I’ve been using Opera for a few years now and I’ve been enjoying its features, UI and everything. However, I (surprisingly to me) haven’t noticed many people mentioning it. Also, when I was on Reddit and mentioned that I use it I got downvoted which left me somewhat confused haha.
So I’m wondering if there’s anything wrong with it and/or if I should give another browser a go (I noticed Firefox is mentioned a lot on here)
Opera is just chromium with extra spyware and shit. Firefox is mentioned a lot because it is foss, and my favorite browser for that matter.
Sadly this is the truth these days, opera certainly has had it moments in the sun in the past (especially on lower spec devices) but I would personally stare clear these days
Firefox is really the only true alternative
Small shout-out to edge browser’s built in pdf editing functions though, this is really handy on PC at times
And Edge’s built-in vertical tabs. They’re so clean and neat and the groups are colored and feel good to use while with most other browsers, vertical tabs feel like a hack, like you’re going against the browser’s intended usage. A year ago you’d have a hard time convincing me to use any Microsoft products but after using Edge at work for a while, I switched away from Firefox on my personal machines as well.
It was the best, most full-featured browser until it (effectively) died after Opera 12 in 2013, now it’s just a Chrome skin.
Use Firefox, it’s not just (in my opinion) the best browser now but it helps protect against a Google monopoly on web standards.
Please don’t use Opera (or any other proprietary browser). It contains a lot of on-by-default spyware and it’s hard or impossible to disable everything.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil13/ (post in German, but you can see what the browser transmits. It’s a lot. Including the domains of all sites you visit). The best way to increase your privacy with Opera is to uninstall it. Apparently, this is how they make their money nowadays. They used to sell their browser, but it’s free since a while. So users pay with their data.
Also, try not to use Chromium based browsers (not even if they are purely open source, based on the open source Chromium base). Its development is very much steered by Google and their interests and you can see the effects e.g. with their Manifest v3 which cripples ad blocking extensions, for example.
Please try and use non chromium based browser.
I used Opera back in the day, but I don’t trust the new development anymore.
I’d recommend using Firefox instead.
Back when they still had their own browser engine it was the greatest browser at the time. HTML5 was rolling in hard and Opera was always the first one to implement these new features. It was also faster than any other browser, had customizable UI (with full MDI instead of just tabs), builtin E-mail client and good tools for Web developers.
But as an open source person using it always felt a little bit wrong, because of it’s closed source nature. Now that it’s just an alternative UI for Chrome and owned by some shady Chinese company I wouldn’t touch the damn thing with thousand foot pole.
Opera sold out to China years ago, stop using it ASAP. I you wanna stay in chromium use the original devs new thing, Vivaldi.
I was a Netscape and Opera girl back in the day. I haven’t used it since my uni days but I used to love it. I think it’s owned by some pretty shady companies these days though :(
Opera 12 was my main browser until it died and was replaced by a completely unrelated and terrible browser called Opera 2013. Opera 12’s spiritual successor is Vivaldi, and that’s what I still use now.
Vivaldi is the only browser that has all of the UI features that I want… No amount of extensions and customization of Chrome, Edge, or Firefox has been able to come anywhere close to matching it.
I recently switched from Vivaldi to Firefox. They’re both good. I think I may slightly prefer Firefox though Vivaldi has some really cool features I haven’t seen in another browser, but they weren’t useful to me an do never really touched them.
It has been awesome until 2013 when they decided to make their browser a skin on top of Chromium. Now they had more UI revamps and it doesn’t work or feel like Opera at all. I tried using it sometimes ago and now they even got those weird huge buttons…
Questionable that you can’t change the search engine to a custom one out of “concerns”
It’s owned by the Chinese government
i stopped using it after learning that it was chinese owned. back to firefox.
Years ago, Opera has been my main browser and I really liked it. Back then, it was the only browser (to my knowledge) that had tabs. It was a novelty back then. Over the time they added more features, like the conversion tool. Then they added more features I didn’t need or want, like the side bar, and it quickly became bloated. I switched to firefox, which offered a greater variety of add-ons. I still use firefox as my main browser. The only thing I miss is the conversion tool. There is nothing comparable like the one Opera has built in. I later learned that the original developers sold it to a chinese consortium. In hindsight, that explains the constant changes to the worse, which pushed me to another browser.
Questionable that you can’t change the search engine to a custom one out of “privacy” concerns