Opera browser sold to a Chinese consortium for $600M
engadget.com
engadget.com
My Firefox currently looks like this: https://dump.thecybershadow.net/0177f0cecdf6ad3b65158858a210...
b) didn't they change their unpublishing policy after that event?
Unfortunately, I still use Google Services on my phone to use Google Play store for apps. I see no viable alternative for now.
The new Opera, i.e. every Opera after Version 15, is a Chromium fork.
That means it carries with it all the small and large behaviors like: Auto-updating. It also has literally no upside over using Opera v12, which still works fine for most things nowadays; and mostly no upsides over using just Chrome, or any other flavor of Chromium.
As such, getting rid of it after this acquisition gives only upside for the safety-conscious user.
But that is precisely why people distrust the companies.
There is enough mud to be thrown either way. As a country allied with the US (in general) I'm much less concerned by America's government, but the distrust of anything non-western... I mean, we are all people wanting to make a living in this world with much more in common than most are aware of.
Italy is (and was) most certainly an 'allied' country to the US and it didn't stop them either.
I trust the security acumen of the 'many eyes' who work on that project much more than Opera or Firefox. And Google doesn't vacuum up any data unless you volunteer it in Chrome. That's been proven.
Source: http://e24.no/boers-og-finans/opera-software/opera-gaar-for-...
Frankly the engadget headline here is as hyperbolic, if not more so, than anything The Register gets shit on for.
Also, the presence of a "consortium" for which I haven't read any other relevant name sound like a way to cover the direct acquisition…
What I can see here is: - A Chinese company trying to both comfortably beat their (Chinese) competition while gaining (out of PRC) customers for their "services" (which will likely be integrated within the browser); Which is fine, except for their "controversies". - An executive team (at Opera), that seams pretty all about finance and economics, trying to make the most (money) from an offer in a market (the web browsers one) that is (at least, I think so) hard to remunerate. Obviously those shareholders will be happy; but are those shareholders really involved into the product that they own, or they are just silent speculators who made an investment for the sole purpose of profit when they realized the company's potential of being acquired ?
I'm also disappointed because I used to like the effort that Opera has put into their own browser in the latest months; the same effort that convinced me to adopt their browser (beta version) instead of Chrome and advocate them.
P.S.: Obviously, those are just my thoughts after having read the article; I hope for a more detailed statement from Opera…
The shareholders are ecstatic with joy. The browser has been nothing but an advertising front for what is factually an advertising company for years now.
The fact that you actually saw the abomination that was Opera 15 and beyond in a positive light, instead of the truth of abandoning browser development in favor of a token Chrome fork, speaks volumes to this strategy having worked for them.
BTW, as long as I know, they also pushed some code into Chromium so I see it as a solid step toward the consolidation of web standards by using a common and open base. Better achieved if performance exists as well.
[*]: Even if I occasionally tried some desktop versions of Opera during the years, I've always preferred Firefox and later Chrome as default browser.
They threw away a perfectly functional software package with thousands of features, and replaced it with a fork of third-party software that didn't offer even a tenth of the features of the original package.
That said, yes, the strategy worked. The world at large swallowed their lie because it was mostly people like you, who weren't using Opera in the first place, and didn't know better about what really happened.
The people who suffered were their loyal users, people who had even bought Opera at some point.
At some point I've read that it had an e-mail client, later externalized; if those are the "feature", so I'm also ok with that, as I'm more into Vim than emacs. That's my point. If you're referencing something else, I'm curious. :)
The mail client also doubles as an RSS reader client.
Aside from that, it also has mouse gestures that are core in the browser, not bolted on with JS addons, which means they work consistently, everywhere, and fast. Gestures i do a lot: Right-click + wheel to change tabs, hold right tap left to go back, hold left tap right to go forward, and various hold rought and move mouse gestures to open new tabs, close tabs, move up a level, etc.
Then there's the performance and memory efficiency. I have 100+ tabs open and the thing sits at 2 GB with my email story as well. Right-click + wheel scrolls me through tabs at basically display refresh rate, chrome can't even switch that fast.
A very powerful url blocker that can be configured per-domain is built in, and is faster than any kind of js-based addon could ever dream of.
I can actually manually edit menu and toolbar ini files and even add macros and javascript bits right there. For example i use that to add menu entries to right-click on links to open those links in other browsers.
I can edit text-based style descriptor files with additional image files to completely restyle the browser effortlessly.
Getting to the screen where i can view and edit cookies for the active page directly takes me 3 clicks.
