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Opera is Reborn

blogs.opera.com

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Re: Opera is Reborn

#131

Post by Pyxl101 »

jug wrote: 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 EULA does specifically say that the contract is based on Norweigan law, for what it's worth:

> 12. THIS CONTRACT IS BASED ON NORWEGIAN LAW. This EULA will be governed by the laws of Norway without giving effect to any conflicts of law principles that may require the application of the laws of a different country.

Other potentially interesting terms -- "components" from "third parties" may be delivered along with Opera. Operate claims they're not responsible for that software, despite making the choice to deliver it to you:

> 5. COMPONENTS FROM THIRD PARTIES MAY BE DELIVERED ALONG WITH THE SOFTWARE. The Software is delivered along with certain software components provide by third parties (“Third Party Software”). Opera shall not be responsible for any such Third-Party Software.

Opera may come with "additional services", including one that routes your browser traffic through an Opera proxy:

> 6. THE SOFTWARE MAY INCLUDE ADDITIONAL OPERA SERVICES. Various additional Opera services may be offered where available via or as integrated into the Software (“Services”). These Services may include one or more of the following:

> ii. Compression: The Software includes compression functionality to enable users to boost the download of web content such as webpages and/or videos. This functionality requests web content through Opera’s proxy or compression servers. Your browsing experience may change due to increased loading speeds.

This last clause seems to allow Opera to route your web traffic through their servers, where they presumably have the technical ability to examine, record, and modify it. It's not clear to me if the EULA places any restrictions on how they may interact with this traffic, to record it, examine it, etc.

Others of these "additional services" are described as "optional", whereas the compression service is not:

> v. Contextual Hints: The Software may include “Browser Assistant”, a component that provides contextual hints about certain Opera browser features and other useful information which you might be interested in. Browser Assistant is an optional component of the Software.

Though, to be fair: the third-party reference may be referring to open source software (but doesn't appear limited to that); and Opera's compression service is similar to features offered by other browsers like Google Chrome.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#132

Post by zacmps »

bigbugbag wrote: post #61
Kholo wrote: post #14

Hey opera folks who might be reading this - work on simplifying offline access to web content. I want to be able to maintain ~100 GB of offline data store, full text searchable. Wikipedia, stackexchange\stackoverflow, khan academy, zealdocs and whole bunch of other sources of useful browser renderable web content provide dumps of their data. And then they end up having to build spl apps and extensions and other garba…

There was a time when Opera was not a google chrome skin and offered indexed full page search of local cache of visited page. This was incredibly useful and practical. It also had the option to save the whole web page in a single file. Sadly this kind of feature disappeared when opera moved to a quarterly profit based strategy. The kind of feature you want is achievable today but requires a set of tools beyond a web…

This would be possible with a chrome extension. They can implement their own search engines.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#134

Post by bigbugbag »

jug wrote: post #50
robjan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people say "the Chinese" as if Chinese people are some scary, out of this world concept or they are some kind of James Bond villain.

I don't really blame the Chinese people myself, it's the ways the Chinese government is embedded in their industries whether they want it or not that worry me, especially with a software like a web browser.

You could have similar criticism of the US, see patriot act.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#135

Post by cryptarch »

shakna wrote: post #129
StavrosK wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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) True, if I used Google, or their products. But, I use Mozilla, who are publicly auditable, and an email provider that is not located in the US. The majority of visits to websites have no search engine interaction, but those that do, make use of DuckDuckGo and the like. > More genera…

... and even pinning won't save you unless you use a tool to monitor your connections and confirm you actually are using the cert your browser is saying you're using.

I'm not entirely sure it's possible to build such a tool.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#136

Post by bigbugbag »

Hey this google chrome skin has made some progress since last time I heard about it. It's still light years behind opera 12 and sadly will never regain what it lost.

If you're interested in the actual reborn opera experience, it's vivaldi you're looking for, opera co-founder and many for the original opera team is making vivaldi and though based on blink engine too, hence limited and unable to do exactly what opera used to, it has the same philosophy and vision.

The other alternative is the free software otter[1] browser aiming at recreating the opera 12 experience.

[0]: http://vivaldi.net/ [1]: https://otter-browser.org/

Re: Opera is Reborn

#137

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

neotek wrote: post #112
michalstanko wrote: post #15

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).

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.

Not being able to move tabs with the keyboard annoys me more than it should. Of course, I also wish the switching used the same method as window-switching, but I really wish tab/window/app switching was globally handled by the OS, and fully configurable in terms of behaviour.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#138

Post by jonmccull »

nonsince wrote: post #59

I really like the concept of bringing i3-style tiling management to the browser space, but why is it specific to messengers? Since most well-designed websites work at any size, couldn't you just have a permanent tab at the side of the screen of, say, twitter, or some browser-based IRC client? Admittedly, I'd probably use facebook messenger as this tab anyway, so my needs are covered, but it seems like a missed opport…

Vivaldi's "Web Panels" are doing this with a lot more flexibility - you can add any site you want as a custom panel in the sidebar and resize the width to adjust the ratio with your main window.

Granted, a lot of people use it for social/messengers, but it's also super useful for resources and tools like Stackoverflow or Google Translate.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#139

Post by bigbugbag »

adrianN wrote: post #117
shakna wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say they attempt to track you by having various mechanisms to do so. This distinction is important as to no make this tracking appears imevitable.

you can take measures to prevent them from tracking you, a simple and quite effective one is to disable scripting and use a properly set up blocker such as ublock origin.

Re: Opera is Reborn

#140

Post by izacus »

bigbugbag wrote: post #69
jug wrote: 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…

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.

Except that if you're an American, chances of Chinese government being able to affect you are tiny. Chances of NSA/Homeland Security/FBI tagging you as a "suspicious person - potential terrorist" and making your travel a living hell due to your Chrome history is significantly higher.
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