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.
Said another way: if a company offering a password manager can recover all your passwords with you just clicking "forgot password", that means they can read your passwords in plain text (and so can hackers if the company gets hacked).
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.
Pretty much every service on the internet does password-reset via a token sent to your mailbox, so if someone gets control of your mail, you're pretty much pwned anyway. It would be slower and more inconvenient for an attacker to reset everything individually, but I'm sure they can automate that.
This is just security theatre. Burning all my data makes my life a lot harder, but an attacker would barely notice.
If I can reset each individual credential via mail token, on the assumption that only the genuine owner has access to the mailbox, then I lose nothing by resetting access to the whole set of credentials via mail token, on that same assumption.
It's only security theater because you have this kind of mentality:
It would be slower and more inconvenient for an attacker to reset everything individually, but I'm sure they can automate that.
then I lose nothing by resetting access to the whole set of credentials via mail token, on that same assumption.
You're right that an attacker could reset everything if they had access to your primary email account, but 1) you should already have 2fa on that account to protect yourself, 2) losing access to your email would be a signal that something is wrong and gives you a chance to react before they have everything, and 3) there's a world of difference between having credentials immediately vs having to jump through hoops to reset stuff. Also:
Burning all my data makes my life a lot harder, but an attacker would barely notice.
Burning all your data means your attacker can't suddenly transfer the contents of your checking account away or buy all kinds of shit from trusted vendors just because they broke into one account. Security is about layered defense, not just giving the attacker keys to the kingdom because you couldn't remember one password.
That’s great until Google finds that one picture of your child at the pool and immediately deletes your CSAM-harboring filthy account.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I use Vivaldi on macOS and Android.
I've never had stability issues.
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 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.
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.
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 don't want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
Stop using Chromium.
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.
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.
I stopped using Opera when they dropped their actual product in favor of yet another Chromium-based something.
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
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.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.
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.
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
Just install firefox / waterfox / etc. and be done with it.
...groundfox, and airfox! With all the foxes of infinity collected, I can finally be free.
Long ago, the four foxes lived together in harmony. But everything changed when the firefox attacked...
Due to recent scientific advances, we now know that firefox is actually oxygen fox combining with other molecular foxes and waterfox is one of those products.
And heartfox! By their powers combined...
darkenergyfox has entered the chat
Or floorp
They did some 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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazing piece of software. Reliable on the server side, agile and full of features on the mobile side. And they even made sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook could be used in the browser. What a pity the Opera branding ended like this.
This is unlikely to get the Opera GX fanboys to switch.
Good article though. Fuck that 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.
More importantly, using Firefox (or any of its forks) would mean less people are dependent on Google's Chromium. With less people depending on Google's Chromium, the less Google can swing its weight around, imposing its dictum on unsuspecting users.
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.
If Firefox adopted some Vivaldi features it would be the perfect browser, as it stands Vivaldi is unusable for development, but the Tiling and stacking tabs are awesome, wish Firefox borrowed those.
Alternatively Vivaldi switching to Firefox's engine and giving us a better dev experience would be nice
vivaldi using gecko would be great! it probably would take a lot of work tho
Firefox with vertical tabs works great for me.
Vertical tabs are honestly one of the single most important features of a web browser for me these days. I honestly can't believe how much of a difference it makes.
Every time I have tried a different browser than Firefox I could never get it set up quite right. I never strayed from Firefox only because of the openness of the add-ons and customization, even when Firefox was miles behind when it came to browsing speed in the early 2010s as Chrome was popping off.
Anyone who tells me Chrome is better hasn't seen my multitude of tab add-ons which are the only thing that hold my online life together.
Plus, I recall google limiting adblockers and such on Chrome at a certain point. Firefox would never
I want to see your multitude of tab add-ons. I'm always looking for ways to improve my experience but I never even considered messing with tabs and now I wonder what I'm missing out on!
Session buddy was a big one for me in college when I had an overwhelming number of tabs open but didn't want to forget about what was on them. Basically just archives all your open tabs to a single page you can refine and look back at, so you can quickly just close everything and start fresh without actually losing anything meaningful or cluttering up your bookmarks.
The marvellous suspender helped prevent those tabs from using so much memory. Chrome hogs enough memory as it is lol.
