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Opera is Reborn

blogs.opera.com

111–120 of 303 posts

Re: Opera is Reborn

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera has been using WebKit as their core engine for the past couple of years.

Actually it's WebKit fork by Google called Blink. And I do use Opera as a default browser. The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).

God I'd love to be able to do that in Chrome. Managing tabs totally fucking sucks, I hate that I can't combine multiple tabs into a single drop-down, or easily change the title of a tab, or tighten up the spacing, or anything I should be able to do in a modern browser.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#113
post #40

I don't dare to use this since Opera got bought by that Chinese consortium of companies I'm not accustomed with. Not sure if I'm overly cautious? I'm thinking of especially Opera Link (which had a recent security breach to boot!). Wouldn't that leave out my passwords to China? And I do want to use some sort of syncing, I'd go crazy without anything there or some iffy third party addon. It's not even just about a trus…

The company bought opera is the one with a bad reputation in the field of user privacy. Qihoo is the one which provides a software_you_dont_need installation gateway which covered by a free anti-virus mask. LOL

Re: Opera is Reborn

#114
post #7

Where to Opera get their money? Building and maintaining a browser seems like an expensive undertaking, and yet despite nobody I know using or even testing their websites on Opera, they've been actively developing and maintaining their browser for years.

Opera ASA the company used to get its money by selling the browser, then moved to an ad supported browser (circa v5 IIRC), then they managed to secured enough funding through commercial partnership (mostly google to be the default search engine, same as firefox) and removed ads from the browser, another source of income source was opera mobile.

A few years back the founders got removed and there was a shift to quarterly profit and they stopped developing and maintaining their own rendering engine and browser to basically become a skin for google chrome, saving costs. In the recent times they improved their skin status and tried to sell the whole package and managed to do last summer to a chinese consortium of investors.

I suppose right now opera gets its money from the deep pockets of rich chinese investors, the current business model might have something to do with surveillance capitalism.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#115
post #7

Where to Opera get their money? Building and maintaining a browser seems like an expensive undertaking, and yet despite nobody I know using or even testing their websites on Opera, they've been actively developing and maintaining their browser for years.

The company behind Opera browser owns a large ad network.

I did not know "Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership" who owns the opera browser also owned a large ad network. Can you provide more details on this ?

Re: Opera is Reborn

#116
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this limited to Opera and China ? This kind of reasoning also applies to facebook, any alphabet or google product/service, apple, uber, airbnb, and pretty much any company/service that's based in the US where the patriot act pretty much makes all these companies open bar for the US government.

There is a difference between the engine I use to access a large variety of websites, and a single website/service.

I'm confused. Is "the engine you use to access a large variety of websites" Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway). If it's Google, Chrome is no better, and Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway.

More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#117
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this limited to Opera and China ? This kind of reasoning also applies to facebook, any alphabet or google product/service, apple, uber, airbnb, and pretty much any company/service that's based in the US where the patriot act pretty much makes all these companies open bar for the US government.

There is a difference between the engine I use to access a large variety of websites, and a single website/service.

Facebook and Google track you all over the web.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#118
post #8

So chatting while browsing is the future of desktop browsing? Sounds rather... unambitious.

It's also a simple rip-off of what Vivaldi already had, thanks to customisable side panels - which, to be fair, is itself a simple update of what Mozilla had back in the '90s.

If this is the best Opera has to offer today, they won't last long.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's WebKit fork by Google called Blink. And I do use Opera as a default browser. The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).

There is an option to change that behavior in Firefox.

There's tabmixplus that is way better than changing setting in about:config.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

Re: Opera is Reborn

#120
post #29

I wonder why [.* ]baidu.com, [.* ]facebook.com, [.* ]google.com and [.* ]yandex.com are in the default list of exceptions when blocking ads. Any ideas?

Money.

IIRC Opera has an agreement with Google to make it the default browser. I wonder what they have with Facebook, Baidu and Yandex. Maybe the default browser is region-based.
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