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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.
This behavior is just beyond batshit. Before anyone decides tl;dr, the article is well worth a read.
I had a hunch that Opera was circling the drain when I started seeing them sponsor Youtubers. A general rule of thumb is that no company that has anything worth a shit devolves to sponsoring Youtube videos. I had no idea about the predatory loans thing, or the crypto scam chasing thing, or the ripping off ChatGPT thing…
Back here in reality, there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox. There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.
And it’s always been Firefox since day one. Out of the ashes of Netscape Navigator rose Firefox and Mozilla have been one of the only bastions of the free and open web ever since. I honestly don’t understand why anyone would use another browser.
Fear of change and effective marketing. Those are the only reasons.
Actually it’s an effective cloud-based password manager that doesn’t rely on local storage or weird plugins or backups.
That’s what keeps me using chrome. I could lose everything in a house fire, pick up any device, log in and have access to all my stuff without any further action on my part, right out of the box.
That’s the only feature I care about, and chrome is the only browser I’ve seen that provides it.
Get me that in firefox, and I’ll switch today.
What are you talking about? Firefox has had literally Sync since before Chrome existed.
Firefox Sync initial release: December 21, 2007
Google Chrome intial release: September 2, 2008 (Beta), (1.0) December 11, 2008
A full year, my guy.
I’m confused since Firefox Sync has been letting you sync/backup your passwords, bookmarks and history for a decade or two at this point, and you can even self-host the sync server.
I don’t know the complete FF password manager details (Bitwarden user here) but where does Firefox fall short for you?
You can lose your Google account in the blink of an eye with no recourse, no access to support or anything.
With local and my own backups, I can choose to put them at any location, cloud or local.
I have all that functionality today with FF… Not sure when you last checked, but if you create a Mozilla account and log in to FF you can sync all the same stuff as Chrome does.
Checked it out: apparently I had a mozilla account at one point in time. Hit ‘forgot password’:
Note: When you reset your password, you reset your account. You may lose some of your personal information (including history, bookmarks, and passwords). That’s because we encrypt your data with your password to protect your privacy.
Forgot your password: fuck you.
This is the exact fucking opposite of the behaviour I’d ever want from a password manager.
I think that’s what most people want in a password manager. The only way to have a truly secure pw manager is to encrypt it and failsafe to delete. That way if your identity gets stolen or email compromised, it limits the damage.
Forgot your password: fuck you.
This is the exact fucking opposite of the behaviour I’d ever want from a password manager.
Wait wait wait wait, you’re telling me you want the people who hold your password to be able to view them without your explicit permission (entering a secret that unlocks your vault)? Because that’s what you’re asking for - if they can reset your password and provide you your plaintext passwords, that means they can 1) read your passwords if they chose to and 2) you can be phished and have your account stolen and passwords provided to some rando.
The convenience offered by that “feature” is outweighed by the potential consequences of it existing. Passwords should absolutely be a Trust No One (TNO) solution.
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That’s great until Google finds that one picture of your child at the pool and immediately deletes your CSAM-harboring filthy account.
Looks like you best get to switching.
Sadly chromium is often the only supported browser for a lot of web apps. Sometimes not even chromium but just chrome in particular. Chrome has basically inherited all the downsides of internet explorer of yesteryear except it doesn’t run like shit yet.
I wonder if it’s really a lack of support and not just a user agent string check for lazy development.
and google sabotaging shit so it only works on their platform.
Like they did with youtube and Edge (before they finally gave in to googles terrorism and switched edge to chrome base)
like they are doing with youtube and adblockers.
I’ll say this. I use chrome and I KNOW I need to switch to Mozilla. It’s just such a pain to switch that I inevitably go back. Maybe this is the wake up call I need.
Cuz Firefox was for a long time just some shiiiiiiit. It was overloaded, blocky, seemed outdated etc., so ie wasn’t any worse. When chrome came, whooo.
Now tho, I am simply still prejudiced against it. And I found Edge suits me ideally so I don’t care for any other browser. Until my adblock stops working, then I’ll run.
I also left Firefox for Chrome many years ago during that time period, but Firefox has been good again for quite some time. They did a big refresh called Quantum several years back and solved most of those issues. Give it a try.