I have one called tab manager plus which looks handy but I honestly forgot it was there before I ever actually used it lol
Sorry for the extremely late reply. But anyways, I use
Auto Tab Discard - Frees up ram with unused tabs
Sideberry - a vertical option to organize and search tabs with a overwhelming plethora of options
Tab Session Manager - To make sure I don't lose my tabs if my browser crashes
Tab Stash - to hide away bundles of tabs so I can sort through them later
Window Titler - To name my different windows I have open in order to keep things organized on my windows toolbar. I use the old school windows toolbar layout which has text beside the icon. I like it this way instead of going through little popup windows to sort through my shit.
I've never tried it, why is it preferable over the default horizontal tabs?
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.
Test out reading mode in other Chronium browsers, for me that does the job
Firefox also has a reading mode, firefox's reading mode hides all the unnecessary element instead of zooming in though, but it does such a great job that I don't care
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.
Hey, anybody know the best browser for Windows Mobile 6.5?
Anybody know the best browser for my Nintendo Wii?
In other news: stop using Netscape
Opera is still used by 2.86% of the world, while Netscape probably has less than 100 users.
Wait, is it really just 3%? A lot of people I know use Opera, especially the "Gamer Edition", more than even default Chrome. I have the same thing with Firefox, where there's a way higher density in people I know using it than its overall market share, but that bias is to be expected. I'm surprised that it's a similar case with Opera.
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.
It is very features-heavy, but the downside of that is that it takes more resources.
firefox is slower for me lmao, still use it but compared to vivaldi, it uses more cpu and ram somehow
Actually after Opera switched engine from Presto to Blink and become another Chromium-based browser I was a bit lost, and switched between different browsers while never really had that "good connection" I had with Opera, but I eventually switched to Firefox and I don't really see any other alternative right now. It just works, and supports free and open web.
I don't see regular Opera being used, but often Opera GX. Their marketing is so powerful, and those edgy features attract gamers.
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.
God damn it. I just switched to Opera because of the "Hey get off Chrome" posts like 2 weeks ago.
I have Firefox installed but don't love it. Need a "and the next closest good mobile browser is X"
What is Firefox lacking for you to love it?
Not who you asked, but the tab islands is my favorite feature from opera
Fair, that is pretty awesome feature, especially for the tab sprawl in this day and age.
I (obviously) use Firefox, and I had the same problem, and found the "Tree Style Tab" extension solves the same problem for me, however it does it in a very different way.
Instead of having your tabs along the top of the window, your tabs are kept in a sidebar, and vertically. Opening new tabs from an already open page makes the new tabs nest under the original tab. You can collapse and expand whole trees of tabs, and move them around should you need to.
It also integrates nicely with the "Container Tabs" putting a colored band next to the tabs belonging to each container.
The tabs being vertical also means that you can always read the titles of the tabs, they don't get "squished".
It does cost a chunk of screen real estate, but for me the organization is worth it.
That tree tabs sounds awesome. I'm using container tabs already and it's greatly helped my tabs become less of a mess. But keeping them organized based on which tab I spawned them from sounds great, too. And tbh, it not hiding the original tab bar sounds even better because then I can combine the organization of container tabs with the historical origin of the tabs from tree style tabs and just use whichever one feels more intuitive in the moment to find the tab I'm looking for (or to traverse open tabs for cleanup).
Awesome to hear, and good luck with it!
I just want to mention that there is a lot of configuration options in Tree Style Tab, so if it doesn't behave exactly how you want it to, there's a high likelihood that you just need to tweak the settings a bit.
Brave, Firefox Focus and Mull are decent options for mobile users.
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.
the last time when I used Opera browser was on my Sony Ericsson W580i and C702i
I remember Opera Mini being the only browser that worked properly on my old Sony Ericsson Xperia X8, all other ones just worked very slowly to the point of being entirely unusable (even Opera Mobile which was a different browser than Opera Mini).
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.
Somebody here is going to have a reason: why shouldn’t I use Safari?
As a developer, Safari is the browser that supports the least standards and is holding the browser ecosystem back.
IE died, and Safari took up the mantle as the asshole of the internet.
It should be held back. Although I dislike the company, I believe safari's market share and use of an alternative browser engine is important in keeping google from closing the web.
