- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
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.
It’s kinda scummy to manipulate the market as such, but it’s much more scummy to partake in the fraud.
They’re like the anti-hero of this story.
Hilarious name too, honestly.
The Crash n’ Burn Bois
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.
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.
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.
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).
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”
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!
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.
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:-(.
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
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).
😅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.
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.
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?
Open the link…
No I won’t open the link, clickbaiting makes me scroll away rather than clicking
My man 👍
Bonafide Opera GX users are here!
In other news: stop using Netscape
Opera is still used by 2.86% of the world, while Netscape probably has less than 100 users.
Wait, is it really just 3%? A lot of people I know use Opera, especially the “Gamer Edition”, more than even default Chrome. I have the same thing with Firefox, where there’s a way higher density in people I know using it than its overall market share, but that bias is to be expected. I’m surprised that it’s a similar case with Opera.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Fear of change and effective marketing. Those are the only reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.
It’s quite nice and I use it daily.
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.
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.
It’s just another flavour of Chromium though isn’t it?
Yeah
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
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.
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!
Huge fan of Vivaldi for both pc and mobile!
Isn’t Vivaldi also shady?