Who are the Chinese tech companies that just bought Opera? | Hacker News Reader

Who are the Chinese tech companies that just bought Opera?

techinasia.com

55 pointswilliswee42 comments

This is a sad news, especially to those of us who have been in the industry long enough to remember what kind of company Qihoo is.

> Qihoo has often been surrounded by rumors of foul play, fraud, and dirty tricks. Its apps have been banned from the iTunes store before

Well, the same team started by building Malware, tons of them, and then hijacked computers to manipulate Alexa ranking or DDoS competitors websites.

Then they turned around and started a new company to built anti-Malware software that had, and still probably has, an enormous market share, which gives them more machines to sell adverts.

RIP, Opera.

Very sad indeed, have been an Opera user since the very beginning. When IE's only feature was having bookmarks, Opera had tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc. It was a great browser designed by great people, not by some corporate design policy.

But I guess not everybody sees that :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_%28IQ%29...

I switched to Vivaldi Browser https://vivaldi.com/

It is founded by Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Tatsuki Tomita. Vivaldi aims to revive the old, popular features of Opera 12 and introduce new, more innovative ones.

It was released on Linux day one. Runs V8 and Blink and you can use Chrome Extensions. Been a good ride so far and they in Beta 2 currently.

This looks good! Thanks for sharing. Are there extensions that don't run on it?

The main extensions I'm interested in would be Hola VPN and Privacy Badger.

Hola VPN is really bad for privacy as it allows them to track which sites you go to. I'm guessing you're trying to mitigate that with Privacy Badger? That won't work as you are routed through them anyway.

one of the sources: http://adios-hola.org/

Get rid of Hola

If a service is free, you are the product. Don't use Hola VPN...

Unfortunately, it's closed source. A closed source browser in this day and age is laughable.

Chrome, Safari, Edge (IE), Opera (Which this thread is about) = Laughable?

If this was a thread about replacement for Firefox sure, but not here.

Closed source. No thanks.

Isn't Opera closed source?

Very sad news. Because of the untrustworthiness of the buyers I'll have to find another browser for my phone. Any suggestions?

I started googling around and found an addon for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/text-reflow/r... but it's looks imperfect.

Apparently text reflow won't make its way into Firefox https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298

It seems that maybe Lightning does it. I'll try it out. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=acr.browser.ba...

Edit: added link to Lightning

I have used Dolphin for years and ditched Opera a long time ago. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.mgeek.Tun...

I went the other way for two reasons:

1) Dolphin uses the stock browser's rendering engine, which is not updated as often as an external one. For older devices is not updated at all. I remember two or three updates in an year on my tablet, which went from 4.4.2 to 5.0.2. Opera is updated in sync with Chromium/Chrome.

2) Opera has text reflow and that made me ditch Dolphin instantaneously. I checked it again now and Dolphin still doesn't have text reflow.

Dolphin does have text reflow. There is an option that says 'Auto-fit pages' in advanced settings, which is the same thing as text reflow. That option is the only reason I'm using Dolphin as my mobile browser. I used to use Opera before, but after they switched to Blink, an annoying bug that reloads a tab when it is selected, became a deal breaker for me.

Doplhin's text reflow works on some sites but doesn't work in HN. If I zoom a page of comments I have to scroll right and left, which defeats the purpose of zooming. Do you experience the same behavior?

It doesn't work for me either. The fault lies with HN. I think the reason text reflow doesn't work on HN is that HN styles its content using old-fashioned HTML tables instead of DIVs.

Yes, it's the table layout but Opera manages to reflow it so I'd say that HN is a difficult customer but Dolphin is not doing a good job at managing it.

Not quite. Dolphin do provide Jetpack that is a updated (ish, their last release was a year ago) webkit engine.

There have been a number of vulnerabilities in Webkit since that last update. https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=Webk...

Maybe they don't apply to Jetpack. Do you know if they have a bug tracker?

none off hand.

> It seems that maybe Lightning does it. I'll try it out.

I hate to say it but I've rarely seen text wrapping worked in Lightning, and even when it worked it's nowhere near as good as Opera does it.

Might want to uninstall Opera Mini if you have it installed. It MitMs all your traffic.

So now that traffic might go to China to a company you may not trust.

Also, depending on how far back Opera have logs stored, you might want to uninstall it several months/years ago.

I uninstalled it after the announcement. A sad day for Opera.

