The main driver for innovation and growth of the open web was that it is open. The diversity we got from that was tremendous. Anyone could make a website with whatever content they could think of and people all over the world could access it. There was some kind of "web neutrality" in browsers. They didn't prefer one site over the other. The second big boost came from extendability and customizability of browsers through extensions which gave people even more control over what they would consume. And on top of that, the browers became open source, a big win all around.
Opera is going the other way. They have a closed source browser that directly integrates some specific products into the browser. You can't completely get rid of them, you can't integrate another product in the same way and I'd guess an extension can't mess with these pre-packaged addons. It's nice that you can have a messenger in a sidebar next to your current browsing page. But it's taking control away from users and that's not the way forward in an open web. Why can't this be an extension? Why can't it have a feature that lets me run two tabs side by side so I can choose what products to use there?
In general I think this Opera Reborn is still far behind say Firefox or the official Chrome. Just now you can change the filter lists in their Adblocker something that adblocking extensions could do for years. Now you can change Operas theme, i could make Firefox look like whatever I wanted forever. For all the love that the old Opera deserved, I don't think Opera is the future of web browsing.
Vivaldi is a pretty good replacement for old Opera. Its based on the latest chromium (updated within a day or so of downstream updates), and has a lot of the "power user" features Opera had.
I've been using Opera Beta for about a year now but with Vivaldi adding some more of the core features that were missing in earlier releases (bookmarks), it's probably worth another look.
I tried Vivaldi recently and found it unusable. Much slower than other Chromes (Chrome, Opera), and the "open new tabs adjacent to current" functionality is buggy (something causes the tabs to open in an unrelated location).
You can, just right click and remove the icon from the sidebar. They are literally just glorified links to websites (e.g. if you click the messenger icon on the sidebar, it's literally just loading messenger.com as a web panel).
I personally prefer a browser full of built-in functionality, such as the old O12, rather than relying on extensions. Extensions add friction to browser updates and run into compatibility problems sooner or later.
>desktops and laptops, while theoretically more powerful multitasking tools, have been left behind
>Browsing and chatting simultaneously is cumbersome and inefficient now, as you need to switch between tabs when responding to a message
Or, since we all have widescreen monitors (and often multiple monitors) you could just have your messengers in a window next to the browser instead of a sidebar within the browser. Seems like a solution looking for a problem. What good is allowing messengers to reside within your browser other than that it lets the people who are tracking your browsing habits simultaneously spy on your messages?
> Or, since we all have widescreen monitors (and often multiple monitors) you could just have your messengers in a window next to the browser instead of a sidebar within the browser.
Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks, and solution like this is barely usable (hard to keep the windows properly aligned, hard to have them simultaneously on the foreground when other windows come into the mix, etc. etd.).
I agree that solutions like that shouldn't be in browsers. But it's cheaper this way for the app vendors...
> Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks, and solution like this is barely usable...
It's like everyone's forgotten what makes desktops great. There are tons [1][2][3][4] of tools you can install today that solve this problem for you. No need to wait for browser vendors to integrate everything.
WinSplit Revolution can be configured to have shortcuts to place your windows in any position you want. Out-the-box it has numpad shortcuts for a 2x2 or 3x3 grid and you can add as many as you want it the keys will cycle through them.
You have to download it from cnet because it's not maintained any more and the original website redirects to a paid-for alternative, but it still works for me with Windows 7.
> what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.
We used to have this. There were multiple clients that could do this (including Pidgin, an open source one). Then some major players entered using or shifted to proprietary and harder to decipher protocols, and others responded by doing the same lest they be at a disadvantage. Now it's just as bad as it was two decades ago.
And no, just because on mobile those messengers are all "apps" doesn't make it any more bearable. In fact, switching between messaging apps all the time is simply annoying.
As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app.
Since you're on macOS, that would have been the built-in iChat app that could do Jabber, AIM, Yahoo!, and some other protocols I've forgotten. It might still work in modern day Messages, dunno, pretty much no one uses them anymore so I can't check.
> "As for messengers, what would be revolutionary is if you could actually use all these fragmented messengers in a single app."
http://meetfranz.com/ does this in a maybe user-friendlier way than Pidgin (at the cost of a more shallow "integration" due to most of the supported services being non-standard, basically you're running all the clients in one place). It doesn't "remember which of the messaging apps each of my friends prefers, and routes messages appropriately" as requested below by marcus_holmes, but maybe it can start scratching your itch.
