You should read the previous posts Labels and Labels (2) for description and details.
This post is the ending summary about alternatives, dependencies and commercial / strategical impacts.
Alternatives
None of the alternatives deliver the same big improvement towards a more intuitive and overall equal UI. They are also less capable to provide the basis for other features that need easy convertibility.
- The easy alternative is to go on with the current mainly folder based user interface.
- Adding some more or less independent functionality of simple labels.
- Adding semantic labels only to some of the places described and not everywhere in Opera.
Dependencies:
- Redesign of UI (Magic will be the topic of a following post) will have some synergy effects.
- Redesign of the internal indexing / database structure to solve the system immanent problems (get more independent from the unreliability of the OS file system; problem about possible inconsistency in the indexing itself). This problems should be solved anyway and are pretty much needed to make the semantic labels work properly.
Impacts (rough estimations):
This estimations are towards a solution that is only inside Opera (especially without conversion to online bookmarking). All panel-functionality is affected, tab-grouping will probably be separate.
- Costs will be major to more than major, 500-700 FTE, 50% (or more) pre-projecting and functional design, 20% coding (or less – this and the total costs could be higher when there is a very different handling of the different places in current implementation) and 30% (or more) testing (I feel kind of crazy writing this numbers not knowing the development process at Opera)
- Time needed: 9-12 month
- File size of Opera might be about the same (depending on current implementation – it could be smaller, if there are currently different modules for the different places), rendering core untouched
- Performance is not critical (as the current performance of M2 with much more data is very good), but performance is probably affected by the redesign of internal indexing / database.
- Security issues are not critical (not higher than with other UI changes)
- RAM usage depends on current implementation (same as file size)
- Market share would probably increase by +1-2% points (ie from 2% to 3-4%) in a (pretty long) period of 12 month. It will be not as much make people change towards Opera but making people stuck with Opera because of the outstanding UI. I expect very good reviews in magazines. The effect will be lower when Firefox or IE have similar functionality at this time.
Closing words
From users view this feature is mainly a change of the UI. As the current UI is already kind of old fashioned (although still very effective) there probably have to be major changes. Semantic labels are only a smaller part of that.
The bigger impact of this feature will come when it is used to interact with other online and offline storages (strategical focus to be open).