They also solved the “issue” of XULRunner and all associated functionality, not offering anything instead.
I had to move from
conkeror, and now jump between FF and SeaMonkey. The latter lags behind a bit in porting FF functionality.To each his own, I guess.
SeaMonkey is not dead yet.
I do not agree with your generalisation of YouTube sponsorships, but with the rest I absolutely agree with.
Honestly, I read something about Opera being vaguely connected to shady Chinese companies right before I started recommending ppl to switch away from Opera or Opera GX. Glad I stuck to that, looks like my intuition did not fail me.
You, uh, really feel that the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Nord VPN, Honey by PayPal, Raycons, and HelloFresh are really making a positive contribution to the world that we can’t do without?
I mean, what’s the problem with NordVPN? Pretty much every youtuber I respect who does sponsorship promotes it, and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. Generalizing like that is always bad (or well, mostly always, or ironically I would be generalizing).
I think there might be a few exceptions, but generally it’s just loot boxes and predatory games.
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there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox.
Yeah. And everybody should use the same brand of shoes, drive the same model of car, buy at the same store, eat the same food…
God forbids people having different tastes, opinions and needs.
There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.
Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.
Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.
Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.
Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here.
I simply don’t assume that an org/com actually exist which is concerned users’ privacy. Mozilla just follows the money, as any other corp.
Protecting my privacy is a task I prefer to delegate to mybrain(.org).
Good. We think alike 👍
Wow. Deleting the app now.
Yeah, I was a huge fan but the moment they changed the engine it was just Chrome in different skin. And later the news that they were bought by a Chinese firm doing shady stuff just confirmed that it was the right decision.
I am sad that they did not open source the engine. Somebody leaked it, but no one serious would touch it for legal reasons.
For me old Opera is an artifact of the bygone era, together with old Skype and Hamachi, when some proprietary software would really work well and even support Linux.
Opera actually even released FreeBSD versions, if I’m not mistaken.
Skype - we all know what.
Hamachi still works =)
It’s been that way for years now.
Yeah the surprise in this thread is surprising to me. I’ve considered Opera to be untrustworthy for years now.
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I knew not to use Opera GX as soon as they started sponsoring youtubers. I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.
When I see a product I already use being promoted by YouTubers in sponsored segments, I immediately question if I should be using it, even if I’d have happily continued had I never seen that sponsorship.
Absolutely true. I remember every YouTuber and their mother shilling out for LastPass a few years back. Now that their reputstion is kind of in the dumps after several “noncritical” hacks I see those same YouTubers shilling out for Dashlane.
It just gets worse if you try to think of any serious sponsorship program by companies that are, to date, trustworthy. There are none because they don’t need them. Word of mouth is good enough for them because the customers they have will stay being customers for a long time. Long enough that they bring in more people just by being happy about the service.
Same with Express/Nord VPN sponsorships. Many people debunked the adverising BS they were spinning about blocking tracking when really it only masked a tiny subset.
As someone who studied infosec, those ads were infuriating. Now I just sponsor block it all because I’m beyond tired of it.
Really like Mullvad for that. They don’t pretend a VPN alone makes you invisible for tracking nor do they pretend it makes your browsing much more secure. They don’t do any BS sales either. You get what you pay for and they are very upfront about what you get (mostly ISP block and region lock bypass).
Haven’t seen a YT sponsorship for them yet either so that’s another plus in my book.
I left LastPass as soon as they started screwing with the free product. Same with Evernote. It’s fine to make a non-free product. But if you make a free product with premium settings you can’t go back and pinch the original user base by taking features away. Those companies *products always fail.
Lol, now that I think of it I had never seen a YouTube ad or sponsor where I would say “this is an ethical and fairly priced product without a catch that I would like to buy”…
I only saw a decent product once, it was Henson razor. Not sure if it’s ethical and fairly priced (those are somewhat hard to tell, imo). If I weren’t using it already, the sponsorship would have deterred from trying 😅
This 100%.
I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.
We’re the minority though.
Agreed. I think (and I’m not sponsored lol) that the only product from YouTube that’s actually good is Harry’s razors
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It’s quite nice and I use it daily.
