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.
Fear of change and effective marketing. Those are the only reasons.
Actually it’s an effective cloud-based password manager that doesn’t rely on local storage or weird plugins or backups.
That’s what keeps me using chrome. I could lose everything in a house fire, pick up any device, log in and have access to all my stuff without any further action on my part, right out of the box.
That’s the only feature I care about, and chrome is the only browser I’ve seen that provides it.
Get me that in firefox, and I’ll switch today.
What are you talking about? Firefox has had literally Sync since before Chrome existed.
Firefox Sync initial release: December 21, 2007
Google Chrome intial release: September 2, 2008 (Beta), (1.0) December 11, 2008
A full year, my guy.
Cuz Firefox was for a long time just some shiiiiiiit. It was overloaded, blocky, seemed outdated etc., so ie wasn’t any worse. When chrome came, whooo.
Now tho, I am simply still prejudiced against it. And I found Edge suits me ideally so I don’t care for any other browser. Until my adblock stops working, then I’ll run.
I do not agree with your generalisation of YouTube sponsorships, but with the rest I absolutely agree with.
Honestly, I read something about Opera being vaguely connected to shady Chinese companies right before I started recommending ppl to switch away from Opera or Opera GX. Glad I stuck to that, looks like my intuition did not fail me.
You, uh, really feel that the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Nord VPN, Honey by PayPal, Raycons, and HelloFresh are really making a positive contribution to the world that we can’t do without?
I mean, what’s the problem with NordVPN? Pretty much every youtuber I respect who does sponsorship promotes it, and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. Generalizing like that is always bad (or well, mostly always, or ironically I would be generalizing).
there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox.
Yeah. And everybody should use the same brand of shoes, drive the same model of car, buy at the same store, eat the same food…
God forbids people having different tastes, opinions and needs.
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.
Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.
Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.
Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.
Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here.
I simply don’t assume that an org/com actually exist which is concerned users’ privacy. Mozilla just follows the money, as any other corp.
Protecting my privacy is a task I prefer to delegate to mybrain(.org).
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.
It’s kinda scummy to manipulate the market as such, but it’s much more scummy to partake in the fraud.
They’re like the anti-hero of this story.
Hilarious name too, honestly.
The Crash n’ Burn Bois
Short sellers provide benefit to society by finding and shaming doomed businesses so they fail faster and don’t suck up as many resources.
They also have a proud history of uncovering outright fraud.
In business, the people complaining loudest about short sellers are emperors with no clothes.
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.
This 100%.
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It’s quite nice and I use it daily.
It’s just another flavour of Chromium though isn’t it?
Yeah
Much more UI customization and a shitton of power user stuff too
Still chromium, no thanks.
Fair, site compatibility is needed for my work so I unfortunately must use chromium
Quit the job, work in Firefox only environments, send the message /s
I keep revisiting Vivaldi once every few months, and get reminded of why I uninstall it within minutes. They remove the option of changing DNS servers from the configuration UI and moved it into flags. I have absolutely no idea why they do that, and its a philosophy I vehemently disagree with.
Yep. I daily drive Vivaldi on both macOS and Android.
I love it. The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there. The theme is highly customizable; I have mine set to something similar to the Opera dark theme.
I don’t use the email or calendar features. The great thing about Vivaldi is that they provide a ton of power user features, but don’t shove it in your face. It’s super easy to turn off the things you don’t want and to turn on the things you do want.
I do use UBO, but they also have a builtin ad blocker if you want to use that instead.
The settings page is very extensive. Tons of customization. True to the Opera legacy!
The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there.
That’s amazing, I didn’t know you could do that. I’ve been using Vivaldi since the alpha days and I had no clue you could drag the extensions there.
Vivaldi has the best tab management ever.
That’s what I thought until I installed Firefox with Sidebery and oh man, that’s another level. It required quite a bit of configuration make it really fit my needs, but when you configure it, it’s incredible.
Thanks for telling me about sidebery!
Huge fan of Vivaldi for both pc and mobile!
Isn’t Vivaldi also shady?
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.
Don’t forget about their outdated-hIpster friend, Brave Chromium.
Acting like all these forks are just chrome is really disingenuous and isn’t helping the conversation at all.
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.
I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.
Yeah I mean I wouldn’t use that CCP bullshit.
I don’t want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.
Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo
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
late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab’d and noticed there was the “don’t symbol” (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, “that can’t be right”. I’m running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN’T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can’t use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.
I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.
Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.
Stop using Chromium.
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.
Somebody here is going to have a reason: why shouldn’t I use Safari?
While inferior to Firefox due to reason outlined by another user, it is infinitely better than going with Chromium-based browsers.