Now that’s a reason I can get behind.
furthermore, they add nonstandard features to their browser(along with chrome), which makes it difficult to make websites look the same across browsers.
fortunately, I can test those websites beforehand since we have webkit-based epiphany on GNU/Linux(the engine which safari uses).
but other developers, especially those who are on windows can't, since safari is mac-only.
I have a special stylesheet to fix safari(and chrome) styling.
otherwise it's a fine lightweight browser(blessed be KHTML).
While inferior to Firefox due to reason outlined by another user, it is infinitely better than going with Chromium-based browsers.
Keep on using it if you feel comfortable with it
Just for the bullshit with the video players i would never use safari.
What bullshit is that? I’ve never had an issue watching pirated content.
Apparently There is beef between apple and google, and google won’t allow you to watch content in 4K on their video players (say youtube) for newer chip like the M1. There is no sound explanation apart from being a petty org. So to be able to watch stuff in the resolution you like you need to enable dev mode and add “experimental features” and some arent even on after that. Ask me why apple doesn’t battle it? I didn’t care enough to find out at that point, they’re both assholes fighting but the users pay. I simply switched to firefox on macbook pro and i can actually use a retina to its full potential. Can enable 4K there on video players with no hassle.
I think there are some better alternatives out there such as Firefox + uBlock Origin extension, Brave, Vivaldi (maybe Arc? Haven't tried it yet) that gives you some extra features that are missing in safari (for example Multi-account containers, vertical tabs, split tabs,... just to mention the ones I enjoy the most)
But if you just want a browser that works from a normal usage I don't see nothing wrong in using Safari.
+it uses an engine different from Blink (aka Chromium) which keeps a little bit of variety in the browser engine market. So while using Safari you're also doing something good for the internet imho
My biggest attachment to Safari is how well integrated it is with the rest of the Mac. Fingerprint integration for passwords, gesture integration with the track pad, seamless handoff between phone and computer—these things are somewhat reproducible with Firefox and extensions, but it is nowhere near as perfect as it is when you’ve got the browser and the whole OS designed to work in a coordinated dance with each other.
Hard to disagree with that... the flawless integration of every piece in Apple's "ecosystem" is hard to reproduce (even if all those features can be achieved as you were saying, it wouldn't be "as flawless")
Just maybe pair it with an Ad and Tracker blocker extension like AdGuard
TIL about Hindenburg and the hilarity of their investment strategy.
Also, I really liked that presto engine. The shit was always very dramatically faster than any other browser and I was ok with the odd table or two being mispositioned.
Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it's spyware.
Is this a shitpost or is that idiot actually telling me not to use Opera because of alleged investor fraud in 2020?
I don't give a fuck about that, mate, when the other option is a Monopoly that literally removed the "Don't be Evil" clause from their code of conduct. If you want me to stop using Opera then you'll have to give me a reason about the specifications of the program, not about the company's petty crimes due to Chinese regulatory failures.
I don’t give a fuck about that, mate, when the other option is a Monopoly that literally removed the “Don’t be Evil” clause from their code of conduct.
That's not the only other option. Use Firefox.
I would if they brought back manual cookie handling like it used to. Just feels like a downgrade in features, tbh.
Not that it matters either way but they didn't remove the clause, they just moved it from the introduction to the closing statement. Which clickbait articles all reported as "removed".
But it was always meaningless anyway.
People in here dropping facts on me.
I'm just tired as the next person about posts that provide a million half-assed reasons to not use anything but Firefox. But honestly If we don't stop these places from building dossiers on us and locking us out of websites that are unsanctioned by them, It will a erode our opportunities in years to come.
Right now, it doesn't feel like it matters. Lexis-Nexis knows every nickel you ever spend and every creditor that ever ran a check on you, Google knows what type of porn you like to watch, tik tok and opera are storing everything that you've ever been into in a place that can be retrieved by other governments.
At some point we're going to have to take our privacy more seriously. Preferably before 1984 actually becomes real.
If you could just provide some citations about Opera intrusively tracking and building profiles then I'd happily switch. The thing is, though, it's still leagues better than Chromium in that regard.
For what it's worth their privacy policy does say they gather telemetry and they did pay how many billions for the company?
Almost everybody else is gathering telemetry as well obviously. The actual root of the concern is that the companies are based in China, you know the great firewall of China, China. The Chinese government holds a stranglehold on the companies that operate within them. For example if you have a US company and you want to do some business in China you have to find a Chinese partner company to sponsor you. Everything you store there everything you touch runs through the Chinese government. If they want any of the data, that required to be given access.