It’s just another flavour of Chromium though isn’t it?
Yeah
Much more UI customization and a shitton of power user stuff too
Still chromium, no thanks.
Fair, site compatibility is needed for my work so I unfortunately must use chromium
Quit the job, work in Firefox only environments, send the message /s
I’ve heard multiple people say this as the reason for not using Firefox, but I can’t remember if I ever had sites not working on FF. Does it happen often for you?
Not often, but it does happen enough times that I have Chrome installed as a backup in case something doesn’t work. It’s usually the in-house websites (for instance, the ones made for tracking timesheets) that break on Firefox. Not all of them break, of course, but if you’re required to submit a form via a particular in-house website and it doesn’t load on Firefox, then you’re kind of forced to have a backup browser at minimum.
It doesn’t happen often enough that I would say that using Firefox is problematic, but if you combine that with people’s inherent aversion to change, you can start to see why people are so resistant to even trying Firefox. Unfortunately, it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the less people use Firefox, the less the web development teams at these companies would be incentivized to make sure their website works on Firefox
My power got shut off one day before December last year. I thought the bills were all being paid cause I received no notice of delinquency. Turns out, my electric company purged my account.
When I tried to make a new account, going through multiple attempts where the only thing that worked right was their shitty captcha (select all motorcycles bullshit), I finally had to call them. Turns out, soon as I switched to a chromium browser, it allowed me to complete the registration.
I told the rep on the phone, a nice lady who was as shocked as I was that Firefox wasn’t allowing registration to complete, to convey to their IT team that a) removing the accounts of paying customers is a really awful policy (who logs into their power companies site after setting up auto pay?) and b) that catering to a single line of browser was not bad practice. She said she’d pass it on.
I don’t think she passed it on.
Yeah unfortunately, things like Apple Business Manager, ezoffice, and our KVM software refuse to work on non chromium browsers, no matter how many user agent spoofing extensions I install
Happened to me during an internship, I was really frustrated to install this on my machine.
You can try floorp, it’s Firefox + some of Vivaldi
For gecko the best alternative to old opera and Vivaldi I found so far is floorp
I looked it up and it looks great. Currently downloading it to give it a try. I wonder how it compares to LibreWolf though.
Yup
It’s a rebranded chromium with some extra bloat. Just like his older brother Chinese Chromium, Opera, and their edgy cousin, Microsoft Chromium. All following the example of Papa Chrome.
Don’t forget about their outdated-hIpster friend, Brave Chromium.
Acting like all these forks are just chrome is really disingenuous and isn’t helping the conversation at all.
Yep. I daily drive Vivaldi on both macOS and Android.
I love it. The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there. The theme is highly customizable; I have mine set to something similar to the Opera dark theme.
I don’t use the email or calendar features. The great thing about Vivaldi is that they provide a ton of power user features, but don’t shove it in your face. It’s super easy to turn off the things you don’t want and to turn on the things you do want.
I do use UBO, but they also have a builtin ad blocker if you want to use that instead.
The settings page is very extensive. Tons of customization. True to the Opera legacy!
The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there.
That’s amazing, I didn’t know you could do that. I’ve been using Vivaldi since the alpha days and I had no clue you could drag the extensions there.
Not to mention it has the best ad and tracker blocking I’ve seen without extensions, I’ve never used UBO or anything and still have zero issues on YouTube with ads or performance problems.
Yeah yeah I know, it’s still based on chromium, but until Firefox gets a suitable alternative to tab stacking and the side bar (ive already tried all of the solutions people claim is good enough or “the same” and find them all lacking) ill stick with V.
Side bar was what I miss most from GX when I tried it.
Vivaldi has the best tab management ever.
That’s what I thought until I installed Firefox with Sidebery and oh man, that’s another level. It required quite a bit of configuration make it really fit my needs, but when you configure it, it’s incredible.
Thanks for telling me about sidebery!
Huge fan of Vivaldi for both pc and mobile!
Isn’t Vivaldi also shady?
Maybe a tiny bit unstable and proprietary, but I don’t think they have had any controversies or shady action.
