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Comment by hellotomyrars | Hacker News Reader

I really loved Opera before it became chromium based but I do still like opera. They've integrated a lot of nice features which makes it a more compelling offering than chrome without any additional add-ons.

I also think that setting resource limits for the browser is a good feature.

I do not see why this needs to be broken out as a separate browser for #Gamers though. I guess it might help them gain market share because it's "new" but I think it's more likely to cause a lot of eye-rolling instead.

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Their business model is/was selling users' data. I met several sales teams at Opera back in the 2010s while I worked with one of the world biggest smartphone seller (i.e we chose which app to preinstall on zillions Android devices). They had no shame explaining in details how we and our partners data could use the data to profit against their very own users. How could one imagine using their product after such cynical presentation? I wish this was better known.

You might check out Vivaldi, created by one of the founders of Opera Software. Has a ton of UI customization options built-in.

https://vivaldi.com/

It’s also Chromium based

But it's not owned by a Chinese company. Opera is and that makes me question how trustworthy it is. There hasn't been evidence to suggest it's not, but I'm not comfortable running it on my machines.

The term I heard recently was "distrust and verify", a modern spin on the Russian proverb "Trust, but verify" which was made famous by Ronald Reagan during the first Cold War [1].

In software industry, following the "distrust and verify" strategy makes particularly good sense. Software that is not open-source cannot be verified, so should only be used in carefully sandboxed environments.

In 2020, why would anybody use a closed-source web browser?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify

I believe it was Pompeo who recently said that. It's about right for some of the things going on lately.

Any software from China or Russia falls into that category for me. Some other places would too if it was more common to see mainstream software from them.

I agree with you on the web browsers. Hardly anyone uses an open source browser though. Most of them have open source components mixed with closed source blobs to the point where you don't really know what it's doing. Chrome is a good example where they go as far as to scan your machine for malware, but it's not the only one.

What's their business model? Got to say, the browser looks pretty slick.

It's a great browser, as customizable as you'd expect a spiritual successor to Opera to be. Unfortunately you largely have to take their word when it comes to privacy, but they seem trustworthy enough.

Fwiw many of the Opera engineers who worked on Presto moved over to work on Chromium and have done amazing work improving performance, standards compliance, and other cool web features. The browser itself might not live on but the expertise does.

Really?

I read somewhere they laid of a huge part of the C++ team back in the day, when they switched to Chromium.

So that "many" you mention is what, 5%, 20%, 50% of the original Presto team?

it's for market segmentation for advertisers. This way they can sell aggregate data and ad impressions that's targeted to a very specific and profitable segment.

Like google's 'flocks' concept, but maybe less moving pieces.

This FLoC?

https://github.com/jkarlin/floc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)

>https://github.com/jkarlin/floc

this is the one I mean, yes.

This reminded me of the Flock browser which was an interesting take on browsers like 10 years ago!

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