If you remember when Google went to open a data center in China there was a pretty big kerfuffle. It was because the Chinese government was going to be handed keys to the kingdom for anything that was stored in China. For better or for worse it's just how they operate.
You may not feel the same way but I'm sure you at least get the concern there.
Personally I try not to use Google integrated Chrome or Microsoft integrated chromium. I still use brave when I need a Chrome browser and that's not the best either. They'd sell me up the river if they decided they needed a buck.
I honestly wish we had more Firefox competition. And unified plug-in languages. The stuff that Opera and brave are providing aren't difficult to mimic. And I really like there being developers fighting YouTube ad blocking and website pop-ups and pay wall bypasses.
I'm not saying oh my God they're going to rape you over the coals right now but do consider that the people that are making these crazy ass posts aren't delusional or entirely wrong, and do use who's getting your data on your consideration.
Usually the saying is "rake you over the coals" but I kind of like your version in the context.
Opera IS a Chromium browser, you doofus!
Ah wow you're right, ever since Opera 15 they dropped the presto engine. Still, my point was supposed to be they're much more privacy friendly than Google Chrome, and that still stands to be argued.
If you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve got nothing to fear. If you’ve got something to hide then you shouldn’t even be here.
Nah, you're conflating wrong with unlawful
20 years later you're denied a house loan because your internet records show you went to a fascist website. Or an anti-fascist website, whatever floats your boat.
Things that were acceptable or slightly garish 20 years ago are now grounds for dismissal at a job, you know.
You've had your chance now they have the mandate. If you've changed your mind I'm afraid it's too late.
Yeah, if I stopped using/buying a product just because the company behind it did something slightly shitty, I wouldn't have any belongings, food, etc.
I use Firefox just as much as I use opera gx, I use them on each of my browsers. Opera gx is more primary but yeah...
I dont know what I would replace it with. Brave, I guess?
A couple of people have made a good argument for Brave.
I use Brave on occasions and it's pretty good. But for some reason I just can't seem to make it my everyday driver.
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.
I can't even install opera GX, I just get an error, is it because I have core isolation enabled?
I've been using Firefox as my "home" browser and Opera GX as my "work" browser. On Windows, it's easy to set up launch profiles but not so much on Mac. I need to figure out a solution to this before I can transition.
Have you given Vivaldi a try? I quite like it and use it for work related tasks. Anything else I use Firefox.
Isn’t it just more chromium though?
Opera is also Chromium though, so that wouldn't really change anything
I need to figure out an easy way to launch different browser profiles on a Mac without having to go to about:profile.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. It's different enough using day to day though IMO. Although I haven't kept track of what's their status on chromium extensions getting nerfed though.
That is quite the pivot.
Been saying this for ages
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.
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
Done
Is there a good modern alternative to something like GNU IceCat that I can compile from source?
To be fair I use Chrome form most day to day things, Firefox sometimes, Edge whenever I want to use AI search (cheatgpt stuff) and Opera is my dedicated porn browser!
Opera is just another skin of chrome (built on top of chromium), so really you use chrome for everything except porn and ai. Why are you so set on using multiple forms of trash?
And what should I use, only Firefox for everything? Cause I really don't like Firefox and I don't know of other browsers other then Tor. I'm not gonna use that one!
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.
Didn't Mozilla just do a big roadmap talking about what they plan to do in the future and it was basically all AI and Activism with no mention of Firefox?
I hope to see Firefox grow, but who knows. Especially if antitrust actions or a continued drop in Firefox usage cuts off the Google money and makes Mozilla go poof.
But of course at least Gecko is Foss so it can't disappear entirely if the community doesn't let it.
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?
Is openai similar to a Chinese malware producer?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it's time to jump ship.
What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That's how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they've been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.
Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it's Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That's why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.
But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
So Mozilla isn't perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.
at least someone will be able to fork Firefox's code, unlike the sad story with Opera's old Presto engine, that due to being proprietary suffered an inevitable dead.
😅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.
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.
It does keep getting better and better (while Chrome gets shittier and shittier).
In the olden days they had 100% support for extentions
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
It is like "even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - but that does not mean that you should trust the time that you see". It is possible, in more ways than one, to be both right yet also very wrong at the same time. :-P
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
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.
