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.

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.

PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.

It's quite nice and I use it daily.

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.

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.

I don't want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.

Stop using Chromium.

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.

Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo

I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.

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.

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.

God I miss old Opera

Just install firefox / waterfox / etc. and be done with it.

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.

What's wrong with firefox?

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.

Firefox with vertical tabs works great for me.

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.

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.