Opera’s $1.2B sale: Shocking underdog victory or cruel twist of fate? | Hacker News Reader

Opera’s $1.2B sale: Shocking underdog victory or cruel twist of fate?

venturebeat.com

59 pointswormold53 comments

The way Qihoo 360 operates should give anyone pause: https://www.techinasia.com/360-safe-browser-malware

Stolen recolored IE icon, sneaky installs, difficult/impossible uninstalls, fake "security" ratings, etc.

Stated in another thread on Opera's sale, but to restate and reaffirm: anything that involves Qihoo|360 in a name should be instantly removed from your system. It is self-spreading malware. Source: Dealing with this malware on a daily basis. It replicates itself from USB stick to plugged in phone.

360/Qihoo is, in every sense of corporations or individuals seeking any semblance of control of their device, a heathen.

Edit: Live in China. Work for privately held Chinese company. Enforced removal of this 360 entity from company.

Opera's owners better be taking 100% cash.

I used Opera from ~2000, way back when it was still ad-supported. It always amazed me that they managed to provide a top-notch web browser, a passable BitTorrent client, newsgroup client, FTP client, IRC client, and email client... all inside one 4 MiB installer package. I stopped using it the moment they switched to Chromium and blew away all the features that made it unique.

Vivaldi aside, hopefully any remaining talent that still works at Opera will now finally be free to go create more kickass software.

Which is a testament to the industry's ability to fill any and all hardware improvement with more overhead unfortunately. If you compare what 1990s demo mags did on floppy disks vs the resources it takes to render a 2016 web page, it's hard not to feel like we're failing as software developers. All the dynamic features and scriptability can be had with a system that fits on a floppy disk if only we valued it but we don't. These things do and did exist but didn't have the marketing department like, say, Sun Java. And one of Niklaus Wirth's peers made a Java (with applet plugin) alternative in the 90s as a direct competitor that was a huge improvement and got no traction. Instead of using faster internet connections for richer content we fill it up with different (i.e. less efficient) ways of doing the same thing. When I see that the most trivial mobile app package is larger than 50MB, it's impossible to respect what the industry as a whole views to be good software. Take Qt5's 30MB base memory overhead for a simplest of simple Qt windows. How is that acceptable?

Web Pages themselves are far heavier and more complex than they were in the 90's

Isn't it a failure of HTML+CSS+WebFoo when the supporting assets are 10 or 20 times larger than the content to be consumed? Pages loading megabytes of JavaScript, fonts, and large images and videos just on the landing page. I think we lost it completely when we started to fetch JSON and render it locally via JavaScript. The whole concept of HTTP GET was nullified that way.

CSS basically turned the whole thing into a crappy apps UI, though the appification of the web honestly started back when Microsoft and Netscape was battling for control over the intranet (and likely why anything and everything is layered on top of TCP/IP these days, for better or worse).

In a way we have come full circle. The personal computer came to be because accountants was fed up begging sysadmins for time on the mainframes. And with CSS and JS "powered" web sites we have returned to the era of the graphical terminal.

It's even worse than TCP/IP only, it's mostly HTTP only these days. Things like SCTP got pushed into niche use and we're reinventing SCTP on top of HTPP(2) on top of TCP on top of IP.

I'm hopeful to see the trend go back though, if it's really a circle :).

Yeah i know. We seem to have turned HTTP into TCP, and use it to carry various ad-hoc "protocols" encoded in JSON.

Part of that i think we can blame firewalls, as most often they block everything but HTTP(S) by default.

Nobody is arguing that, but should e.g. a landing page for a startup that just collects an email address really be heavier weight than a whole browser was a few years ago?

Exactly. Also can anybody explain why websites make it hard and harder to find an about or contact page which actually has a postal address. You don't have to implement it like the German law insists but what used to be common practice now seems to be hidden. Another bug of modern web pages is that they're designed like tv ads and it's impossible to find out what a company is actually doing. Go to 10 random startup pages and see how many actually explain what it is they're producing/providing. It makes me feel like I'm listening to someone who's talking much without discernible content.

