God damn it. I just switched to Opera because of the "Hey get off Chrome" posts like 2 weeks ago.
I have Firefox installed but don't love it. Need a "and the next closest good mobile browser is X"
I remember way back in the late 90s or early 2000s, when Opera was commercial, I bought a lifetime license. I don't remember the specifics but it was basically a way to support them and it was good for all future versions, forever and ever.
I lost the key long ago and the browser is free now anyway. Still wouldn't use it.
I started using Opera at version 9 point something and was a happy camper for a long time. It was a great browser, but its biggest problem was compatibility - more and more sites were behaving strangely and more and more the Opera folks had to patch things on the browser side. I stopped using it around the time the first alpha version of Vivaldi came out. Yes, Vivaldi had a lot of catching up to do at the beginning, but it was functional enough for a daily driver. Opera's first Blink-based version was some kind of a joke - it didn't even have a proper bookmarking system - it was as if everyone was assumed to have 15-20 bookmarks on their start page and that's it. Anyway, they lost all my trust when they sold out later on.
I'm willing to give Firefox a chance regarding the whole manifest v3 drama, although I see the Vivaldi folks opposing it (not sure how much they'll be able to do once they have to merge the MV3 stuff). My biggest hurdle with Firefox right now is the lack of native mouse gestures. Yes, it's somewhat possible to do it with extensions, but the 1% of the pages it doesn't work on (I know, I know, intentional limitation for all extensions) is enough to break my flow; gestures are so ingrained into my muscle memory at this point that I don't see myself using a browser without them supported the way they are in Vivaldi.
late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab'd and noticed there was the "don't symbol" (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, "that can't be right". I'm running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN'T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can't use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.
I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.
Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.
Somebody here is going to have a reason: why shouldn’t I use Safari?
While inferior to Firefox due to reason outlined by another user, it is infinitely better than going with Chromium-based browsers.
Keep on using it if you feel comfortable with it
the last time when I used Opera browser was on my Sony Ericsson W580i and C702i
Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it's spyware.
Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.
at least someone will be able to fork Firefox's code, unlike the sad story with Opera's old Presto engine, that due to being proprietary suffered an inevitable dead.
Firefox has so many issues. I do hear people say that if you use the nightly build it gets better, but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
I still use it, both on mobile and desktop, but its main appeal for me right now is that it is "not Chrome". The 5% breakage of Firefox is nowhere close to the 50% enshittification of Chrome:-(.
but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
Considering that the chrome app does not even have a way to install extensions, this is still a massive win for Firefox.
Mozilla has also started to make more and more extensions compatible with the mobile app recently, see https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/01/is-your-extension-ready-for-firefox-for-android/
Opera was useful to me at three very specific points in time for very specific reasons:
When I built my first PC out of old scrap parts in the early 2000s, the only halfway modern browser that was still compatible with Windows 95 and a 486 CPU was Opera. Not the latest version, but new enough to be usable. This version, which came with a permanent toolbar urging users to purchase a full license, already had tabs.
I did not have broadband Internet until 2006. Even 56k modems didn't work with the awful telephone line we had - I had to make do with 48k. The proxy service with compression Opera came with was the only way to browse then current websites without waiting for half an hour for a page to load.
When I bought my first touchscreen phone in early 2009, the LG KP500, a Java-based phone with only 2G and no WiFi that pretended it was a smartphone, Opera Mini was the only browser that was usable, again thanks to its proxy service.
Outside of these niche use cases, I never saw a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox. While it was an important innovator in the beginning, for me personally at least, it has always been nothing but an "emergency" browser and ever since it was bought out by a Chinese firm and switched over to Chromium, there was no reason left to use it other than brand attachment.
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