Opera delivers desktop browser with crypto wallet integration | Hacker News Reader

Opera delivers desktop browser with crypto wallet integration

blogs.opera.com

25 pointsdikkechill15 comments

PSA that Opera is owned by a Chinese consortium as of 2016. I wouldn't trust it as a safe replacement for Chrome privacy issues.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/18/opera-browser-sold-to-a-...

Back in the days I was a big Opera fan, I even bought myself free from the ads it came with in the top right. But since they abandoned their own rendering engine I literary haven't even downloaded it a single time to even test it. It's so uninteresting to see a closed source browser which just uses the open source blink engine.

I can understand your dissatisfaction with their choice of closed on top of open, but I’d encourage you to give it a whirl. I switched early last year because I was growing wary of Google and wanted to see if Opera was faster. Sure enough, it’s impressively fast and has all the built in things that I want. I’m quite impressed with their latest improvements and really enjoy using it. I’d be hard pressed to switch to anything else right now.

I use it on mobile. It's quite nice, has an okayish ad blocker and a nice text wrap zoom feature that I enjoy and no other mobile browser has. It's fast enough but Brave is faster. Also used it on the Windows desktop before FF quantum.

I've tried it recently. I lasted < 10 minutes. The spinner in the tabs while things load are very distracting. cnn.com causes it to start spinning every 8 seconds for about 3 seconds.

I'm still using Opera 12! I use it with Javascript disabled and it works flawlessly as it always did. Just to reply here I decided to count the number of tabs I've got opened. I counted 60! I should just put them in the 'Read Later' list I guess!

Wikipedia says Opera 15 with the Blink engine came out on 28 May 2013 [0]. So, it's still chugging along after 5 years of the switch. Which in the web world is an eternity I suppose.

The tab navigation, the mouse gestures, the keyboard based navigation on the page, the keyboard shortcuts, tab stacks, customized searches with keywords, just too many features to count. And all without a single add-on.

Vivaldi does a lot of these things right as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)#History

What I find interesting is that it supports access to an external wallet on your phone. This reduces the attack surface.

Another browser that has a wallet built in is Brave [1]. But afaik this does not support access to wallets on other devices.

[1] https://brave.com/funding-your-brave-wallet/

what could possibly go wrong integrating an engine capable of running arbitrary web downloaded javascript, with a wallet capable of being drained of real-world affecting value...

oh, its ok, we have sandboxes

Not just sandboxes, passwords too, and 2FA.

We're all being trained to click through warnings. Smart people won't get caught by malware stealing their cryptos from the wallet? Sure. Thats good. Darwinism in this space means dumb angry people with financial loss. I can't be totally happy about that. Can you?

It's really simple to take any crypto currency holdings you have and split them into multiple accounts. One of your accounts, that you enable on your mobile device, could have a small amount of currency and even if there were a JavaScript exploit that hijacked your private key, you've only lost that bit in the small account. And, you don't have to wait for the bank transfer to occur, or even create an account with a bank bureaucracy. It seems much better than the alternative, no?

yes. But the utility shrinks as soon as you walk into the risks. The headline story is great. The reality is going to demand the same rigour around offline and online wallets.

Plus, we just incentivised the bad guys to try harder. Up to now, the risk has been "steal my CPU to do DDoS or mine" but now the risk is steal my money

The golden age of Opera was with Opera Mini, where they ran a massive proxy to dumb down desktop web sites for tiny mobile browsers, likely running Java. Everyone used it, loved it, and I bet it cost Opera a lot of money too.

After this, Opera is struggling a lot to set themselves apart of the pack, and in my opinion, they are failing at it. They lost the focus, and past recent "innovations" were simply smashing things with the browser.

- VPN integration built in. - Ad Blocker built in - Torrent client built in - Crypto currency wallet built in

All these features, but they still have to make money too. Running ads (as suggested sites or whatever) doesn't bode well in a land where we have more popular open source browsers not running ads, and having all these features as add-ons, web apps, or one way or the other.

What is the 'web 3.0' Opera speak of? Is this a buzzword too far? I think I get the idea - semantic web where the web knows loads of stuff about you thanks to your browser, however, if I was in a client meeting and spoke of 'web 3.0' I would expect people to think I had gone mad, taken too many drugs, arrived pissed and generally jumped the shark. It is not a helpful buzzword and it surprises me that marketing for Opera use such a vague buzzword.

Regarding the crypto wallet that is built in, who honestly believes in the crypto future these days? The fad is over and nobody is interested in the fake bitcoins. Bitcoin dominance is on the rise and the other 'coins' only persist due to people 'HODLing', i.e. holding on to the 'coins' they have out of the hope that one day some greater fool will come along and be interested in what they have 'invested in'.

Alt coins and their apparent value reminds me of those holiday homes people built but did not complete in Spain, Ireland and elsewhere prior to the 2008 crash. If you go to Spain you can still see these properties and notionally these useless buildings have got 'value'. Eventually someone will come along and find use for the properties, even if it is to use them for keeping cattle in. The owners are not selling as they have negative equity. That residual value does fluctuate with movements in the currency markets much as the values in fake bitcoins does move up and down. But there is no income, the capital is not employed to generate a profit and the assets are worthless yet worth something at the same time.

On this analogy it is like Opera think the good old days of 2008 will come back. Or in alt-coins, the good old days of December 2017.

The 'good old days' of crypto are not coming back. There are no greater fools foolish enough to want to buy in. The 'dApps' never arrived, much like the tourists that never arrived in the pre-2008 speculator Potemkin villages of Spain, Ireland etc. Mainstream people just do not want to have anything to do with it, crypto is just not cool. Opera must be very desperate to want to tie their fortunes to 'crypto wallets'.

opera is now a Chinese asset, correct?

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