Otter Browser [1] is a FOSS clone of the old opera. It seems to have active development, last time I tried it (more than a year ago) it was pretty decent.

[1] https://otter-browser.org/

Eh. It was dead since they painted an Opera logo on a Webkit wrapper (a sad day indeed). This is just an episode of Walking dead.

Worth noting a fork of Opera known as Vivladi exists.

https://vivaldi.net/en-US/

It's focused on power users however.

It's not a fork, it's a new chromium-based browser.

The new Opera was based on Chromium after version 12.

Yes, and Chrome has been based on Chromium since forever; like Vivaldi, its also not a fork of Opera. Being Chromium based gives it something in common with Opera, but doesn't make it a fork of Opera.

If writing a web engine from scratch would not have taken a ungodly amount of time and effort, they would likely have done so. That said, the behavior of Vivaldi is closer to Opera 12 than Opera 13 and later is. Basically a bunch of cloudcookoolander UX designers got the reigns of Opera, and has since slowly been crawling back towards what Opera 12 was capable of.

It sounds to me that you are saying that Vivaldi is (approximately) a Chromium-based clone of Opera 12, not a fork.

Symantics of clone and fork dealing with a closed program that was sold for billions seems kind of pointless.

It is a fork of Opera 12 in most ways since it has the same feature set attempt. http://winaero.com/blog/vivaldi-a-browser-for-all-opera-12-f...

Since Opera 12 is a Closed Source program I am sure they will deny it 100%.

That's not what "fork" means.

Metaforkically speaking you're correct.

Well, I've been waiting for the "final nail to the coffin" and I got a shank...

Oh well, at least there are alternatives, like SeaMonkey, Vivaldi, Otter... or I might just start using Pale Moon.

...as a secondary browser to Opera 12.

First thing I did when I saw the news was take Opera and drag it to the trash bin. I barely used and never really liked their browser after the Chromium switch anyways.

I'd imagine that's the end of the already 4th-5th place desktop browser. Kind of a shame, but not super surprising these days.

edit: added 'desktop' qualifier

I used Opera as my daily browser for years, up to the 12.x release. It was my little "browser that could" vs the big guys. Chrome was gaining huge ground but I kept with Opera as sort of the underdog and knowing the Presto engine was just as good at the time.

Then the switch to it being a skinned Chrome. That was tough for me to swallow as it always was on the back of my mind. I still gave it random tries for days at a time as the new blink/chrome skin, but a discovery had turned me off for good.

Over a year ago, I noticed outgoing traffic to 1-2 IP's in addition to the URL I was visiting. Turns out it was to Opera's malware scanning and to Akamai. Opera and Akamai had info on every web page you visit and there was NO way to turn this off. You can turn this off in Chrome simply in the settings, but Opera purposely spent time removing that ability from Chromium. By-default URL/malware scanning is probably a good thing for the masses, but I did not need it and also felt it was a privacy violation being it was also involving Akamai.

I raised this issue up SEVERAL times with Opera through the desktop blog comments as well as survey's with them. To this day I don't think they even acknowledged the posts I made and just ignored the issue. I recall, I think, one Opera employee saying they will look into it for future versions, but every new release I saw nothing.

Before the switch off Presto, Opera would quickly work on resolving bug comments as well as community feedback. I felt the major difference once it went to being Google's b&tch (even making it very difficult for some time in changing off of Google as default search from address bar), that Opera no longer became a browser for the fans and somewhat of the underdog you could cheer for to a cold, commercial sellout. On their own path adding features no one asked/wanted yet several times reverting them back. Much energy spent on throwing stuff out to see what sticks with Speed Dial, theme, bookmarks, but nothing at all in bringing back the features and customization that made Opera 12.x great.

This latest news though is the FINAL straw for me being sold to shady Chinese companies with KNOWN attachment to malware and tracking in whatever they put out. I already had issues with the URL scanning mentioned above and having my info sent to Opera servers was one thing. I will not even let Chinese Opera touch my PC going forward. Opera is good as dead and I will not even look at it anymore.

RIP Opera: 2/11/2016

FF is our last hope in a browser that still worries about privacy to an extent and is still pretty customizable. For daily use I will use Edge and FF equally.

> You can turn this off in Chrome simply in the settings, but Opera purposely spent time removing that ability from Chromium.

FWIW, the browser UI, as well as things like malware scanning, is entirely Opera's own code, and isn't forked from Chromium, so it wasn't "purposely removed" rather just never implemented…

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