Opera will always help you block ads natively
56 comments
·October 26, 2024cebert
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cebert
I don’t personally want a browser, which is such an important element of my personal and professional life, owned by a Chinese company. Additional, Opera isn’t fully open source. I also don’t trust Google.
zztop44
I’m curious, what’s the rationale for this? Is it corporate espionage? Or do you live in China/have family there and engage in online activity that might cause problems?
JumpCrisscross
> because they look and talk different
You’re complaining about “passive aggressive crap” while falsely insinuating OP is racist?
The problem they cite is Opera is Chinese. Not that the people involved are ethnically Chinese.
rasz
There you go
https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...
>A Chinese super app is facing claims of predatory consumer lending in Nigeria, Kenya and India
https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnarou...
>The group’s largest investor and current Opera Chairman/CEO was recently involved in a Chinese lending business that listed in the U.S. and saw its shares plunge more than 80% in just 2 years amid allegations of fraud and illegal lending practices.
>Post IPO, Opera has now also made a similar and dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%.
zztop44
This seems like a much better reason to be suspicious of Opera.
josephcsible
> We plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Opera independently of what will happen to other browsers.
Once Google rips the MV2 code out of Chromium entirely next year, are Opera's developers really going to have the resources necessary to maintain such a hard fork?
Jach
I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes, but we'll see. The thing about Opera (and MS with Edge) is that they've already bitten the give-up bullet once by moving to a Chromium-base in the first place, rather than continue with their own separate browsers, so it seems likely to me that if the challenge of maintaining a significant difference is too great they'll bite the bullet again.
Somewhat related, I read this about OpenBSD today: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd...
"Robert Nagy in our group maintains 1280 patches to make chrome work on OpenBSD. Google ignores them and will not upstream them. Some of these changes are security related, and they ignore them. Other changes are to cope with security work we've done on our own, for example: JIT changes from Stephen@google for mandatory IBT which google hasn't upstreamed yet, impacts due to PROT_EXEC-only mappings, etc."
As far as I can tell, most of these patches (https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...) are just checks for whether the code is on openbsd or not. Still, even in 2019 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5...) the author made the expected complaint trying to upstream them about how "it is getting really hard to follow all the code moving and new features". Keeping v2 compatibility will predictably get harder and harder over time.
whatyesaid
Maybe if Opera, Arc, and Brave people joined forces... Without a combined effort they lack the power of Chrome store and developer docs.
Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine. The MV2 extensions don't need much work to leap over for Firefox
dlachausse
This is why it’s so critical that we don’t consolidate onto monocultures. It is crucial that Firefox and WebKit continue to be viable alternatives to Chromium.
wruza
Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine
I wish that was the outcome. I could finally try firefox with a ui that fits my workflow.
bobbylarrybobby
My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
lxgr
Is this something that Mozilla is focusing on at all? That would seem like an important step towards actually protecting the heterogeneity of the web (or what's left of it).
stavros
How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?
KetoManx64
Oh hey! Small world! I recently used your Static site generator to convert a subset of my Joplin notes into a website which I used as a showcase for employers and that showcase ended up being the thing that got me my initial interview with the company I'm now working for. Thanks for making the converter public and saving me a bunch of time from not having to write one myself from scratch!
TheNewsIsHere
Absolutely off topic here — what has your experience with Joplin been, if you don’t mind me asking?
I recently tried to migrate to Joplin from an amalgamation of notes apps (including Standard Notes, via an ENEX converter in between). I really wanted to love it, but it proved to be unusably slow. I think it might have been my WebDAV service, but replacing it wasn’t a project I was interested in. That was with about 3,000 notes, so I’m not sure if my experience is typical.
stavros
Oh nice! I'm really glad that was useful, I use it for myself but I didn't know if anyone else did!
josephcsible
Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
JadeNB
> Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
That's a definition, but I think that stavros was proposing that, much like Microsoft's "open" formats for Office, if a codebase is so complex that no-one else, not even with the resources of a full company, can maintain it, then at best its open sourceness is pro forma.