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':
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.
Said another way: if a company offering a password manager can recover all your passwords with you just clicking "forgot password", that means they can read your passwords in plain text (and so can hackers if the company gets hacked).
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.
Pretty much every service on the internet does password-reset via a token sent to your mailbox, so if someone gets control of your mail, you're pretty much pwned anyway. It would be slower and more inconvenient for an attacker to reset everything individually, but I'm sure they can automate that.
This is just security theatre. Burning all my data makes my life a lot harder, but an attacker would barely notice.
If I can reset each individual credential via mail token, on the assumption that only the genuine owner has access to the mailbox, then I lose nothing by resetting access to the whole set of credentials via mail token, on that same assumption.
It's only security theater because you have this kind of mentality:
You're right that an attacker could reset everything if they had access to your primary email account, but 1) you should already have 2fa on that account to protect yourself, 2) losing access to your email would be a signal that something is wrong and gives you a chance to react before they have everything, and 3) there's a world of difference between having credentials immediately vs having to jump through hoops to reset stuff. Also:
Burning all your data means your attacker can't suddenly transfer the contents of your checking account away or buy all kinds of shit from trusted vendors just because they broke into one account. Security is about layered defense, not just giving the attacker keys to the kingdom because you couldn't remember one password.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-What-does-Brave-remove-from-the-Chromium-engine
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!
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.
I use Vivaldi on macOS and Android.
I've never had stability issues.
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 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
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!
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.
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.
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 don't want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
Stop using Chromium.
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.
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.
I stopped using Opera when they dropped their actual product in favor of yet another Chromium-based something.
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.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
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
Unfortunately Gecko was in the process of being significantly rewritten when Vivaldi had to choose an engine.
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
Just install firefox / waterfox / etc. and be done with it.
...groundfox, and airfox! With all the foxes of infinity collected, I can finally be free.
Long ago, the four foxes lived together in harmony. But everything changed when the firefox attacked...
Due to recent scientific advances, we now know that firefox is actually oxygen fox combining with other molecular foxes and waterfox is one of those products.
And heartfox! By their powers combined...
darkenergyfox has entered the chat
Or floorp
They did some 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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazing piece of software. Reliable on the server side, agile and full of features on the mobile side. And they even made sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook could be used in the browser. What a pity the Opera branding ended like this.
This is unlikely to get the Opera GX fanboys to switch.
Good article though. Fuck that 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.
More importantly, using Firefox (or any of its forks) would mean less people are dependent on Google's Chromium. With less people depending on Google's Chromium, the less Google can swing its weight around, imposing its dictum on unsuspecting users.
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.
If Firefox adopted some Vivaldi features it would be the perfect browser, as it stands Vivaldi is unusable for development, but the Tiling and stacking tabs are awesome, wish Firefox borrowed those.
Alternatively Vivaldi switching to Firefox's engine and giving us a better dev experience would be nice
vivaldi using gecko would be great! it probably would take a lot of work tho
Firefox with vertical tabs works great for me.
Vertical tabs are honestly one of the single most important features of a web browser for me these days. I honestly can't believe how much of a difference it makes.
Every time I have tried a different browser than Firefox I could never get it set up quite right. I never strayed from Firefox only because of the openness of the add-ons and customization, even when Firefox was miles behind when it came to browsing speed in the early 2010s as Chrome was popping off.
Anyone who tells me Chrome is better hasn't seen my multitude of tab add-ons which are the only thing that hold my online life together.
Plus, I recall google limiting adblockers and such on Chrome at a certain point. Firefox would never
I want to see your multitude of tab add-ons. I'm always looking for ways to improve my experience but I never even considered messing with tabs and now I wonder what I'm missing out on!
Session buddy was a big one for me in college when I had an overwhelming number of tabs open but didn't want to forget about what was on them. Basically just archives all your open tabs to a single page you can refine and look back at, so you can quickly just close everything and start fresh without actually losing anything meaningful or cluttering up your bookmarks.
The marvellous suspender helped prevent those tabs from using so much memory. Chrome hogs enough memory as it is lol.