That is, until they go back to using similar and open protocols, we won't see this again. That's the sad part, there was a concerted push away from this by quite a few of the major players (either initially, or in response to others, or for technical reasons, or a combination thereof). :/
> Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks
Isn't the solution to that to not use systems with poor usability? Linux exists; it's capable of doing everything many (maybe most?) people need — why not just use the superior system?
None of your windows have to be big enough for alignment to be a problem. Even on my small netbook I can fit three 80 column windows of text next to each other easily.
At this point your browser is your OS(with Blink as the kernel, Chrome(ium) as the init/package manager and Opera as the DE), so something like this does makes sense. I just wish that web developers would realise how terrible of an idea this trend is.
> Or, since we all have widescreen monitors (and often multiple monitors) you could just have your messengers in a window next to the browser instead of a sidebar within the browser.
And have all links from external app open in a window depending on which was the last one you've used, and having to open links from chat and then drag them to the main browser window. No thanks.
>What good is allowing messengers to reside within your browser other than that it lets the people who are tracking your browsing habits simultaneously spy on your messages?
I highly doubt third parties have access to the messenger tab.
It's a neat addition that works well for people who browse in one fullscreenized window.
I'd like to try, but I'd probably not end up using it because it's not open source. I feel silly for rejecting a product based on that, but openness is important to me. Here's for hoping they open source it soon!
Same for me. Some of the changes Opera have been making are interesting, and they do seem to be doing more with the UI than Firefox and Chrome, who are removing as much UI as possible. But the social messenger stuff doesn't interest me, and having stuff like Facebook hard wired into a browser without having the source to know what it's actually sending to them really puts me off. I know Chromium is open source, but the interesting bits are in the stuff they've added on top, which is not.
My reasoning for not using it is largely the same. Especially when there are plenty of high-quality open source browsers, including two major ones (Chromium and Firefox). I'm not willing to switch to a proprietary browser just because it's a bit shinier.
This reminds me of an interesting thing that happened when I uninstalled Opera VPN on my Android.
After uninstalling it automatically opened up a browser to one of those "Tell us why you uninstalled" pages that you normally see on the desktop, this shouldn't be possible on Android.
I think they are doing this by having Opera Browser watch for uninstallation of Opera VPN and possibly vice-versa and when one detects the other has been uninstalled it launches the page, clever but annoying.
Um, before going down the conspiracy theory road, maybe do a simple google search? This is literally the top result for "android app on uninstall": http://stackoverflow.com/a/18816716/4944625
I think what they are describing there runs before the uninstall does it not? Pretty sure mine was after the uninstall completed, which is not possible since the app is already gone by that point.
There are actually networks of unrelated apps that listen for uninstalls. I was contacted by a company wanting to add their SDK to my apps, partly for this purpose. Uninstall activity is just another thing being monitored.
So that's why there are 999 versions of 'flashlight' app. Not because everyone wanted to develop it, but because we now have the equivalent of pre-packaged bloatware/malware for the desktop, now for the phone.
Thanks for chiming in. I didn't know this kind of company or business model existed, so now I will be more wary about installing seemingly benign apps. (I am not an app developer).
I was surprised myself. So much bloat and spying. I saved one of the emails I received:
Subject: Monetize Your Daily App Uninstalls!
Hi Developer,
My name is Kathy Lee, Director of Business Development at [redacted], and I wanted to introduce to you our new (100% Google Compliant) revenue-generating tool that lets you monetize your app uninstalls. If you are currently earning with In-app ads, why not monetize when users uninstall your app? We are the only network that can help you instantly earn $$$ when your users uninstall your app.
The [redacted] SDK, with one line of code, lets you earn the highest eCPM with today’s top global offers. When you sign up and integrate today, we’ll deposit $50.00 FREE into your account!
To get started and claim your FREE $50.00, sign up for your free account.
If you are interested in learning more about app uninstall revenue or have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via email or Skype.
I look forward to you working with you.
Kindest Regards, Kathy
Kathy Lee Director of Business Development Skype: kathy
Mobile: 646-
I know that launchers normally detect when the package was installed/uninstalled. That's how they refresh the list of app icons. And launcher is just a regular app with no special permissions. I think some kind of an intent is broadcasted when the list of apps is changed.
They were probably using the Opera browser to check for the OperaVPN uninstall [1]. This may actually be possible in the app itself as I believe the intent fires before the app is actually uninstalled giving you time to do one last action (fire up a uninstall questionnaire).
