more on the Add-ons blog about this change of focus.
Over the last six years we have learned a lot from our work on Opera Widgets and Opera Unite, and when we later built the extension platform for Opera 11 we benefited significantly from this experience. Our extension technology has been a great success, with millions of monthly downloads, and so far completely dwarfing the other platforms. Recently, we also shipped an Opera Labs version with extension support in Opera Mobile, investigating a fully cross-platform extension environment.
Moving forward we want to focus on one high quality add-on platform across our products, rather than spending resources on maintaining legacy systems. The know-how and and technologies from Unite and Widgets are already being reused in other Opera products. An example is the recently announced UPnP support in Opera Dragonfly.
We would love to hear your feedback on use cases for Opera Unite or Opera Widgets you think should be transferred to Opera extensions or other technology. Please visit our forum for further discussions.
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