I have one called tab manager plus which looks handy but I honestly forgot it was there before I ever actually used it lol
Sorry for the extremely late reply. But anyways, I use Auto Tab Discard - Frees up ram with unused tabs
Sideberry - a vertical option to organize and search tabs with a overwhelming plethora of options
Tab Session Manager - To make sure I don't lose my tabs if my browser crashes
Tab Stash - to hide away bundles of tabs so I can sort through them later
Window Titler - To name my different windows I have open in order to keep things organized on my windows toolbar. I use the old school windows toolbar layout which has text beside the icon. I like it this way instead of going through little popup windows to sort through my shit.
I've never tried it, why is it preferable over the default horizontal tabs?
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.
Test out reading mode in other Chronium browsers, for me that does the job
Firefox also has a reading mode, firefox's reading mode hides all the unnecessary element instead of zooming in though, but it does such a great job that I don't care
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.
Hey, anybody know the best browser for Windows Mobile 6.5?
Anybody know the best browser for my Nintendo Wii?
In other news: stop using Netscape
Opera is still used by 2.86% of the world, while Netscape probably has less than 100 users.
Wait, is it really just 3%? A lot of people I know use Opera, especially the "Gamer Edition", more than even default Chrome. I have the same thing with Firefox, where there's a way higher density in people I know using it than its overall market share, but that bias is to be expected. I'm surprised that it's a similar case with Opera.
Why?
Chinese spyware, has been for years now.
People still use Opera?
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.
It is very features-heavy, but the downside of that is that it takes more resources.
firefox is slower for me lmao, still use it but compared to vivaldi, it uses more cpu and ram somehow
Actually after Opera switched engine from Presto to Blink and become another Chromium-based browser I was a bit lost, and switched between different browsers while never really had that "good connection" I had with Opera, but I eventually switched to Firefox and I don't really see any other alternative right now. It just works, and supports free and open web.
I don't see regular Opera being used, but often Opera GX. Their marketing is so powerful, and those edgy features attract gamers.
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.
God damn it. I just switched to Opera because of the "Hey get off Chrome" posts like 2 weeks ago.
I have Firefox installed but don't love it. Need a "and the next closest good mobile browser is X"
What is Firefox lacking for you to love it?
Not who you asked, but the tab islands is my favorite feature from opera
Fair, that is pretty awesome feature, especially for the tab sprawl in this day and age.
I (obviously) use Firefox, and I had the same problem, and found the "Tree Style Tab" extension solves the same problem for me, however it does it in a very different way.
Instead of having your tabs along the top of the window, your tabs are kept in a sidebar, and vertically. Opening new tabs from an already open page makes the new tabs nest under the original tab. You can collapse and expand whole trees of tabs, and move them around should you need to.
It also integrates nicely with the "Container Tabs" putting a colored band next to the tabs belonging to each container.
The tabs being vertical also means that you can always read the titles of the tabs, they don't get "squished".
It does cost a chunk of screen real estate, but for me the organization is worth it.
BTW: The extension doesn't itself hide the tabbar at the top of the window, but that can be hidden with a relatively easy modification to a file.
That tree tabs sounds awesome. I'm using container tabs already and it's greatly helped my tabs become less of a mess. But keeping them organized based on which tab I spawned them from sounds great, too. And tbh, it not hiding the original tab bar sounds even better because then I can combine the organization of container tabs with the historical origin of the tabs from tree style tabs and just use whichever one feels more intuitive in the moment to find the tab I'm looking for (or to traverse open tabs for cleanup).
Awesome to hear, and good luck with it!
I just want to mention that there is a lot of configuration options in Tree Style Tab, so if it doesn't behave exactly how you want it to, there's a high likelihood that you just need to tweak the settings a bit.
Brave, Firefox Focus and Mull are decent options for mobile users.
Not brave.
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.
the last time when I used Opera browser was on my Sony Ericsson W580i and C702i
I remember Opera Mini being the only browser that worked properly on my old Sony Ericsson Xperia X8, all other ones just worked very slowly to the point of being entirely unusable (even Opera Mobile which was a different browser than Opera Mini).
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.
Somebody here is going to have a reason: why shouldn’t I use Safari?
As a developer, Safari is the browser that supports the least standards and is holding the browser ecosystem back.
IE died, and Safari took up the mantle as the asshole of the internet.
It should be held back. Although I dislike the company, I believe safari's market share and use of an alternative browser engine is important in keeping google from closing the web.
