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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
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.
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.
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.
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"...
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It's quite nice and I use it daily.
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.
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
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
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.
Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo
Stop using Chromium.
I don't want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
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.
I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They did some awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn't think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.
This is unlikely to get the Opera GX fanboys to switch.
Good article though. Fuck that noise.
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.
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.
