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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to have to switch browser AGAIN? Dammit.

Is Opera safe or what shady shit have they done? I haven't used Opera since Opera back in 2006. God I miss the Presto engine and dragonfly.

Can I go back to them or they doing shady stuff?

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Opera is still proprietary, and, uh, also they got caught doing some stuff involving predatory short-term loans to the impoverished in African countries, not to mention their CEO was also involved in an entirely different Chinese conglomerate that was also involved with fraud and some lending thing.

Oh yeah and if you haven't used it since 2006: Opera is Chromium now, and the company behind it got sold a time or two.

what the fuck, whats happening in the tech scene :(

what should I use if I _dont_ want to be in the botnet or scammed and outside of google's mesh

Firefox, like always.

I used Opera from 5 to 12, then Firefox till v37, and it's been Pale Moon ever since. Check out the latest release notes. I know I'm not the only one that likes things such as,

>Removed more telemetry code

>Removed the in-browser speech recognition engine and API

>Removed support for the obsolete and unmaintained NVidia 3DVision stereoscopic interface.

Palemoon is Firefox if it were still Firefox instead of feature-for-feature chrome copy for watching encrypted netflix.

I would love to be able to use Palemoon, but I just can't get over the fact that it's a single main developer trying to maintain an entire web browser.

That seems like a security nightmare waiting to happen. If I'm wrong about this, please let me know, I really like the idea.

Except they don’t “maintain the entire browser,” rather, they “maintain” a trimmed-down build.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense. I'll download it and give it a shot.

I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The fact that Moonchild has removed some a few features they don't like from Palemoon doesn't make the remaining codebase meaningfully easier to maintain. They're still left with what is effectively an orphaned codebase, increasingly unable to use patches from mainline Firefox, and subject to unknown vulnerabilities in portions of the codebase which no longer exist upstream.

Maybe we're touching the same elephant but we're obviously on opposite ends of it. That's how I perceive Firefox security with all it's crazy new features, old experiments left in, black box DRM that's literally unauditable, etc.

Dosen't pale moon use https://start.me/ by default still? From reading https://start.me/privacy that does not seem encouraging.

> they got caught doing some stuff involving predatory short-term loans to the impoverished in African countries, not to mention their CEO was also involved in an entirely different Chinese conglomerate that was also involved with fraud and some lending thing

Ooh juicy. Any links to read on this?

Previous coverage on HN because I'm very indecisive and don't like giving links myself:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You can also find more if you check Opera Software's Wikipedia page.

Thanks!

When it turned to shit, Yngve and Jon got out and did their own thing: https://vivaldi.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8952517

Just use Firefox (or one of the forks that removes builtin extensions and the like). For all of its problems, Mozilla is still probably the best bet we have at building a web browser that won't do shady things (it will do some annoying things, like having Pocket built in by default, but for the most part they still try to protect your privacy, don't force you into creepy payment models and things like Brave tries to do, etc.)

They were sold to a chinese consortium, so take that as you will.

Vivaldi is an excellent alternative, and the latest versions of Firefox are far superior imo.

Vivaldi is essentially Old Opera 2.0 in terms of features, focused on power users, created by the same guy as the original Opera, and runs on Chromium.

Still putting my vote in Firefox though.

I keep Vivaldi as my "test in Chrome" browser, but their business model is not the most transparent from a privacy perspective (at one point it looked like they were aggregating browsing stats to resell).

Firefox is still my main driver. They make the occasional bad choice but their overall business model is basically the best we can hope for in a browser, these days.

What is wrong with firefox?

Oh, let me count the ways... or let me just refer you to waterfox's website: https://www.waterfox.net/

Only advantage I see is "No telemetry" option, which you can disable in firefox.

Waterfox sold-out to an ad company (which “has developed a pre-targeting platform that identifies and unlocks consumer intent across channels including social, native, email, search, market research and lead generation rather than relying solely on what consumers enter into search boxes.”)

The founder also claimed that Waterfox was never pivoted as a privacy-focused product.

May I suggest using Vivaldi browser? https://medium.com/@Priem19/how-to-use-the-web-properly-f98f...

Are we supposed to “trust” this one now?

Their code for the full browser isn't open source. Only the chromium code is. Although it's mostly UI related code that you can inspect but just be aware.

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