Opera CEO: Sale to Chinese Consortium Wasn’t Our Decision
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But Qihoo/360? This is a company with the exact opposite moral principles of Opera. Of bloatware and spyware, of unexpected updates, backdoors, and spider-like trojans that install on anything from USB sticks to mobile phones plugged into an 'infected' device. It represents the worse of the worse of China's software market, which can be really really excellent.
I'm uninstalling Opera right now.
Do you have an examples of excellence?
I haven't had the need to uninstall it, but it hasn't given me the reason to either - at no point it made me feel like i was using something shady. It also has very little (and in a different forum i would use the word "none") in terms of the shareware aspects that are common to other free antiviruses. I've been using it for a while too, probably over a year.
Here's a 69-page long thread on an antivirus-themed forums that's been running since 2014:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/360-total-security-en...
I've been visiting it from time to time seeing whether the community attitude towards the product has changed for the worse, but so far it appears a lot of people use it.
It's actually very fast and stable and many people in 3rd world still use opera mini based on presto for low end phones.
It makes me wonder how much the purchase was about the browser vs. a solid play in the mobile gaming market ad space.
[0] http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/confirmed-opera-buys-adcolo...
You can actually put numbers to this. In 2015 Opera made 75% of its revenue from their ad business. Calling them a browser maker in this year is straight up false.
I still use Opera, and super-apprehensive about this new development. It's still fantastic - the rendering engine change actually benefited Opera, in that it removed so many of the rendering glitches in Opera 12. Some options were lost, but it's still very configurable. I respect Hakum and the team that's still there, but not sure if they'll stick around. It will be a shame if we lose one of the best desktop apps on the planet to spyware/bloatware.
And that's why browser vendors can never win. Too many cases to optimize for; if you don't get every extremely contrived (non) use case right, it's off to twitter/hn-comments-section to complain. FFS
I'm home now, and have been online for ~2 hours. Gmail, Twitter, 5 JIRA tabs, 10 Jupyter notebooks, 5 stackoverflow, 2 python doc pages, 1 javadoc page, 2 Wikipedia pages, 2 Kaggle pages, Hacker news.
30 tabs, and I haven't really read any news yet.
Since Firefox now only reloads tabs on demand after a restart, it's not resource-heavy to keep many tabs open if one occasionally restarts the browser.
I also reserve some time to clean them up about once a week, I start with the oldest tab and "take care of it", sometimes it's just a news story I want to read, sometimes it's something I kept opened because of the information on that page.
If I don't do that I will have a thousand tabs opened and will never actually do anything about it.
That's only Wikipedia. I do the same things with forums, documentation, stackoverflow, etc.
Edit: looks like Fastmail bought themselves back from Opera anyway. https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-...
I like to think that it leaves me safer than newer browsers with a broader attack-surface, but really it's just so much faster 95% of the time.
Can't you do that in ALL browsers, with a plugin that adds a button to your toolbar?
In return, you get to use a modern browser without a bizarro rendering engine.
Much beter than the "ad blocker" extensions that make deal with some ad providers. Real control.
The overhead for running a few select extensions, compared to native code, would be minimal.
And if Opera implements its native extensions as a scripting API (lots of apps do), then zero.
Only if the browser is designed that way. If the browser has only global settings implementing per-site handling can impose the need of extension reimplementing half of the browser (in extreme case, see how Google made their "extension" of the IE which effectively installed the 90% of the Chrome inside of IE).
And you have to trust extension authors, they can do their own things.
Old Opera had what I needed built in, it worked without the need of even enabling javascript subsystem. I don't know of any other browser able to work that way.
That's not an extension running on IE to deactivate JS. It's a completely different rendering engine running inside an IE shell.
The two concepts are so different it's not even worth commenting.
>Old Opera had what I needed built in, it worked without the need of even enabling javascript subsystem. I don't know of any other browser able to work that way.
It's trivial (one setting toggle) to disable Javascript in both Chrome and Safari (and I presume Firefox too).
Only globally it is trivial, but locally per web site, even in the same tab, certainly not:
You know, one single page can fetch the scripts from different addresses. Opera allowed me to run the script from site A but not from site B while opening the page on site C, from which the script is also not run.
The effect is that you can enable, for example, some real functionality on some site but even if some annoying trackers or ad are included they are never executed. And it's not about being ad-hostile, it's about me as a user selecting which sites I want to ever let run dynamic content and consuming other sites as the static content. Breaks post on Google's "blogger" but the rest of the web is mostly better, faster and much safer.
Only if you never even thought about that, and especially if you've never considered what you would have to do if you would write such an extension can you even argument with the "global toggle" which does something completely different, and really simple.
But what Opera had is something completely different, built in natively.
I've started with Mosaic and Netscape (and on Sun OS for that matter), used Mozilla for a few years, then FF on Windows, and finally Safari and then Chrome for as long as both existed on the Mac (and have even used KHTML --in the form of Konqueror-- for light browsing on my dev box for a couple of years in the early 00s). Those, as an end user.
As a web dev for testing, besides IE, I have also fired up Opera for years, including back when it had an ugly QT facade and with its own rendering engine. I've never liked it though, and it never stuck to be used as the main browser.
Being able to toggle Javascript on/off with a single checkbox: all browsers have that.
Doing it per page: again, as I said, dead easy to add, e.g.: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...
So, "only Opera has that" is BS.
"Oh, but Opera has it built-in and I can't be bothered to install a third party exception", on the other hand, might be true -- that doesn't make that much of a valid reason to stick to an older browser to me eyes.
> https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher/...
That is, if the url of the tab is whitelisted, the code from all sites is run in the given tab with this extension? Opera worked differently.
Digging into its JS source-code, the extension calls a browser-API chromeContentSettings.javascript [1]. Now, it sounds like at one point in the past that setting was asynchronous, meaning that disabling JS before visiting a suspect page wasn't guaranteed to work anyway [2], but no recent bug-reports or docs mention it, so maybe Chrome fixed that.
Still not sure whether there's an exploitable race-condition between when the page URL is available versus when the plugin disables JS, I'm not familiar enough with the relevant events/callbacks.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s... [1] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/contentSettings [2] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Blocking-jav...
Absolutely. 12.18 has been available for a while.
also WOOHOO ECDHE is supported in 12.18, I just hope its a good patch, 12.17 crashes constantly with TLS 1.1/1.2 enabled or when using x64 build.
Why doesn't Qihoo 360 have a good reputation?
Their investors were lucky to get an exit.
The well-upholstered lady sung the swan song, I'm afraid... I hope those guys refocus on something that does change the world for the better rather duplicate what others are already did.
The reality is that they pre-date Chrome and Firefox, but never gained much traction.
Some of it maybe popularity/marketing of not having a huge org behind them, but odd rough-edges did more to sabotage stickiness. Plus, competing with deep pockets giving away something for free is an unnecessary competitive war of attrition, especially by not differentiating: most secure browser or best browser for X/Y/Z.
Unfortunately, technical prowess is not enough to gain traction. Being closed-source and costing money (until version 8) was a much bigger factor for their failure.
Still, back then there was simply nothing that was as fast or usable as Opera. Rest in Peace.
Because Jon von Tetzschner was and is passionate about building a good browser, and didn't really care that the odds were (are?) against him.
But when Opera is brought up, the focus is always on the Desktop browser. However, the money was always in devices - Opera has traditionally been really big on a plethora of devices.
Also, Opera both on desktop and mobile, has long been big in markets other than the US, especially eastern Europe.
At the time, Javascript speed wasn't important for non-showcase webpages. Good for benchmarks, and that was about it.
But times have changed.