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.