- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Been saying this for ages
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It’s quite nice and I use it daily.
It’s a rebranded chromium with some extra bloat. Just like his older brother Chinese Chromium, Opera, and their edgy cousin, Microsoft Chromium. All following the example of Papa Chrome.
Don’t forget about their outdated-hIpster friend, Brave Chromium.
Acting like all these forks are just chrome is really disingenuous and isn’t helping the conversation at all.
Vivaldi has the best tab management ever.
That’s what I thought until I installed Firefox with Sidebery and oh man, that’s another level. It required quite a bit of configuration make it really fit my needs, but when you configure it, it’s incredible.
Thanks for telling me about sidebery!
Yep. I daily drive Vivaldi on both macOS and Android.
I love it. The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there. The theme is highly customizable; I have mine set to something similar to the Opera dark theme.
I don’t use the email or calendar features. The great thing about Vivaldi is that they provide a ton of power user features, but don’t shove it in your face. It’s super easy to turn off the things you don’t want and to turn on the things you do want.
I do use UBO, but they also have a builtin ad blocker if you want to use that instead.
The settings page is very extensive. Tons of customization. True to the Opera legacy!
The sidebar is a great feature; I stash my extension icons there.
That’s amazing, I didn’t know you could do that. I’ve been using Vivaldi since the alpha days and I had no clue you could drag the extensions there.
I keep revisiting Vivaldi once every few months, and get reminded of why I uninstall it within minutes. They remove the option of changing DNS servers from the configuration UI and moved it into flags. I have absolutely no idea why they do that, and its a philosophy I vehemently disagree with.
Huge fan of Vivaldi for both pc and mobile!
Isn’t Vivaldi also shady?
Maybe a tiny bit unstable and proprietary, but I don’t think they have had any controversies or shady action.
I loved some of the functionality Vivaldi adds (split tabs, tab groups, etc) but I couldn’t take the instability that came with it. That thing crashed more times in the 6 months I used it than Firefox or Chrome ever have for me total I swear to god.
I use Vivaldi on macOS and Android.
I’ve never had stability issues.
It’s just another flavour of Chromium though isn’t it?
Much more UI customization and a shitton of power user stuff too
Still chromium, no thanks.
Fair, site compatibility is needed for my work so I unfortunately must use chromium
Quit the job, work in Firefox only environments, send the message /s
Yeah
Vivaldi has been a better option for those who love the feel of Opera. But Firefox is an overall better package imo
Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.
Mozilla has bad resource management, that’s a fact.
However turning into a loan shark app business? I really don’t think so. Unless another browser enters the market and takes off (which is extremely difficult given the tons of features browsers are built to support for all sorts of websites) Mozilla never has to worry that much about money since Google is their top funder; and Google’s main reason to fund them is to not deal with all sorts of legal issues and fines they’ll recieve for creating a monopoly.
Oh come now. Who would have predicted Opera would have ended up like this? Even with hindsight this dark path is hard to predict bit the overall trend is not.
Mozilla has created something of value and it has amassed a growing audience. If you are willing to invest in your confidence, I would happily short you in 10years or less, it’s nearly ripe for corruption and not at all immune from something similar to what has become of Opera. Trusting that Google will doing anything consistent is another lesson in ignoring trends.
Can you name any other non profits, around for as long as mozilla, and as large as mozilla, that have become “something similar” to a Chinese malware producer?
Besides opera? Its a decent case example. openai started as nonprofit. You think they have your best interest in mind right now?
Is openai similar to a Chinese malware producer?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it’s time to jump ship.
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/
It does keep getting better and better (while Chrome gets shittier and shittier).
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
😅Love the optimism here! And Firefox fanboyism here! I’m a FF user too, but if you think FF is immune to going down shitty paths in the future like almost all well-intentioned tech products eventually do, there is antifreeze in your kool-aid, and I’m afraid you’ve gone blind.
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.
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).
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.
Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it’s spyware.
Stop using Chromium.
I tried Opera years before, but the UI wasn’t my cup of tea at the time. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me; but, when, I tried it ones again a year or two ago it was much more, like it was honestly and objectively bad.
Which is sad because regarding of my tastes and needs it was a good browser
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.
Done
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”
What is Firefox lacking for you to love it?
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.
I had an @operamail email account for years, I was all in!
Vivaldi, the best alternative to Opera from the same old people who originally created Opera. I use it as a backup browser to Firefox and it’s been great
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 - 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.
