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.
The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it’s basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don’t know the new owners, so I don’t trust them with my browsing data!
The original devs of Opera went to make Vivaldi, which is a yet another Chromium based browser.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it’s just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.
Brave is littered with crypto and replaces other ad networks with their own (which does tracking basically exclusively for them).
Steer clear, it’s a trap.
Tor browser for mostly anonymous browsing, Mullvad browser as default non-Tor browser (it’s basically an open source Firefox fork made by Mullvad and the Tor team), but I also still have a regular Firefox configured with Arkenfox’ user.js and some important extensions, as well as a Chromium with zero protections except uBlock Origin. I switch between those browsers depending on use case. Each browser has a different theme to make them easily distinguishable from each other, the “insecure” browsers which I only use for rare exceptions (websites misbehaving in any other browser) have a red-like color. All browsers are being run sandboxed.
On mobile: Tor browser, Bromite and Vanadium.
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 try and use non chromium based browser.
I loved Opera 20 years ago when the built in RSS reader, email client, mouse gestures and unique rendering engine that was either faster than the others or completely incompatible with websites. Now I don’t give it much thought, all the chromium browsers feel the same.
I loved their speed dial when that came. Just having a home page with a grid of your favorite websites was so innovative at the time.
I remember the mouse gestures, they were a really neat feature. I don’t think any other browser has had anything close to it since then.
There are extensions for Chromium browser’s that do the same thing now :) I use it at work because my mouse doesn’t have buttons for navigating back and forward, it’s great.
There’s also a Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/