Keep on using it if you feel comfortable with it
As a developer, Safari is the browser that supports the least standards and is holding the browser ecosystem back.
Now that’s a reason I can get behind.
furthermore, they add nonstandard features to their browser(along with chrome), which makes it difficult to make websites look the same across browsers.
fortunately, I can test those websites beforehand since we have webkit-based epiphany on GNU/Linux(the engine which safari uses).
but other developers, especially those who are on windows can’t, since safari is mac-only.I have a special stylesheet to fix safari(and chrome) styling.
otherwise it’s a fine lightweight browser(blessed be KHTML).
I think there are some better alternatives out there such as Firefox + uBlock Origin extension, Brave, Vivaldi (maybe Arc? Haven’t tried it yet) that gives you some extra features that are missing in safari (for example Multi-account containers, vertical tabs, split tabs,… just to mention the ones I enjoy the most)
But if you just want a browser that works from a normal usage I don’t see nothing wrong in using Safari.
+it uses an engine different from Blink (aka Chromium) which keeps a little bit of variety in the browser engine market. So while using Safari you’re also doing something good for the internet imho
My biggest attachment to Safari is how well integrated it is with the rest of the Mac. Fingerprint integration for passwords, gesture integration with the track pad, seamless handoff between phone and computer—these things are somewhat reproducible with Firefox and extensions, but it is nowhere near as perfect as it is when you’ve got the browser and the whole OS designed to work in a coordinated dance with each other.
Hard to disagree with that… the flawless integration of every piece in Apple’s “ecosystem” is hard to reproduce (even if all those features can be achieved as you were saying, it wouldn’t be “as flawless”) Just maybe pair it with an Ad and Tracker blocker extension like AdGuard
Just for the bullshit with the video players i would never use safari.
Is this a shitpost or is that idiot actually telling me not to use Opera because of alleged investor fraud in 2020?
I don’t give a fuck about that, mate, when the other option is a Monopoly that literally removed the “Don’t be Evil” clause from their code of conduct. If you want me to stop using Opera then you’ll have to give me a reason about the specifications of the program, not about the company’s petty crimes due to Chinese regulatory failures.
I’m just tired as the next person about posts that provide a million half-assed reasons to not use anything but Firefox. But honestly If we don’t stop these places from building dossiers on us and locking us out of websites that are unsanctioned by them, It will a erode our opportunities in years to come.
Right now, it doesn’t feel like it matters. Lexis-Nexis knows every nickel you ever spend and every creditor that ever ran a check on you, Google knows what type of porn you like to watch, tik tok and opera are storing everything that you’ve ever been into in a place that can be retrieved by other governments.
At some point we’re going to have to take our privacy more seriously. Preferably before 1984 actually becomes real.
If you could just provide some citations about Opera intrusively tracking and building profiles then I’d happily switch. The thing is, though, it’s still leagues better than Chromium in that regard.
For what it’s worth their privacy policy does say they gather telemetry and they did pay how many billions for the company?
Almost everybody else is gathering telemetry as well obviously. The actual root of the concern is that the companies are based in China, you know the great firewall of China, China. The Chinese government holds a stranglehold on the companies that operate within them. For example if you have a US company and you want to do some business in China you have to find a Chinese partner company to sponsor you. Everything you store there everything you touch runs through the Chinese government. If they want any of the data, that required to be given access.
If you remember when Google went to open a data center in China there was a pretty big kerfuffle. It was because the Chinese government was going to be handed keys to the kingdom for anything that was stored in China. For better or for worse it’s just how they operate.
You may not feel the same way but I’m sure you at least get the concern there.
Personally I try not to use Google integrated Chrome or Microsoft integrated chromium. I still use brave when I need a Chrome browser and that’s not the best either. They’d sell me up the river if they decided they needed a buck.
I honestly wish we had more Firefox competition. And unified plug-in languages. The stuff that Opera and brave are providing aren’t difficult to mimic. And I really like there being developers fighting YouTube ad blocking and website pop-ups and pay wall bypasses.
I’m not saying oh my God they’re going to rape you over the coals right now but do consider that the people that are making these crazy ass posts aren’t delusional or entirely wrong, and do use who’s getting your data on your consideration.
Usually the saying is “rake you over the coals” but I kind of like your version in the context.
If you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve got nothing to fear. If you’ve got something to hide then you shouldn’t even be here.
20 years later you’re denied a house loan because your internet records show you went to a fascist website. Or an anti-fascist website, whatever floats your boat.
Things that were acceptable or slightly garish 20 years ago are now grounds for dismissal at a job, you know.