I was just running a win98 box with 64MB of ram. Office would run nicely. Also that disk had (the maddeningly fast) Turbo Pascal IDE clocking around 600KB. I like v8 prowess and everything but I miss those days.

Would be sad if it goes through. I recently found my receipt for an Opera licence (which I must have bought some time in the 90s). It was amazing back then just to have an alternative to IE. All today's browsers are indebted to Opera. E.g., they were the first to use tabbed browsing.

I think I switched to opera somewhere around the end of Opera3, before the advertising window, then 5.12 being a version number that I seem to remember vividly. Even bought a few Opera7/FreeBSD keys back then for all my boxes (even the headless ones) to show support.

The initial Chrome-based Opera was a culture shock after the 12.x series. But, the more recent releases are actually quite usable I found and Opera is once again my main choice on Windows. I would be honestly sad to see it go.

it was also first to support gestures, tab recovery after crash, decent speed... For couple of years (before Mozilla become usable) it was the ONLY alternative to IE.

> E.g., they were the first to use tabbed browsing.

That's open for discussion They had MDI at first, not proper tabs. Other early browsers with tabs include NetCaptor (1997?), and iBrowse2 (Amiga; 1999). Phoenix (what became Firefox) also had what we'd consider tabs today in September 2002, while Opera first got that in November 2002.

So it boils down to whether or not you consider an MDI based interface equivalent to tabs. Personally, I don't - MDI was one of the things that kept me away from Opera back then..

Opera used MDI until the last days of version 12.

The tab bar was basically added as a means of easing switching (though control tab was always an option).

oh, didn't know about any of these. :-)

I've been using Opera on a Macbook for about a year, and have been generally happy with it's configurability although it has worse battery life than I'd like. I switched to it when Chrome mucked up the "click-to-play" function: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRB...

But like many others, I'm thinking this acquisition might be a good reason to switch again. I've been trying out Safari today. I appreciate how "snappy" it feel, and it seems more processor-efficient as well. Scrolling on Reddit (among other sites) quickly caused the fans to roar for Chrome and Opera, but Safari doesn't seem to break a sweat.

So far, the thing that bothers me most is that my fingers are currently hard wired to shift-click links when I want to open them in a new window. And every time I do this, Safari silently "lobs" the link into the hidden reading list rather than opening it. Is there any way to configure Safari to have shift-click open a new window, or do I have no choice but to retrain my fingers?

ps. I was excited to see that the HckrNews extension works well on Safari: http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions

On Safari, you use Cmd+click to open a link in a new tab. I don't think there's an easy way to change that.

Yes, by default. I tend to remember that immediately after I unintentionally add another link to the Reading List. I'm sure I can change, but it seems like I only just got comfortable with shift-click after switching from ctrl-click a decade ago.

I was very happy, though, to see that on the Preferences/Tabs settings I can set Command-Click to open in a new window rather than in a new tab. I was hoping there might be a hidden "non-easy" way to reconfigure this too.

Opera was my favorite web browser back when they used Presto and they had a social network (My Opera). Now Opera is more or less just a Chromium skin.

R.I.P. Opera

I felt the same until I realized that all I really wanted was Chrome without all that Google-goo all over it. That's Opera in a nutshell.

Just out of curiosity what are you referring to when you say "Google-goo?" Does chromium not fit the need?

Not the OP, but when you're required to create a google account just to install an extension, I would say 'no'.

I just opened https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions on Chromium, signed out of my google account, and didn't have a problem installing an extension.

You're right! I just fired it up and was able to install Advanced REST Client (the only thing I regularly use Chromium for) without logging in.

When I first installed it - less than a year ago - that wasn't possible.

That's a step in the right direction, but you're still only allowed to install extensions from the Google-owned Chrome Web Store.

Have you tried Vivaldi? It's supposed to be from the original team of Opera. Also based on Chromium, but at least not a clone of Chrome.

