What is going on at Opera Software?

Opera was purchased by a China-based investor group prior to its IPO. The group’s largest investor and current Opera Chairman/CEO was recently involved in a Chinese lending business that listed in the U.S. and saw its shares plunge more than 80% in just 2 years amid allegations of fraud and illegal lending practices.

Post IPO, Opera has now also made a similar and dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%.

Most of Opera’s lending business is operated through apps offered on Google’s Play Store. In August, Google tightened rules to curtail predatory lending and, as a result, Opera’s apps are now in black and white violation of numerous Google rules.

Then again it seems the Opera mobile itself hasn't mutated to a predatory credit app, so it might not apply here.

The real fly in the ointment for me when Opera ditched Presto was the loss of M2. I have tens of thousands of emails it just handles with little to no overhead. Back when I was subscribed to multiple mailing lists relevant to my job, it just handled those, too. The world of mail clients seems to have thinned out to me, but I haven't seriously tried anything else in awhile. I've been holding out for Vivaldi's M3, but given that they've taken so long to get it done, I'll be surprised if it's ever released.

Building a rendering engine didn't really fit in to that business model.

Fortunately the China sale spooked a ton of longtime Opera users who all jumped ship. Now apparently the husk of the company has been used to grow a lending company.

I still remember the day, roughly 2 years later when the Technical Preview of Vivaldi launched. I don't even remember how I found it, but I've been using it since day one and it has remained a true spiritual successor to what made the original Opera what it was, aside from the rendering engine.

> When you had a team that could create that behind your product, you knew that the team cared and was driven by passion and excellent craftmanship.

Even better: the Opera speed test:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdirsXNaibo

which was the Opera developer's reaction to the Google Chrome Speed Test:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI

As in they're under a license agreement that prohibits open-sourcing?

Presumably unless it's specifically prohibited then they could release their code with holes where the licensed content goes, which would bump the problem up the chain to the next layer of owners and allow people to focus on them? Or let people adapt the codebase to work around the other libraries (or whatever)??

Opera did a lot for the web.

Opera was, I think, the first browser to make UA-switching a first-class feature, precisely to avoid this phenomenon. I believe at one point they even sent a fake UA string by default. This sort of thing was really not the reason they hit the rocks.

The truth is that making a browser is hard work for little reward. Keeping up with web standard was pretty hard already, for an operation running on thin margins and based in an expensive country; when Google got in the game, brutally accelerating the development of features and hammering people with adverts for Chrome, Opera struggled to compete. They found some margins in the developing world, where their bandwidth-optimizing services were popular; but targeting the low end of the market only buys you some time (if you exist because connections are bad, as connections improve people will leave you).

Eventually, their perennial search for cash ended with an inevitable sale to this or that financial shark, and here we are.