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Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

I tried opera a while back, and while it's fast and looks good, it has a new tab page with "recommended" sites that you can't turn off - I tried, but it's protected by DRM (opera will refuse to start if the file doesn't have a valid digital signature).

So if I'm going to switch browsers because of privacy/advertising concerns, it's not going to be Opera.

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Current Opera doesn't even allow to customize mouse gestures. The browser that once prided itself in its feature richness...

I mean... at least it has mouse gestures. Hard to knock it for being not feature-rich enough when it has a feature no other browser has by default (except Vivaldi, which has Opera lineage).

Sure, however:

a) This built-in feature is way below the standards trivially achievable via extensions in Firefox, Chrome etc.

b) It's a downgrade in relation to what Opera itself used to offer in the past (and then, if I recall, got so stripped of functionalities it didn't even support bookmarks at some point).

Opera is owned by Chinese company.

The new tab page has a list of bookmarks you can customize. It starts off with some "recommeded" sites in there, but you can just remove them once and they never come back. The only thing you can't remove from the new tab page is the Google search bar, which never really bothered me. Either way, it seems like you're implying that Opera will populate the new tab page with sites it chooses, but that's just not the case.

Plus, the search bar isn't just limited to Google, it respects the default search engine selection.

Opera does allow you to remove the Google search bar (actually, it's not tied to Google).

Go to browser settings -> advanced settings -> Start Page.

This is what I use https://i.imgur.com/GpF0sQt.png

Thanks for the tip!

I just wrote a blog post on how to replace the new tab page altogether if that is something you are interested in: https://blog.nahtnam.com/p/my-new-favorite-browser

It is highlighted in the "new tab page" section

Hey! I hope this isn't breaking the rules (self promotion) but I wrote a blog post on how to change your new tab page: https://blog.nahtnam.com/p/my-new-favorite-browser

It is described under the "new tab page" section. I can't really comment on the privacy/advertising concerns but I do know that Opera providers a VPN for you (who know what they are doing behind the scenes) and have their own adblocker built in.

I don't see anything like that in new tab page. I have only searchbar and thumbnails for pages I like to visit. I'm on Mac, do they have different versions of new tab page for other systems?

I tried, but it's protected by DRM (opera will refuse to start if the file doesn't have a valid digital signature).

Not too long ago, that situation would just cause someone to crack it and share how, or at least a patch.

Then again, that was also a time when there was an actual choice between browsers, and not just "Firefox or WebKit/Chrome(/ium) shell."

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