I loved some of the functionality Vivaldi adds (split tabs, tab groups, etc) but I couldn’t take the instability that came with it. That thing crashed more times in the 6 months I used it than Firefox or Chrome ever have for me total I swear to god.
Somewhat ditto, though for me it was less actual crashes and more generically bad performance while the rest of the system chugged along fine.
I love Vivaldi but it definitely chugs with the stupid amount of hibernated tabs I’ve got. The new sessions thing helped alleviate that a bit since I can save a window state and close it but I definitely run into some kind of memory leak with it. (I have had like 1k+ hibernated tabs open, so not entirely unexpected that it runs into issues but I’d still think if they’re hibernated they should just be stubbed out tabs in memory until clicking one turns it into a full browser process. Idk)
I use Vivaldi on macOS and Android.
I’ve never had stability issues.
I keep revisiting Vivaldi once every few months, and get reminded of why I uninstall it within minutes. They remove the option of changing DNS servers from the configuration UI and moved it into flags. I have absolutely no idea why they do that, and its a philosophy I vehemently disagree with.
the ad blocking on its own is just amazing, blocks some trackers that even UBO misses sometimes, rarely, but does happen.
Last I looked, I couldn’t find a Linux version of Vivaldi. Which is strange as I’m pretty sure their beta releases did. Been a hot minute since I’ve looked again. Other than being chromium based, I liked what I seen. It’s almost like kde developed it with its staggering feature set lol.
It’s available for Linux.
They’re available in a lot of standard repos, but you can find an executable on their site as well.
Recently a flatpack as well
Opera invested $30 million in the crypto startup ICST that same year, and the startup’s CEO was arrested four days later for financial crimes.
LOL
Well, some years ago the crypto startup was all the heat.
Explain why don’t just clickbait me.
Man its fucking sad what’s become of Opera. They gave us tabbed browsing, CSS, and lots of other stuff and then just like that, they became another uninteresting Chromium fork and its been straight to the shitter since.
Many of the O.G. Opera devs founded Vivaldi after Opera was sold to Chinese investors. It’s Chromium, but it has a considerable number of excellent power user features
I believe they also have plans to move beyond Chromium, but a new code base isn’t a quick project… (That said, they do eliminate the tracking features and other questionable elements of the code currently.)
Why is it clickbait? I don’t understand. The article explains the reasons. They don’t fit in the headline.
I had an @operamail email account for years, I was all in!
Hindenburg is an investment firm that researches publicly-traded companies and shorts their stocks if they find sufficient evidence of investor fraud before releasing its report.
What a wild business plan. I’m amazed it’s legal.
It’s kinda scummy to manipulate the market as such, but it’s much more scummy to partake in the fraud.
They’re like the anti-hero of this story.
Hilarious name too, honestly.
The Crash n’ Burn Bois
Short sellers provide benefit to society by finding and shaming doomed businesses so they fail faster and don’t suck up as many resources.
They also have a proud history of uncovering outright fraud.
In business, the people complaining loudest about short sellers are emperors with no clothes.
Stop using Chromium.
I don’t want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo
Floorp is the best of both worlds.
and it really needs a new name
I’ve been trying out Floorp for a few days now. It’s a great browser but honestly I don’t see that much of a difference compared to regular Firefox. If I had to pick, my favorite feature from Floorp would be the fact that it packages changes that would normally reuuire fiddling with
userChrome.cssinto simple toggles in about:preferences. I especially like how it makes hiding the horizontal tab bar so easy when I use Tree Style Tabs. That being said, I have fully switched over anyways.There isn’t on “killer feature”. It’s all of the little nice things that make me want to use it
Isnt Floorp being based on the lower ESR Firefox version a big turnoff, tho?
Nope
Elaborate. How is it not?
It’s more stable, and they merge some of the newer stuff
I want the latest version of my browser tho, I don’t want the “stable” version from 6 months ago. Never had a stability problem with Firefox to warrant the wait.
I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything by using it instead of the latest firefox
Vivaldi overheats my Macbook and runs like crap on my PC.
i used to like it but stopped using it recently
Opera was effectively the first software I bought, back when they had a trial version in 2001. They had tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, a solid DECADE before they came to any other browser. Lightyears ahead of the competition and worth every penny. I think in 2003 they made it free, and I wasn’t even mad.
