I've been using Opera for a few years now and I've been enjoying its features, UI and everything. However, I (surprisingly to me) haven't noticed many people mentioning it. Also, when I was on Reddit and mentioned that I use it I got downvoted which left me somewhat confused haha.
So I'm wondering if there's anything wrong with it and/or if I should give another browser a go (I noticed Firefox is mentioned a lot on here)
Opera 12 was my main browser until it died and was replaced by a completely unrelated and terrible browser called Opera 2013. Opera 12’s spiritual successor is Vivaldi, and that’s what I still use now.
Vivaldi is the only browser that has all of the UI features that I want… No amount of extensions and customization of Chrome, Edge, or Firefox has been able to come anywhere close to matching it.
Back when they still had their own browser engine it was the greatest browser at the time. HTML5 was rolling in hard and Opera was always the first one to implement these new features. It was also faster than any other browser, had customizable UI (with full MDI instead of just tabs), builtin E-mail client and good tools for Web developers.
But as an open source person using it always felt a little bit wrong, because of it’s closed source nature. Now that it’s just an alternative UI for Chrome and owned by some shady Chinese company I wouldn’t touch the damn thing with thousand foot pole.
Years ago, Opera has been my main browser and I really liked it. Back then, it was the only browser (to my knowledge) that had tabs. It was a novelty back then. Over the time they added more features, like the conversion tool. Then they added more features I didn’t need or want, like the side bar, and it quickly became bloated. I switched to firefox, which offered a greater variety of add-ons. I still use firefox as my main browser. The only thing I miss is the conversion tool. There is nothing comparable like the one Opera has built in. I later learned that the original developers sold it to a chinese consortium. In hindsight, that explains the constant changes to the worse, which pushed me to another browser.
I’ve tried to use opera on several occasions and it just never sticks with me for one reason or another ultimately I have for more privacy options and privacy focus browsers and those that have abilities for add-ons to achieve even greater security in privacy so Firefox tends to be the direction I go or brave.
It has been awesome until 2013 when they decided to make their browser a skin on top of Chromium. Now they had more UI revamps and it doesn’t work or feel like Opera at all. I tried using it sometimes ago and now they even got those weird huge buttons…
Please don’t use Opera (or any other proprietary browser). It contains a lot of on-by-default spyware and it’s hard or impossible to disable everything.
kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-… (post in German, but you can see what the browser transmits. It’s a lot. Including the domains of all sites you visit). The best way to increase your privacy with Opera is to uninstall it. Apparently, this is how they make their money nowadays. They used to sell their browser, but it’s free since a while. So users pay with their data.
Also, try not to use Chromium based browsers (not even if they are purely open source, based on the open source Chromium base). Its development is very much steered by Google and their interests and you can see the effects e.g. with their Manifest v3 which cripples ad blocking extensions, for example.
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