I knew not to use Opera GX as soon as they started sponsoring youtubers. I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they're doing something sketchy.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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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.
This 100%.
I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.
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What's wrong with firefox?
Nothing. Ideally you'll take a privacy hardened fork though, like Fennec or LibreWolf.
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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.
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.
In other news: stop using Netscape
As somebody whose wife just downloaded opera onto the family computer I am horrified.
She's been complaining that the internet is slow and has blamed it on protonvon, so has resorted to turning the vpn off when using the internet or discord.
I remember after Twin Peaks season 3 came out, showtime was stating left and right how profitable the show was, and then accusations started flying that the show was so profitable because showtime was taking over the browser while people were watching and mining bitcoin in the background without telling people they were doing so.
I trust Opera about a thousand times less just because I had never hears of them until a week or two ago.
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
This is unlikely to get the Opera GX fanboys to switch.
Good article though. Fuck that noise.
Why would we need them to switch? Shouldn't we just leave them be if they're happy that way?
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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.
In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn't do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.
Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.
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.