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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.
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.
This 100%.
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.
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 😅
That is quite the pivot.
What’s wrong with firefox?
Nothing. Ideally you’ll take a privacy hardened fork though, like Fennec or LibreWolf.
For android there’s iceraven and mull.
Isn’t fennec on android?
I never used fennec.
I used Opera because you could place tabs at the bottom of the window. When Opera became just a Chrome skin, I switched to Firefox because through the Tab Mix Plus extension I could place the tabs to the bottom. When Firefox killed the extension (and many more), I switched to Vivaldi (made by the former Opera team) because it offered tabs on the bottom. Very recently I switched to Waterfox, because @[email protected] told me the browser also allows for tabs to be placed at the bottom. What can I say… I’m a bottom kind of guy…
I like bottoms tbh. 😏 I am using iceraven myself for a year pretty good.
Any particular reason you want your tabs at the bottom of the window? Aesthetics, work flow, grouping?
Just something I’m used to. I have windows tabs on the bottom, so I’d like to have everything in the same place, rather than move the cursor all over the screen. I guess it’s a holdover back from Netscape days when I had several separate windows open, and they all had their own tab on the Windows task bar.
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.
a few years ago
a decade ago
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.
Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.
Mozilla has bad resource management, that’s a fact.
However turning into a loan shark app business? I really don’t think so. Unless another browser enters the market and takes off (which is extremely difficult given the tons of features browsers are built to support for all sorts of websites) Mozilla never has to worry that much about money since Google is their top funder; and Google’s main reason to fund them is to not deal with all sorts of legal issues and fines they’ll recieve for creating a monopoly.
Oh come now. Who would have predicted Opera would have ended up like this? Even with hindsight this dark path is hard to predict bit the overall trend is not.
Mozilla has created something of value and it has amassed a growing audience. If you are willing to invest in your confidence, I would happily short you in 10years or less, it’s nearly ripe for corruption and not at all immune from something similar to what has become of Opera. Trusting that Google will doing anything consistent is another lesson in ignoring trends.
Can you name any other non profits, around for as long as mozilla, and as large as mozilla, that have become “something similar” to a Chinese malware producer?
Besides opera? Its a decent case example. openai started as nonprofit. You think they have your best interest in mind right now?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it’s time to jump ship.
Firefox has so many issues. I do hear people say that if you use the nightly build it gets better, but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
I still use it, both on mobile and desktop, but its main appeal for me right now is that it is “not Chrome”. The 5% breakage of Firefox is nowhere close to the 50% enshittification of Chrome:-(.
but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
Considering that the chrome app does not even have a way to install extensions, this is still a massive win for Firefox.
Mozilla has also started to make more and more extensions compatible with the mobile app recently, see https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/01/is-your-extension-ready-for-firefox-for-android/
It does keep getting better and better (while Chrome gets shittier and shittier).
😅Love the optimism here! And Firefox fanboyism here! I’m a FF user too, but if you think FF is immune to going down shitty paths in the future like almost all well-intentioned tech products eventually do, there is antifreeze in your kool-aid, and I’m afraid you’ve gone blind.
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It’s quite nice and I use it daily.
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.
It’s a rebranded chromium with some extra bloat. Just like his older brother Chinese Chromium, Opera, and their edgy cousin, Microsoft Chromium.
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.
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.
It’s just another flavour of Chromium though isn’t it?
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.
Much more UI customization and a shitton of power user stuff too
Still chromium, no thanks.
Yeah
the ad blocking on its own is just amazing, blocks some trackers that even UBO misses sometimes, rarely, but does happen.
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!
Vivaldi, the best alternative to Opera from the same old people who originally created Opera. I use it as a backup browser to Firefox and it’s been great
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.
People still use Opera?
People used opera?
I don’t see regular Opera being used, but often Opera GX. Their marketing is so powerful, and those edgy features attract gamers.
The true Opera fans moved to Vivaldi.
All that is left are those who got caught.
Tried using Vivaldi at one point and I really liked it but it was noticeably slower than both Firefox and chrome even though it’s just another chromium fork. I’ve since switched back to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
firefox is slower for me lmao, still use it but compared to vivaldi, it uses more cpu and ram somehow
This is unlikely to get the Opera GX fanboys to switch.
Good article though. Fuck this noise.
I don’t know if there are any Opera GX fanboys lol
Why would we need them to switch? Shouldn’t we just leave them be if they’re happy that way?
Firefox’s total global market share is 3.3%. They’re practically losing their influence over the web with numbers that small. So while I’m generally in favor of letting people access the web however they’d like, I’m not naive to the idea of advocating for the little guy.
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
They did done awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn’t think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.
And despite being designed to run on potatoes with a 2G connection it somehow felt just as smooth as modern mobile browsers (at least as I remember it). It’s crazy how well it worked considering the hardware and network limitations of the time.
Didn’t opera cache images on their server and feed you a lower res version instead of what the website had? Granted with the limited bandwidth available back then, that was fine but now I don’t think many people would want that.
In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn’t do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.
Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.
I remember an ex-girlfriend daily driving it on her phone for all kinds of communications, so maybe this is why she preferred it, I never wondered why, I was very happy with my Linux machine and I barely used my mobile phone at those times anyway.
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.
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
Where did this nonsense come from
I used Opera way back in high school over 2 decades ago. The name has been around for a long time, but I don’t know how related the current company is to back then… The product certainly isn’t related anymore since it’s just another chromium clone.
Opera has been in the web browser playing field for a long time at this point, but haven’t been super relevant until the last couple years due to GX
