• lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    I knew not to use Opera GX as soon as they started sponsoring youtubers. I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.

    • CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      When I see a product I already use being promoted by YouTubers in sponsored segments, I immediately question if I should be using it, even if I’d have happily continued had I never seen that sponsorship.

      • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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        8 months ago

        Absolutely true. I remember every YouTuber and their mother shilling out for LastPass a few years back. Now that their reputstion is kind of in the dumps after several “noncritical” hacks I see those same YouTubers shilling out for Dashlane.

        It just gets worse if you try to think of any serious sponsorship program by companies that are, to date, trustworthy. There are none because they don’t need them. Word of mouth is good enough for them because the customers they have will stay being customers for a long time. Long enough that they bring in more people just by being happy about the service.

        • Funwayguy@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Same with Express/Nord VPN sponsorships. Many people debunked the adverising BS they were spinning about blocking tracking when really it only masked a tiny subset.

          As someone who studied infosec, those ads were infuriating. Now I just sponsor block it all because I’m beyond tired of it.

          • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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            8 months ago

            Really like Mullvad for that. They don’t pretend a VPN alone makes you invisible for tracking nor do they pretend it makes your browsing much more secure. They don’t do any BS sales either. You get what you pay for and they are very upfront about what you get (mostly ISP block and region lock bypass).

            Haven’t seen a YT sponsorship for them yet either so that’s another plus in my book.

        • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I left LastPass as soon as they started screwing with the free product. Same with Evernote. It’s fine to make a non-free product. But if you make a free product with premium settings you can’t go back and pinch the original user base by taking features away. Those companies *products always fail.

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      Lol, now that I think of it I had never seen a YouTube ad or sponsor where I would say “this is an ethical and fairly priced product without a catch that I would like to buy”…

      • lad@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        I only saw a decent product once, it was Henson razor. Not sure if it’s ethical and fairly priced (those are somewhat hard to tell, imo). If I weren’t using it already, the sponsorship would have deterred from trying 😅

    • akrot@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.

      We’re the minority though.

    • FrostKing@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Agreed. I think (and I’m not sponsored lol) that the only product from YouTube that’s actually good is Harry’s razors

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    8 months ago

    Holy shit.

    I thought this was just going to be a matter of poor security implementation or crappy feature sets.

    Turns out they converted the company into a loan shark operation owned by Chinese ad companies

    when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      This behavior is just beyond batshit. Before anyone decides tl;dr, the article is well worth a read.

      I had a hunch that Opera was circling the drain when I started seeing them sponsor Youtubers. A general rule of thumb is that no company that has anything worth a shit devolves to sponsoring Youtube videos. I had no idea about the predatory loans thing, or the crypto scam chasing thing, or the ripping off ChatGPT thing…

      Back here in reality, there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox. There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.

      • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        And it’s always been Firefox since day one. Out of the ashes of Netscape Navigator rose Firefox and Mozilla have been one of the only bastions of the free and open web ever since. I honestly don’t understand why anyone would use another browser.

          • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Actually it’s an effective cloud-based password manager that doesn’t rely on local storage or weird plugins or backups.

            That’s what keeps me using chrome. I could lose everything in a house fire, pick up any device, log in and have access to all my stuff without any further action on my part, right out of the box.

            That’s the only feature I care about, and chrome is the only browser I’ve seen that provides it.

            Get me that in firefox, and I’ll switch today.

            • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
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              8 months ago

              What are you talking about? Firefox has had literally Sync since before Chrome existed.

              Firefox Sync initial release: December 21, 2007

              Google Chrome intial release: September 2, 2008 (Beta), (1.0) December 11, 2008

              A full year, my guy.

        • Demdaru@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Cuz Firefox was for a long time just some shiiiiiiit. It was overloaded, blocky, seemed outdated etc., so ie wasn’t any worse. When chrome came, whooo.

          Now tho, I am simply still prejudiced against it. And I found Edge suits me ideally so I don’t care for any other browser. Until my adblock stops working, then I’ll run.

      • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        I do not agree with your generalisation of YouTube sponsorships, but with the rest I absolutely agree with.

        Honestly, I read something about Opera being vaguely connected to shady Chinese companies right before I started recommending ppl to switch away from Opera or Opera GX. Glad I stuck to that, looks like my intuition did not fail me.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          You, uh, really feel that the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Nord VPN, Honey by PayPal, Raycons, and HelloFresh are really making a positive contribution to the world that we can’t do without?

          • Syrc@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I mean, what’s the problem with NordVPN? Pretty much every youtuber I respect who does sponsorship promotes it, and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. Generalizing like that is always bad (or well, mostly always, or ironically I would be generalizing).

      • Engywuck@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox.

        Yeah. And everybody should use the same brand of shoes, drive the same model of car, buy at the same store, eat the same food…

        God forbids people having different tastes, opinions and needs.

        There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.

        Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

        • fernandofig@reddthat.com
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

          Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.

          • Engywuck@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here.

            I simply don’t assume that an org/com actually exist which is concerned users’ privacy. Mozilla just follows the money, as any other corp.

            Protecting my privacy is a task I prefer to delegate to mybrain(.org).

      • Skyhighatrist@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Yeah the surprise in this thread is surprising to me. I’ve considered Opera to be untrustworthy for years now.

  • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    Opera invested $30 million in the crypto startup ICST that same year, and the startup’s CEO was arrested four days later for financial crimes.

    LOL

    • agame@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Well, some years ago the crypto startup was all the heat.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Explain why don’t just clickbait me.

    Man its fucking sad what’s become of Opera. They gave us tabbed browsing, CSS, and lots of other stuff and then just like that, they became another uninteresting Chromium fork and its been straight to the shitter since.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Many of the O.G. Opera devs founded Vivaldi after Opera was sold to Chinese investors. It’s Chromium, but it has a considerable number of excellent power user features

      • gnate@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I believe they also have plans to move beyond Chromium, but a new code base isn’t a quick project… (That said, they do eliminate the tracking features and other questionable elements of the code currently.)

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Why is it clickbait? I don’t understand. The article explains the reasons. They don’t fit in the headline.

  • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Hindenburg is an investment firm that researches publicly-traded companies and shorts their stocks if they find sufficient evidence of investor fraud before releasing its report.

    What a wild business plan. I’m amazed it’s legal.

    • PilferJynx@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s kinda scummy to manipulate the market as such, but it’s much more scummy to partake in the fraud.

    • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      Short sellers provide benefit to society by finding and shaming doomed businesses so they fail faster and don’t suck up as many resources.

      They also have a proud history of uncovering outright fraud.

      In business, the people complaining loudest about short sellers are emperors with no clothes.

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I don’t want to touch any Chromium-based browser. Firefox all the way.

  • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo

      • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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        8 months ago

        I’ve been trying out Floorp for a few days now. It’s a great browser but honestly I don’t see that much of a difference compared to regular Firefox. If I had to pick, my favorite feature from Floorp would be the fact that it packages changes that would normally reuuire fiddling with userChrome.css into simple toggles in about:preferences. I especially like how it makes hiding the horizontal tab bar so easy when I use Tree Style Tabs. That being said, I have fully switched over anyways.

        • Alex@feddit.ro
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          8 months ago

          There isn’t on “killer feature”. It’s all of the little nice things that make me want to use it

              • pathief@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                I want the latest version of my browser tho, I don’t want the “stable” version from 6 months ago. Never had a stability problem with Firefox to warrant the wait.

                • Alex@feddit.ro
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                  8 months ago

                  I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything by using it instead of the latest firefox

  • viking@infosec.pub
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    8 months ago

    Opera was effectively the first software I bought, back when they had a trial version in 2001. They had tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, a solid DECADE before they came to any other browser. Lightyears ahead of the competition and worth every penny. I think in 2003 they made it free, and I wasn’t even mad.

    I was forced to switch to Firefox at some point when a website I had to use for work was incompatible due to some Java applet that wouldn’t load properly, and then slowly migrated over.

