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 is just chromium with extra spyware and shit. Firefox is mentioned a lot because it is foss, and my favorite browser for that matter.
Sadly this is the truth these days, opera certainly has had it moments in the sun in the past (especially on lower spec devices) but I would personally stare clear these days
Firefox is really the only true alternative
Small shout-out to edge browser’s built in pdf editing functions though, this is really handy on PC at times
And Edge’s built-in vertical tabs. They’re so clean and neat and the groups are colored and feel good to use while with most other browsers, vertical tabs feel like a hack, like you’re going against the browser’s intended usage. A year ago you’d have a hard time convincing me to use any Microsoft products but after using Edge at work for a while, I switched away from Firefox on my personal machines as well.
The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it’s basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don’t know the new owners, so I don’t trust them with my browsing data!
The original devs of Opera went to make Vivaldi, which is a yet another Chromium based browser.
It is yet another Chromium based browser but for when Chromium is needed for compatibility reasons, it’s got some pretty cool features like split panes and mobile sites as a sidebar etc.
Firefox always number 1 though.
The original company was sold. Opera Software still makes the browser and its headquarters is still in Norway, but it is owned by a consortium.
Just curious, what browser do you use?
I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it’s just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.
Brave is littered with crypto and replaces other ad networks with their own (which does tracking basically exclusively for them).
Steer clear, it’s a trap.
You can disable Brave ads and tracking pretty easy. A lot of the crypto stuff can be disabled too.
Tor browser for mostly anonymous browsing, Mullvad browser as default non-Tor browser (it’s basically an open source Firefox fork made by Mullvad and the Tor team), but I also still have a regular Firefox configured with Arkenfox’ user.js and some important extensions, as well as a Chromium with zero protections except uBlock Origin. I switch between those browsers depending on use case. Each browser has a different theme to make them easily distinguishable from each other, the “insecure” browsers which I only use for rare exceptions (websites misbehaving in any other browser) have a red-like color. All browsers are being run sandboxed.
On mobile: Tor browser, Bromite and Vanadium.
It was the best, most full-featured browser until it (effectively) died after Opera 12 in 2013, now it’s just a Chrome skin.
Use Firefox, it’s not just (in my opinion) the best browser now but it helps protect against a Google monopoly on web standards.
Pin comment and close thread! :)
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.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil13/ (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.
I loved Opera 20 years ago when the built in RSS reader, email client, mouse gestures and unique rendering engine that was either faster than the others or completely incompatible with websites. Now I don’t give it much thought, all the chromium browsers feel the same.
Yes, and it also pioneered many features we take for granted now. Like tabs, customizable interfacez etc.
But now it is just a reskinned Chrome.
I loved their speed dial when that came. Just having a home page with a grid of your favorite websites was so innovative at the time.
Yes I forgot about this! Speed Dial was a killer feature, we just take it for granted now.
I remember the mouse gestures, they were a really neat feature. I don’t think any other browser has had anything close to it since then.
There are extensions for Chromium browser’s that do the same thing now :) I use it at work because my mouse doesn’t have buttons for navigating back and forward, it’s great.
There’s also a Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/
Please try and use non chromium based browser.
Chrome reskin; Firefox and Vivaldi (made by Opera’s creator and former owner) are much better browsers.
I used Opera back in the day, but I don’t trust the new development anymore.
I’d recommend using Firefox instead.
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.
I was a Netscape and Opera girl back in the day. I haven’t used it since my uni days but I used to love it. I think it’s owned by some pretty shady companies these days though :(
Opera was ahead of it’s time with speed dial and tabs and it’s own engine. Now it’s just a chrome based browser with no real unique features. Vivaldi is my favourite browser nowadays
My opinion on Opera is that it’s an outdated piece of adware.
Didn’t a lot of former members of the opera dev team go on to make Vivaldi? I really like Vivaldi but I always come back to my bae, Firefox
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…
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.
I recently switched from Vivaldi to Firefox. They’re both good. I think I may slightly prefer Firefox though Vivaldi has some really cool features I haven’t seen in another browser, but they weren’t useful to me an do never really touched them.
It’s just another Chromium browser now.
