It hurts me that their marketing worked. Gamers are Choosing Opera GX because its "non bs". There's a ton of fingerprinting data being sent to chinese servers. No one is immune to propaganda
In Firefox you cannot choose the folder to save files to, which is something I absolutely need because I mostly download porn but once in a while I have non-porn and these two must be in different folders.
Chrome doesn't support text reflow on zoom. I don't even have a comment because this makes it literally impossible to use desktop view which usually provides better experience.
I'm not even a power user. These features are IMO extremely basic things. Opera's built-in VPN is nice for browsing Twitter but that's an extra I could live without.
First world problems.
Nobody mentioned the US upstream of your comment until you did. This is obvious propaganda - one of the classic maneuvers in the PRC influence playbook is, when called out on anything, to try to implement whataboutism with the United States (even if it's not relevant, like here, which is equally sad and funny).
That doesn't mean you should be happy with data in America, but China is worse.
That’s not to say their privacy story is fantastic, but they very much still have European operations.
I believe the US stance is that nobody outside the US is entitled to court relief against the US government regarding their privacy, and nobody outside the US and EU is entitled to any relief at all, even from the executive (the “Data Protection Review Court” non-court, formerly the “Privacy Shield Ombudsperson”). In the EU, there are some protections in some countries but for example the GDPR specifically does not apply to governments.
I mean, the Chinese government is worse on this, but the US is nevertheless really bad and a number of EU countries also suck to a remarkable extent. Until the US press starts dropping the “of Americans” from their latest surprised-Pikachu headlines on “mass government surveillance of Americans”, I’m unconvinced the situation will improve.
They don't protect us at all. Thanks to Snowden, we all know that the US government has extremely sophisticated and wide-ranging ability to get access to any data we share with American companies.
> but China is worse
And why so?
Factually incorrect. US privacy laws pose a huge burden to US intelligence. The 4th amendment still applies. Warrants still exist.
> Thanks to Snowden, we all know that the US government has extremely sophisticated and wide-ranging ability to get access to any data we share with American companies.
Citation needed.
> And why so?
In the PRC, there are no privacy laws to protect you from the government. "Private" companies are an extension of the government and all of the larger ones are required to have a CCP party member on board to ensure that they are "aligned" with what the party wants. The party happily disappears dissidents at will, threatens dissidents in other countries, requires that all domestic companies provide encryption keys (or otherwise made encrypted data accessible) on demand with zero warrants or other legal protections, maintains the largest network of surveillance cameras in the world (several times more than the total number of those in the United States), and many more things.
This is extremely common knowledge, easily searchable online, and is factually and categorically different than anything the US, or any other Western country, does. Only the terminally ignorant or the propagandists believe that the PRC's surveillance is remotely similar to that of any western country - the available evidence comprehensively disproves that conspiracy theory.
No, because programs sending telemetry to the US is so routine that and pervasive that we don't even remark on it.
> This is obvious propaganda
Now who's committing a whole catalogue of fallacies?
That's not a valid reason. Nice try, though.
> Now who's committing a whole catalogue of fallacies?
Calling a fallacious and manipulative comment that literally follows a country's propaganda playbook "propaganda" isn't a fallacy - it's just true.
It's extremely telling that you didn't comment on any of the actual points that I made, such as it being a false dichotomy and whataboutism - because you know that I'm right, and so you had to resort to insinuations and redirections yourself. Congratulations, you just proved me right.
I see this recurrent feeling on HN that because the US does bad things we shouldn't care about other countries doing the same. I think we should care about all of them!
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop...
(In German, but Kagi translate or Google translate work fine here)
And I really couldn't care less if the browser vendor or their servers are in the US, China, or even any supposed "data privacy haven". It's simply none of their business which websites I visit.
For the same reason I'm not using Chrome, which intentionally kneecaps browser history sync when sync encryption is enabled, effectively forcing users to choose between non-synced history and privacy, when e.g. Firefox manages to do encrypted sync just fine.
This is novel to me - what's the kneecap specifically? How do you only kinda sync browser history??
For me, this completely defeats the point of having history sync in the first place, so this particular change was what made me switch browsers several years ago.