    Shame to see what happened to this amazing piece of tech.

    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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      8 months ago

      It’s really tough to run a business when your competitors are all free as in freedom (Firefox) or free as in funded by monopolistic megacorps (Google, Apple, Microsoft).

    • erwan@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      To be fair, Opera in the 2000’s was craming every single feature they could think about in their browser.

      So sure, they got some interesting features before the others but they also had hundreds of useless features cluttering the UI.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        But it was still fast and didn’t gobble up RAM so much (well other than memory leaks, but none of the competitors were free of those either and IE crashing would also crash the desktop because it was the same instance of the same app for some reason).

      • viking@infosec.pub
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        8 months ago

        You bought the ad-free version, they had a small banner on top. And of course there were key generators and such, back in the days there wasn’t any online key validation. Or you could kill the banner with a local proxy. Still, I actually wanted to support the development, just like I donate to good FOSS software now, or buy android apps to remove ads although I’m already killing them all with adaway on a rooted phone.

        Sure, there were free browsers out there, but back then Opera was really way ahead of the bell curve.

  • fixerdude2@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I stopped using Opera when the CCP bought up the company a few years ago.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      I stopped using Opera when they dropped their actual product in favor of yet another Chromium-based something.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, that was a depressing discovery. I didn’t see any news about it but one day randomly wondered how opera could afford to develop a free browser that wasn’t FOSS. Digging into it was surprising. Not quite John McAfee surprising, but still sketchy. Like they were in the predatory banking industry and then there were the ties to China. It wasn’t hard to see that it was time to check out Firefox again.

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I loved Opera’s own engine. It was snappy and memory efficient. But their developers, at least back then, were very toxic. I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products and they all collectively went on vacation saying it’s a non-issue, instead of delaying the release. Any mention of this on forums guaranteed you a permanent ban.

    They only have themselves to blame for user migration and all this controversy.

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Opera added a user agent header “selector” pretty early so it would tell the webpage it was chrome/IE/Firefox. It was important for compatibility for a lot of websites. I’d trust that listing less for them much less than I would for the bigger/default browsers.

        The migration from their own codebase to chromium in 2012/2013 was…rough. They were the first browser to have cross-device synch and you couldn’t import bookmarks for a long time, much less RSS feeds/everything else people used Opera for. Their original userbase took a sizeable hit.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yes, but as a user, there was always a broken webpage somewhere or some API it didn’t support.

          When they switched to blink, I immediately got Firefox and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a browser that cares about my privacy, my choice to use an ad blocker, etc.

      • wikibot@lemmy.worldB
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        8 months ago

        Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

        The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.

        to opt out, pm me ‘optout’. article | about

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products

      I remember that it was Google which intentionally made their sites non-functional with Opera. And that changing user agent alone was sufficient to make them work. I may be mistaken, of course.

      EDIT: But yes, their developers were like that.

  • fne8w2ah@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Vivaldi Browser is headed by some of the original founders of Opera ASA and is a reasonably good alternative to Google Chrome, MS Edge, Safari and new Opera itself.

    Alternatively, use Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox/Waterfox/Iceraven.

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    They did some awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn’t think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.

    • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      And despite being designed to run on potatoes with a 2G connection it somehow felt just as smooth as modern mobile browsers (at least as I remember it). It’s crazy how well it worked considering the hardware and network limitations of the time.

      • Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip
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        8 months ago

        Didn’t opera cache images on their server and feed you a lower res version instead of what the website had? Granted with the limited bandwidth available back then, that was fine but now I don’t think many people would want that.

        • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.

        • privatizetwiddle@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn’t do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        I remember an ex-girlfriend daily driving it on her phone for all kinds of communications, so maybe this is why she preferred it, I never wondered why, I was very happy with my Linux machine and I barely used my mobile phone at those times anyway.

      • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Amazing piece of software. Reliable on the server side, agile and full of features on the mobile side. And they even made sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook could be used in the browser. What a pity the Opera branding ended like this.