Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX
Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX
Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertis...
Holy shit.
I thought this was just going to be a matter of poor security implementation or crappy feature sets.
Turns out they converted the company into a loan shark operation owned by Chinese ad companies
when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days.
Stop using Chromium.
I don't want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
As somebody whose wife just downloaded opera onto the family computer I am horrified.
She's been complaining that the internet is slow and has blamed it on protonvon, so has resorted to turning the vpn off when using the internet or discord.
I remember after Twin Peaks season 3 came out, showtime was stating left and right how profitable the show was, and then accusations started flying that the show was so profitable because showtime was taking over the browser while people were watching and mining bitcoin in the background without telling people they were doing so.
I trust Opera about a thousand times less just because I had never hears of them until a week or two ago.
I fondly remember the old opera days, up until the latest presto version, 12.18. If you knew what you were doing, you were able to fully customize the entire browser, all of it's toolbars and context menus, it was incredible.
Once they switched over to the Blink engine, all of that was lost. It's entire USP gone, just like that.
I've tried Opera 2 or 3 years back, just to see what it is like, and it's just another pointless chromium based browser, offering nothing to keep me using it, and the more i see posts and ads from this company, the more I feel like I made the right choice.
I've also tried the "spiritual successor" to Opera 12, Vivaldi, but it too couldn't win me back over from Firefox.
The feature I absolutely love on Opera mobile is it will dynamicly wrap text and adjust the page layout to a single column when you zoom in/out. So for pages with small text, you can zoom in to see enlarged text and just scroll down to read - where on all other browsers you have to scroll horizontally back and forth to read the enlarged text.
Opera has been doing this brilliantly for at least 10 years, and I have yet to see this on any other mobile browsers I've tried.
Switched to Vivaldi last year and haven't looked back. Did some side by side with FireFox for a month or two on my phone. I have a cheap 2022 Moto G something or other, running whatever Android it shipped with.
I guess that like a lot of people, I don't like having apps tracking stuff, but my work requires me to have access to Facebook, Insta, Threads, and the like... so, I just use browser shortcut widgets for them instead (I should quit my job, I know, I know... working on it). Both Firefox and Vivaldi immediately figured out that I wanted to run them in containers so that was great. However, Vivaldi runs all of them so smooth where as Firefox just kind of stumbles around. Some of them would refuse to work some days, just bringing up the web browser container and then crash. Facebook dot com was the worst... there were issues with the UI not showing me the text input bubbles and latency with button presses was terrible... like needing a refresh to show a "like" or even that a notification was read. It was almost unusable. Bizarrely, Outlook was also bad on FireFox... like that's a fairly bog standard email client and "productivity" site, but on FireFox it would crash more than it worked. Vivaldi handles all of the sites/platforms I need like I'm running the apps.
Maybe it's something with my cheap ass phone and Motorola's bloatware, but Firefox crashed and burned more than it worked. I cannot recommend Vivaldi enough.
I remember way back in the late 90s or early 2000s, when Opera was commercial, I bought a lifetime license. I don't remember the specifics but it was basically a way to support them and it was good for all future versions, forever and ever.
I lost the key long ago and the browser is free now anyway. Still wouldn't use it.
I started using Opera at version 9 point something and was a happy camper for a long time. It was a great browser, but its biggest problem was compatibility - more and more sites were behaving strangely and more and more the Opera folks had to patch things on the browser side. I stopped using it around the time the first alpha version of Vivaldi came out. Yes, Vivaldi had a lot of catching up to do at the beginning, but it was functional enough for a daily driver. Opera's first Blink-based version was some kind of a joke - it didn't even have a proper bookmarking system - it was as if everyone was assumed to have 15-20 bookmarks on their start page and that's it. Anyway, they lost all my trust when they sold out later on.
I'm willing to give Firefox a chance regarding the whole manifest v3 drama, although I see the Vivaldi folks opposing it (not sure how much they'll be able to do once they have to merge the MV3 stuff). My biggest hurdle with Firefox right now is the lack of native mouse gestures. Yes, it's somewhat possible to do it with extensions, but the 1% of the pages it doesn't work on (I know, I know, intentional limitation for all extensions) is enough to break my flow; gestures are so ingrained into my muscle memory at this point that I don't see myself using a browser without them supported the way they are in Vivaldi.
late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab'd and noticed there was the "don't symbol" (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, "that can't be right". I'm running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN'T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can't use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.
I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.
Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.
Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it's spyware.
Opera was useful to me at three very specific points in time for very specific reasons:
When I built my first PC out of old scrap parts in the early 2000s, the only halfway modern browser that was still compatible with Windows 95 and a 486 CPU was Opera. Not the latest version, but new enough to be usable. This version, which came with a permanent toolbar urging users to purchase a full license, already had tabs.
I did not have broadband Internet until 2006. Even 56k modems didn't work with the awful telephone line we had - I had to make do with 48k. The proxy service with compression Opera came with was the only way to browse then current websites without waiting for half an hour for a page to load.
When I bought my first touchscreen phone in early 2009, the LG KP500, a Java-based phone with only 2G and no WiFi that pretended it was a smartphone, Opera Mini was the only browser that was usable, again thanks to its proxy service.
Outside of these niche use cases, I never saw a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox. While it was an important innovator in the beginning, for me personally at least, it has always been nothing but an "emergency" browser and ever since it was bought out by a Chinese firm and switched over to Chromium, there was no reason left to use it other than brand attachment.
Been saying this for ages
That is quite the pivot.
Honestly, I still use opera as my daily driver on Android. I just like the UI, especially the dark mode reader colors. But I've also tried most other browsers. Firefox is janky on some sites. Vivaldi is pretty good. I could probably switch.
Is there a good modern alternative to something like GNU IceCat that I can compile from source?
Done
I tried Opera years before, but the UI wasn't my cup of tea at the time. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't for me; but, when, I tried it ones again a year or two ago it was much more, like it was honestly and objectively bad.
Which is sad because regarding of my tastes and needs it was a good browser