I was forced to switch to Firefox at some point when a website I had to use for work was incompatible due to some Java applet that wouldn’t load properly, and then slowly migrated over.
Shame to see what happened to this amazing piece of tech.
It’s really tough to run a business when your competitors are all free as in freedom (Firefox) or free as in funded by monopolistic megacorps (Google, Apple, Microsoft).
To be fair, Opera in the 2000’s was craming every single feature they could think about in their browser.
So sure, they got some interesting features before the others but they also had hundreds of useless features cluttering the UI.
But it was still fast and didn’t gobble up RAM so much (well other than memory leaks, but none of the competitors were free of those either and IE crashing would also crash the desktop because it was the same instance of the same app for some reason).
imagine buying a web browser
Netscape navigator was free on CDs!
You bought the ad-free version, they had a small banner on top. And of course there were key generators and such, back in the days there wasn’t any online key validation. Or you could kill the banner with a local proxy. Still, I actually wanted to support the development, just like I donate to good FOSS software now, or buy android apps to remove ads although I’m already killing them all with adaway on a rooted phone.
Sure, there were free browsers out there, but back then Opera was really way ahead of the bell curve.
I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.
Yeah I mean I wouldn’t use that CCP bullshit.
I stopped using Opera when they dropped their actual product in favor of yet another Chromium-based something.
Yeah, that was a depressing discovery. I didn’t see any news about it but one day randomly wondered how opera could afford to develop a free browser that wasn’t FOSS. Digging into it was surprising. Not quite John McAfee surprising, but still sketchy. Like they were in the predatory banking industry and then there were the ties to China. It wasn’t hard to see that it was time to check out Firefox again.
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I loved Opera’s own engine. It was snappy and memory efficient. But their developers, at least back then, were very toxic. I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products and they all collectively went on vacation saying it’s a non-issue, instead of delaying the release. Any mention of this on forums guaranteed you a permanent ban.
They only have themselves to blame for user migration and all this controversy.
Opera was always hampered by not being IE or Chrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
the migration to Blink was in 2013, it helped at first it seems
Opera added a user agent header “selector” pretty early so it would tell the webpage it was chrome/IE/Firefox. It was important for compatibility for a lot of websites. I’d trust that listing less for them much less than I would for the bigger/default browsers.
The migration from their own codebase to chromium in 2012/2013 was…rough. They were the first browser to have cross-device synch and you couldn’t import bookmarks for a long time, much less RSS feeds/everything else people used Opera for. Their original userbase took a sizeable hit.
Yes, but as a user, there was always a broken webpage somewhere or some API it didn’t support.
When they switched to blink, I immediately got Firefox and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a browser that cares about my privacy, my choice to use an ad blocker, etc.
I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products
I remember that it was Google which intentionally made their sites non-functional with Opera. And that changing user agent alone was sufficient to make them work. I may be mistaken, of course.
EDIT: But yes, their developers were like that.
Vivaldi Browser is headed by some of the original founders of Opera ASA and is a reasonably good alternative to Google Chrome, MS Edge, Safari and new Opera itself.
Alternatively, use Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox/Waterfox/Iceraven.
Vivaldi is very pretty, but certainly more on the heavy side of the chromium spin-offs, and also they won’t fight the manifest v3 implementation.
Not sure how they could fight manifest v3, it’s Google making an (objectively bad) internal code decision that has knock-on effects for Chromium and everyone else.
FWIW they are going to try and keep things working and are looking for workarounds
God I miss old Opera
Opera died when they killed Presto and pretended they couldn’t make anything like that with blink.
Then the old ones made Vivaldi and proved that was a damned lie.
I’m kind of sad they didn’t choose gecko for Vivaldi.
Currently trying out Floorp after maining Vivaldi for years in preparation for the worst
I can vouch for Floorp being quite good. It also seems to be faster than Waterfox despite having more features built in.
+1 for floorp, it’s really fast
This is the first I’m hearing of floorp, I’ll have to check that out
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Or floorp