Now that’s a reason I can get behind.
furthermore, they add nonstandard features to their browser(along with chrome), which makes it difficult to make websites look the same across browsers.
fortunately, I can test those websites beforehand since we have webkit-based epiphany on GNU/Linux(the engine which safari uses).
but other developers, especially those who are on windows can't, since safari is mac-only.
I have a special stylesheet to fix safari(and chrome) styling.
otherwise it's a fine lightweight browser(blessed be KHTML).
While inferior to Firefox due to reason outlined by another user, it is infinitely better than going with Chromium-based browsers.
Keep on using it if you feel comfortable with it
Just for the bullshit with the video players i would never use safari.
What bullshit is that? I’ve never had an issue watching pirated content.
Apparently There is beef between apple and google, and google won’t allow you to watch content in 4K on their video players (say youtube) for newer chip like the M1. There is no sound explanation apart from being a petty org. So to be able to watch stuff in the resolution you like you need to enable dev mode and add “experimental features” and some arent even on after that. Ask me why apple doesn’t battle it? I didn’t care enough to find out at that point, they’re both assholes fighting but the users pay. I simply switched to firefox on macbook pro and i can actually use a retina to its full potential. Can enable 4K there on video players with no hassle.
I think there are some better alternatives out there such as Firefox + uBlock Origin extension, Brave, Vivaldi (maybe Arc? Haven't tried it yet) that gives you some extra features that are missing in safari (for example Multi-account containers, vertical tabs, split tabs,... just to mention the ones I enjoy the most)
But if you just want a browser that works from a normal usage I don't see nothing wrong in using Safari.
+it uses an engine different from Blink (aka Chromium) which keeps a little bit of variety in the browser engine market. So while using Safari you're also doing something good for the internet imho
My biggest attachment to Safari is how well integrated it is with the rest of the Mac. Fingerprint integration for passwords, gesture integration with the track pad, seamless handoff between phone and computer—these things are somewhat reproducible with Firefox and extensions, but it is nowhere near as perfect as it is when you’ve got the browser and the whole OS designed to work in a coordinated dance with each other.
Hard to disagree with that... the flawless integration of every piece in Apple's "ecosystem" is hard to reproduce (even if all those features can be achieved as you were saying, it wouldn't be "as flawless") Just maybe pair it with an Ad and Tracker blocker extension like AdGuard
TIL about Hindenburg and the hilarity of their investment strategy.
Also, I really liked that presto engine. The shit was always very dramatically faster than any other browser and I was ok with the odd table or two being mispositioned.
Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it's spyware.
Is this a shitpost or is that idiot actually telling me not to use Opera because of alleged investor fraud in 2020?
I don't give a fuck about that, mate, when the other option is a Monopoly that literally removed the "Don't be Evil" clause from their code of conduct. If you want me to stop using Opera then you'll have to give me a reason about the specifications of the program, not about the company's petty crimes due to Chinese regulatory failures.
That's not the only other option. Use Firefox.
I would if they brought back manual cookie handling like it used to. Just feels like a downgrade in features, tbh.
Not that it matters either way but they didn't remove the clause, they just moved it from the introduction to the closing statement. Which clickbait articles all reported as "removed".
But it was always meaningless anyway.
People in here dropping facts on me.
I'm just tired as the next person about posts that provide a million half-assed reasons to not use anything but Firefox. But honestly If we don't stop these places from building dossiers on us and locking us out of websites that are unsanctioned by them, It will a erode our opportunities in years to come.
Right now, it doesn't feel like it matters. Lexis-Nexis knows every nickel you ever spend and every creditor that ever ran a check on you, Google knows what type of porn you like to watch, tik tok and opera are storing everything that you've ever been into in a place that can be retrieved by other governments.
At some point we're going to have to take our privacy more seriously. Preferably before 1984 actually becomes real.
If you could just provide some citations about Opera intrusively tracking and building profiles then I'd happily switch. The thing is, though, it's still leagues better than Chromium in that regard.
For what it's worth their privacy policy does say they gather telemetry and they did pay how many billions for the company?
Almost everybody else is gathering telemetry as well obviously. The actual root of the concern is that the companies are based in China, you know the great firewall of China, China. The Chinese government holds a stranglehold on the companies that operate within them. For example if you have a US company and you want to do some business in China you have to find a Chinese partner company to sponsor you. Everything you store there everything you touch runs through the Chinese government. If they want any of the data, that required to be given access.