AzzyHN
Fun fact, the built-in adblocker for GAMER BROWSER OperaGX (of YouTube sponsorship game) excludes search engine pages by default, and is happy to report "zero trackers" on google.com
But I'm glad Opera is committed to providing a terrible product. The marketing seems to be working!
aucisson_masque
Well we'll see in a year when Google completely shut mv2 support. Until then it's very easy to speak, especially when you have very few market share and everything to gain with marketing stunt and not much to lose.
troymc
Opera already does ad blocking before you add any extensions, so the manifest v3 thing is a bit of a red herring.
wruza
Doesn’t it do that because chrome still has the corresponding api? How exactly will chrome deny chrome-based browsers of ad blocking (aka ending mv2 support in marketing speech)? The same applies to opera either way.
lxgr
I wouldn't be surprised if Opera's built-in ad blocking were internally implemented as a web extension.
In any case, we'll see once Chrome drops Manifest V2; until then, promises of ongoing support are very cheap.
butz
For me Opera died when they abandoned their own rendering engine Presto and moved to Chromium. UI was simplified greatly and many customization options disappeared. Vivaldi is spiritual successor to classic Opera browser, still using Chromium, but has all possible customization options and additional tools, like RSS reader and email client.
yapyap
ugh, hate Opera personally.
1. Their GX twitter account is insufferably cringe, we get it, you allow your social media manager to be edgy because you saw the engagement it has driven to KFC_ES and Wendys.
2. It’s just a shit browser
Distilitron
It's just a Pooh brainworm
rightbyte
> 2. It’s just a shit browser
Fallen from grace...
I used Opera like 20(?) years ago. At the time it seemed better and had tabs.
Do I remember it wrong? Was it way better at some point?
sergiotapia
Opera was at it's best and cutting edge when it used Presto rendering engine, and Dragonfly for devtool. It took a shit on the competition, easily and handily!
I still miss and lament the loss. We lose something beautiful!
Now I follow ladybird browser, I have very high hopes for a true fresh take on a browser.
wruza
Vivaldi replaced opera for me. I was using opera since presto until around 2020 but then it decided to go gaming ui nonsense.
Never cared about it being chinese. It sending anything suspicious^ will be discovered instantly and kill the product. It’s delulu for an average joe to consider this as a personal attack vector. Journalists and politicians - maybe. But not the tinfoil club.
^ above the usual info that all browsing regimes collect either way and lose in breaches
lxgr
Its rendering engine, leadership, and ownership got swapped out completely: The Ship of Theseus as a browser.
selivanovp
It's kinda nuanced. Opera devs in late 90's and early 00's were truly innovative. Tabs is just one of the things introduced by Opera and later adopted by every other browser. But they also introduced a lot of under the hood tricks to render pages on slow connections, delay loading images etc.
But their problem was in quality. Partially it was MS with IE dominance to blame, but anyway, html rendering by Opera was inconsistent. So as a paid browser they failed as soon as 33600 modems turned history and Firefox introduced most of Opera features for free with much more consistent page rendering.
Stagnant
I remember Opera as being decent in the very early 2000's before Firefox took off. I also occasionally used it in the early 2010's but switched it for Vivaldi when Opera was sold to chinese ownership.
Opera mini was also great for pre-touchscreen Nokia sybian phones in the mid 2000's as it made browsing the internet somewhat bearable.
theamk
You remember right, they used to have their own rendering engine and lota of neat featurs like lightning-fast notes and and even email client.
Around 2013 this all disappeared - they switched to Chromium's engine, and dropping all of their special features. Opera 15 was super-generic chromium fork. This was when I've stopped using it.
themoonisachees
It used to be a good browser, but nowadays it's just another chromium wrapper.
gbraad
i know Vivaldi is also just wrapper, but it feels more like the old Opera.
xigoi
Chromium wrapper with bonus tracking and AI bullshit.
“ As of the end of 2023, Opera Software was 72.4% owned by Kunlun, a Chinese public company, making it a subsidiary of that company. Opera CEO James Yahui Zhou is a controlling shareholder in Kunlun.” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)]