I can configure activation, deactivation of js, plugins (flash, etc.), even animated images per site with 3 clicks, globally with 2 or a hotkey. I can tell plugins like flash to load on demand, i.e. only when i click on them or tell the page to start loading plugins by clicking in the adress bar.
I can add browser-wide custom css, or site-specific custom css, again, 3 clicks.
I can disable all CSS for the active page with one click.
It has a note-taking facility built-in that doubles as "richer" bookmark manager, and also serves to give strings for auto-complete suggesting when typing in input fields.
It has one-button keyboard shortcuts, e.g. "seach in page" is "." for me.
I can have a vertical tab bar and a horizontal one at the same time.
I can open a list of all links on the current page, filter it by various conditions, select the ones i want and hit "download these to a folder" in one action.
I can add custom panels in the side panel by adding urls there, which is where i keep a bunch of "translate this word" things.
And that's just scratching the surface. I could go on for a long time. And keep in mind: It has all this stuff in it, and excluding JS engine performance, still outperforms Chrome and Firefox. JS being slower and SSL compatibility slowly going kaput are the only actual downsides.
> It has one-button keyboard shortcuts [...]
> I can configure activation, deactivation of js, plugins (flash, etc.) [...] I can tell plugins like flash to load on demand [...]
> I can have a vertical tab bar and a horizontal one at the same time.
All of this is still here.
> [...] I have 100+ tabs open and the thing sits at 2 GB [...]
I'm not used to leave opened such a large number of tabs, but even today's Opera seems to handle them quite good (I may be wrong, but I think that Chromium smartly remove some tabs from memory and reload them later, on demand and with cache).
> A very powerful url blocker [...]
If you really need this, I think that /etc/hosts is the way.
> I can actually manually edit menu and toolbar ini files [...]
> I can add custom panels in the side panel [...]
> I can open a list of all links on the current page, filter it by various conditions, select the ones i want and hit "download these to a folder" in one action.
Perhaps extensions (which I do not use) are designed to simplify and customize the process...
> I can edit text-based style [...] to completely restyle the browser effortlessly.
Not really a feature, but a "nice to have". As for myself, I'm ok with the OS-native look.
> Getting to the screen where i can view and edit cookies [...]
> I can disable all CSS for the active page with one click.
I think that you can achieve the same result from the Inspector with a couple of more clicks (that's not a behavior that most users need).
:)
Yes, Opera might be fine. It might even end up better. If history tells us anything though, new management can cause a lot of problems. The term “consortium” doesn’t exactly scream “experts at moving technology forward”. One of the companies where I worked was bought by a “consortium”, and I saw some very…interesting decisions made back then.
Opera wasn’t special because of a dollar figure; it was special because of its attitude toward technology. If a consortium values return over anything else, they risk alienating too many of the people that made Opera successful.
From a technological perspective, it seems quite different. One of Opera's great strengths was how "native" it felt on every platform, plus a full suite of Internet tools. This doesn't seem to do chat, email, bittorrent, etc.
Spiritual successor in the sense it's targeted at power users, has aims to revive some of the classic Opera functionality, and because it's developed by ex-Opera personnel.
I'd recommend taking a look at the Vivaldi Wikipedia page for some of the background into how it came to be:
The native feel seems largely to have been Opera 12's downfall; they just didn't have the resources/manpower to maintain their own (very brilliant) internals/rendering engine/etc. on top of the power-user UI + featureset.
Vivaldi looks to be attempting to recreate the latter (poweruser UI+features) and dropping the former (by relying on Chromium/ReactJS for internals), so it's very much a large compromise if you like Opera 12.
Overall, the main criticism I would have is not opensourcing it. This is an old tired argument, but in this specific case it's painfully relevant given the huge resources that went into creating Opera 12's internals which then couldn't be community-forked.
Nope.
What happened is that they started getting more and more into the ad business as a way to make real income, and they got very successful in the mobile area with that, to the point that they didn't need the browser anymore. All it took after that was a bunch of MBAs to have the smart idea to convert the browser to a token marketing effort, edge out the founders' ideas, and pivot towards the ad business full force.
But I agree, the lack of opensource seems very unfortunate in this case, since closed source is part of what got you stuck here. I guess I'm not power user enough to want to add what just seems to be more or less a different version of Chrome, but I'm glad it exists because I'm glad that some projects still dedicate themselves to a power user base.
Any power users that used Opera for that aspect are still using v12, which is unaffected by this, entirely; and no power user would use the chromium fork they put out with v15 and upwards, because all it offers is a dearth of features.
The servers has been decommissioned, and according to Norwegian law, the user data has been deleted.