If you remember when Google went to open a data center in China there was a pretty big kerfuffle. It was because the Chinese government was going to be handed keys to the kingdom for anything that was stored in China. For better or for worse it's just how they operate.
You may not feel the same way but I'm sure you at least get the concern there.
Personally I try not to use Google integrated Chrome or Microsoft integrated chromium. I still use brave when I need a Chrome browser and that's not the best either. They'd sell me up the river if they decided they needed a buck.
I honestly wish we had more Firefox competition. And unified plug-in languages. The stuff that Opera and brave are providing aren't difficult to mimic. And I really like there being developers fighting YouTube ad blocking and website pop-ups and pay wall bypasses.
I'm not saying oh my God they're going to rape you over the coals right now but do consider that the people that are making these crazy ass posts aren't delusional or entirely wrong, and do use who's getting your data on your consideration.
Usually the saying is "rake you over the coals" but I kind of like your version in the context.
Opera IS a Chromium browser, you doofus!
Ah wow you're right, ever since Opera 15 they dropped the presto engine. Still, my point was supposed to be they're much more privacy friendly than Google Chrome, and that still stands to be argued.
If you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve got nothing to fear. If you’ve got something to hide then you shouldn’t even be here.
Nah, you're conflating wrong with unlawful
20 years later you're denied a house loan because your internet records show you went to a fascist website. Or an anti-fascist website, whatever floats your boat.
Things that were acceptable or slightly garish 20 years ago are now grounds for dismissal at a job, you know.
You've had your chance now they have the mandate. If you've changed your mind I'm afraid it's too late.
Yeah, if I stopped using/buying a product just because the company behind it did something slightly shitty, I wouldn't have any belongings, food, etc.
I use Firefox just as much as I use opera gx, I use them on each of my browsers. Opera gx is more primary but yeah...
I dont know what I would replace it with. Brave, I guess?
A couple of people have made a good argument for Brave.
I use Brave on occasions and it's pretty good. But for some reason I just can't seem to make it my everyday driver.
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.
I can't even install opera GX, I just get an error, is it because I have core isolation enabled?
I've been using Firefox as my "home" browser and Opera GX as my "work" browser. On Windows, it's easy to set up launch profiles but not so much on Mac. I need to figure out a solution to this before I can transition.
Have you given Vivaldi a try? I quite like it and use it for work related tasks. Anything else I use Firefox.
Isn’t it just more chromium though?
Opera is also Chromium though, so that wouldn't really change anything
I need to figure out an easy way to launch different browser profiles on a Mac without having to go to about:profile.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. It's different enough using day to day though IMO. Although I haven't kept track of what's their status on chromium extensions getting nerfed though.
That is quite the pivot.
Been saying this for ages
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.
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
Done
Is there a good modern alternative to something like GNU IceCat that I can compile from source?
good
To be fair I use Chrome form most day to day things, Firefox sometimes, Edge whenever I want to use AI search (cheatgpt stuff) and Opera is my dedicated porn browser!
Opera is just another skin of chrome (built on top of chromium), so really you use chrome for everything except porn and ai. Why are you so set on using multiple forms of trash?
And what should I use, only Firefox for everything? Cause I really don't like Firefox and I don't know of other browsers other then Tor. I'm not gonna use that one!
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.
Didn't Mozilla just do a big roadmap talking about what they plan to do in the future and it was basically all AI and Activism with no mention of Firefox?
I hope to see Firefox grow, but who knows. Especially if antitrust actions or a continued drop in Firefox usage cuts off the Google money and makes Mozilla go poof.
But of course at least Gecko is Foss so it can't disappear entirely if the community doesn't let it.
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?
Is openai similar to a Chinese malware producer?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it's time to jump ship.
What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That's how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they've been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.
Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it's Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That's why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.
But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
So Mozilla isn't perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.
at least someone will be able to fork Firefox's code, unlike the sad story with Opera's old Presto engine, that due to being proprietary suffered an inevitable dead.
😅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.
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:-(.
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).
In the olden days they had 100% support for extentions
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
It is like "even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - but that does not mean that you should trust the time that you see". It is possible, in more ways than one, to be both right yet also very wrong at the same time. :-P