Hey opera folks who might be reading this - work on simplifying offline access to web content. I want to be able to maintain ~100 GB of offline data store, full text searchable. Wikipedia, stackexchange\stackoverflow, khan academy, zealdocs and whole bunch of other sources of useful browser renderable web content provide dumps of their data.
And then they end up having to build spl apps and extensions and other garbage that work around and hack cross domain/local file policy, just so the content already on my disk can be read and searched by the browser.
When such a treasure trove of web content is accessible offline the browser can and should be the way to access it.
As the web becomes more and more a corporate sponsored attention sink strong offline support can be a valuable browser feature.
There was a time when Opera was not a google chrome skin and offered indexed full page search of local cache of visited page. This was incredibly useful and practical. It also had the option to save the whole web page in a single file.
Sadly this kind of feature disappeared when opera moved to a quarterly profit based strategy.
The kind of feature you want is achievable today but requires a set of tools beyond a web browser and some human work. It's also a bit tedious to maintain up to date.
Whilst I don't know many people who would be in your situation I do think that an offline, indexed data store could be very useful. Bookmarks even to this day are dreadfully implemented on all of the major browsers.
Bookmarks are obsolete and badly implemented for decades now.
Bookmarks are subject to link rot, having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage, bookmarks are useless when you are offline,... the list goes on and on and I have yet to see any browser even try to do something to address these.
These are UI complaints that can be addressed with a bit of investment and thought, but it's unfashionable work - Mozilla even tried to outsource it to Pocket, sorta...
> Bookmarks are subject to link rot
That can be fixed pretty easily: when the user bookmarks, submit a job to the Internet Archive, then use it whenever you get an error page from that link. FF already does half of it with the experimental no-404 extension. Alternatively, you can have your own InternetArchive-like service to do that, which is basically what services like Pocket and Pinboard do.
> having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage
You don't really have to manage them - these days they show up as soon as you type in the address bar. Ideally you'd have some sort of AI-powered categorisation system auto-filing them in dedicated folders, which could probably work with a bit of specialized meta tags. It's basically the age-old problem with filing documents of any type.
> bookmarks are useless when you are offline
Yeah well, a browser is also kinda useless when offline...
http://zestdocs.org/ is my old project I've abandoned with similar idea. If anyone feels like continuing/rewriting, or perhaps even taking over the domain, GitHub organization, macOS app, or whatever really, you can email me via hn at the website's domain. (Note that I've set up the MX records there only a few minutes ago, so it may take some retries to be able to reach this email.)
Kiwix does. But you have to download the dump and run a couple scripts to convert the XML to kiwix archive format (ZIM). They have a repo on github with the scripts. But Kiwix is built on top of xulrunner which is basically Firefox but not supported by Mozilla anymore. And that goes back to my original post why not just bake the offline functionality into the browser.
> Social messengers completely changed our lives, by allowing us to work, discover new things and communicate at the same time.
Nope.
> One of its novelties is the ability to seamlessly hop between discovering new content and chatting with friends, or even share online discoveries while browsing.
Happily I know no one that uses, or will use, this new version of Opera - I can imagine few things that would disrupt, annoy, and / or reduce my efficiency (or enjoyment) at my computer than being subject to even more random thoughts from the easily distracted.
> > Social messengers completely changed our lives, by allowing us to work, discover new things and communicate at the same time.
> Nope.
Considering how much HN loves Slack (especially when paired with working remotely), I think you and I are in the minority. Some people can chat and work at the same time, apparently.
There's a world of a difference between planned "distractions" (mental breaks) and random interruptions: HN even provides a handy no-procrastination timer.
I don't dare to use this since Opera got bought by that Chinese consortium of companies I'm not accustomed with. Not sure if I'm overly cautious? I'm thinking of especially Opera Link (which had a recent security breach to boot!). Wouldn't that leave out my passwords to China? And I do want to use some sort of syncing, I'd go crazy without anything there or some iffy third party addon.
It's not even just about a trust issue with Chinese company culture. It's that the Chinese government have ways of getting into even resisting companies at their whim that are judged alright in completely different ways than in Norwegian law. So; even if I trusted Opera Software, even if I trusted this consortium that I don't know, even then...?
This kind of reasoning also applies to facebook, any alphabet or google product/service, apple, uber, airbnb, and pretty much any company/service that's based in the US where the patriot act pretty much makes all these companies open bar for the US government.
