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Comment by CapacitorSet | Hacker News Reader

>Opera is an awesome browser which very few people use.

I thought well of it, until it got acquired by the Chinese. How has it been since?

I moved to Opera a few years ago because it performed better than other browsers when kept open for weeks on end. Its ram usage would often clock in at multiple gigabytes less than chrome or firefox over the same time frame even when keeping < 10 tabs open. It allows total customization of keyboard shortcuts and has been an excellent experience. Their iOS version has a built in ad-blocker which prompted me to switch on my phone as well.

Just this week i swapped to Firefix quantum to test the waters here. My initial reactions are fairly muted. It is almost an identical experience given my browsing and development habits. If anything, i would say i still prefer the speed of Opera's (well, Blink's) dev tools.

> Its ram usage would often clock in at multiple gigabytes less than chrome or firefox

Well that's funny, because Opera is based on the Blink engine (which chrome/chromium use as well.), so the memory usage should be very close to the same as Chrome.

I moved to Opera for similar reasons, plus one more: it supports a MRU order for Ctrl+Tab, which Chrome doesn't support and doesn't even allow extensions to support.

I literally can't understand why so many people (who use and develop Chrome) think that MRU is the right thing for Alt+Tab but not for Ctrl+Tab. Sad.

Jon von Tetzchner, the remaining co-founder of Opera (the other one, Geir Ivarsøy, has passed away, RIP) has now launched another browser, called Vivaldi. It's also based on Chromium, so Chrome extensions are compatible with it. And it's probably what Opera would've become...

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