good

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.

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.

Switched to Vivaldi last year and haven’t looked back. Did some side by side with FireFox for a month or two on my phone. I have a cheap 2022 Moto G something or other, running whatever Android it shipped with.

I guess that like a lot of people, I don’t like having apps tracking stuff, but my work requires me to have access to Facebook, Insta, Threads, and the like… so, I just use browser shortcut widgets for them instead (I should quit my job, I know, I know… working on it). Both Firefox and Vivaldi immediately figured out that I wanted to run them in containers so that was great. However, Vivaldi runs all of them so smooth where as Firefox just kind of stumbles around. Some of them would refuse to work some days, just bringing up the web browser container and then crash. Facebook dot com was the worst… there were issues with the UI not showing me the text input bubbles and latency with button presses was terrible… like needing a refresh to show a “like” or even that a notification was read. It was almost unusable. Bizarrely, Outlook was also bad on FireFox… like that’s a fairly bog standard email client and “productivity” site, but on FireFox it would crash more than it worked. Vivaldi handles all of the sites/platforms I need like I’m running the apps.

Maybe it’s something with my cheap ass phone and Motorola’s bloatware, but Firefox crashed and burned more than it worked. I cannot recommend Vivaldi enough.

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”

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.

Been saying this for ages

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.

Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.

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.

Why?

In other news: stop using Netscape

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.

PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.

It’s quite nice and I use it daily.