I tried it. The UI is HTML5 based and good by the way. But it's closed source. With so many shit hitting the fan these days, I don't want to invest my time in closed products if there are alternatives.

i still use the last presto version for reading big chunks of text

The presto version has a great downloader and rss reader that I still use.

Firstly a disclaimer: I'm not a user of Opera myself - I tried it back in the day but found some parts of the interface a bit unfriendly to my conditioned ways (can't remember what now).

I'm a bit surprised by those saying they are now going to uninstall it because it is owned by a Chinese ad company. Firstly: did you actually read the article? The sale hasn't actually happened yet. The article clearly states > the executives noted (several times in our interview) that it must still win shareholder approval and likely won’t close for several months.

Secondly: It seems to me that the Opera developers have earned a certain amount of 'benefit of the doubt'. Surely, if you support the browser and the developers then the best course is to keep using it and then when the deal goes through keep a close eye out for any evidence of the new owners trying to coerce the developers into abusing their users. It seems to me that the devs would be highly resistant to such proposals and that any attempt to force the matter could lead to one or more high level defections. I could be wrong though - but as users of the software: what do you think?

It's not open-source, so you're essentially trusting a binary install with auto-updates. I was fine with it until now, not sure I will be if the sale goes through.

From what I've seen Opera seems pretty confident that they will remain an independent company operating out of Norway (and therefore subject to Norwegian privacy laws which are pretty strict). I probably wouldn't be too worried unless they move the actual development of the browser from Norway to China

> I probably wouldn't be too worried unless they move the actual development of the browser from Norway to China

It's already mostly in Poland.

For people looking at alternatives check Vivaldi. https://vivaldi.com/

It's made by some of the original team.

I will probably miss Opera Mini the most though, Vivaldi does not have a similar product.

sadly yet another Chrome clone for speed of development.

Yes, resources seem low on their end, but fingers crossed.

I get the feeling this was in the cards when the remaining founder left the company a few years back. Soon after they ditched the Presto driven browser that had been with Opera since the founding, and replaced it with a reskinned Chrome.

Frankly i would use the release of their Coast concept demo as the turning point of the company. From that point on designers and MBAs ran the place, not engineers.

Its is really jarring to see Lie claim that going Chrome helped the standardization effort. At this point in time i no longer trust his judgment on things web tech.

Opera is still the best mobile browser. Period. Cannot trust to use it now though.

I noticed that there "traffic-saving" proxy started to redirect direct links to images on https://i.imgur.com to the full-ad-crap pages https://www.imgur.com. Has anyone noticed the same? It does not always happen, might be referrer based.

Imgur does that, based on referrer: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/

I noticed it at least on Reddit. Surely that would be their death note if Imgur did it?

Opera should have open sourced their old Presto code (browser and email client). The Opera 15 browser is based on Chromium. Now the sold to a Chinese company known for adware/malware, that chance is gone. The old Opera was pretty good for its time, and a community could have formed around it.

Some former Opera devs are working on Vivaldi, a promising Chromium based browser that has an HTML5 based UI. Though, it's not open source.

As far as I remember they had too many dependencies that weren't open source friendly for that move. At least I think that was the reason given back then.

I doubt that is true.

They ported the Opera browser to very exotic platforms, like Nintendo DS, Wii, and many other devices I never even heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_(layout_engine)

With multiplatform codebase, you try to keep the dependencies to a minimum or even rely on just C++ and the platform sdk.

It might have included a large amount of licensed code. They could edit and port it, but not relicense it.

Just before the sale (a couple months before), Opera acquired SurfEasy .. a Canadian VPN service. I wonder what the SurfEasy folks think of this deal?

https://www.surfeasy.com/en/

Now owned by Chinese ad company delete delete delete

Does it really matter?

USA and its 3-letter-organizations got much more power on spying on users worldwide.

It's probably safer to use software from Russia, China and the USA at the same time. Why trust any entity more than the other unless you're affiliated with one's government body in some way.

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