Except that if you're an American, chances of Chinese government being able to affect you are tiny. Chances of NSA/Homeland Security/FBI tagging you as a "suspicious person - potential terrorist" and making your travel a living hell due to your Chrome history is significantly higher.
There's also this recent piece [1], which was lost behind the Medium paywall until republished (apparently just today?) on urbit.org. It's a very solid introduction to the platform, its intent, and the reasoning which underlies it, and it's refreshingly free of jargon. If you're looking for something to whet your curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend it.
I'm confused. Is "the engine you use to access a large variety of websites" Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway). If it's Google, Chrome is no better, and Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway.
More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
> Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway)
True, if I used Google, or their products.
But, I use Mozilla, who are publicly auditable, and an email provider that is not located in the US.
The majority of visits to websites have no search engine interaction, but those that do, make use of DuckDuckGo and the like.
> More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
Bringing up the US here, isn't entirely relevant. We're speaking about China, who have demonstrated some interesting ethics around people who are non-Chinese over the past few decades. Yes, the US is of concern, but that doesn't mean that China isn't one.
Secondly, your browser doesn't just have your history. It also has your authentication attempts, because it makes them. It also controls what certificates you use, and can trivially be used to MITM every authentication you make, unless pinning or other not-well-adopted practices are used. Which can give them everything.
... and even pinning won't save you unless you use a tool to monitor your connections and confirm you actually are using the cert your browser is saying you're using.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible to build such a tool.
I'd say they attempt to track you by having various mechanisms to do so. This distinction is important as to no make this tracking appears imevitable.
you can take measures to prevent them from tracking you, a simple and quite effective one is to disable scripting and use a properly set up blocker such as ublock origin.
The EULA does specifically say that the contract is based on Norweigan law, for what it's worth:
> 12. THIS CONTRACT IS BASED ON NORWEGIAN LAW. This EULA will be governed by the laws of Norway without giving effect to any conflicts of law principles that may require the application of the laws of a different country.
Other potentially interesting terms -- "components" from "third parties" may be delivered along with Opera. Operate claims they're not responsible for that software, despite making the choice to deliver it to you:
> 5. COMPONENTS FROM THIRD PARTIES MAY BE DELIVERED ALONG WITH THE SOFTWARE. The Software is delivered along with certain software components provide by third parties (“Third Party Software”). Opera shall not be responsible for any such Third-Party Software.
Opera may come with "additional services", including one that routes your browser traffic through an Opera proxy:
> 6. THE SOFTWARE MAY INCLUDE ADDITIONAL OPERA SERVICES. Various additional Opera services may be offered where available via or as integrated into the Software (“Services”). These Services may include one or more of the following:
> ii. Compression: The Software includes compression functionality to enable users to boost the download of web content such as webpages and/or videos. This functionality requests web content through Opera’s proxy or compression servers. Your browsing experience may change due to increased loading speeds.
This last clause seems to allow Opera to route your web traffic through their servers, where they presumably have the technical ability to examine, record, and modify it. It's not clear to me if the EULA places any restrictions on how they may interact with this traffic, to record it, examine it, etc.
Others of these "additional services" are described as "optional", whereas the compression service is not:
> v. Contextual Hints: The Software may include “Browser Assistant”, a component that provides contextual hints about certain Opera browser features and other useful information which you might be interested in. Browser Assistant is an optional component of the Software.
Though, to be fair: the third-party reference may be referring to open source software (but doesn't appear limited to that); and Opera's compression service is similar to features offered by other browsers like Google Chrome.
The company bought opera is the one with a bad reputation in the field of user privacy. Qihoo is the one which provides a software_you_dont_need installation gateway which covered by a free anti-virus mask. LOL
>It's that the Chinese government have ways of getting into even resisting companies at their whim that are judged alright in completely different ways than in Norwegian law.
No, it is not pointless. Don't recall ever seeing the top-voted comment in a Google / Facebook product related post that a person will not use it because of US government surveillance. If the perception is that both governments are bad were true, then we would seeing much more of them. Someone has also (correctly) pointed out in the same thread that being tracked by the US government is significantly higher risk than the Chinese.
Let's say, worst-case scenario and this consortium of companies is heavily linked to the Chinese govt. So what? Why would a foreign govt care about me, a citizen in a Western country? For what purpose (other than to maybe sell me stuff)?
It's for this reason I have considered using a Chinese/Russian email service rather than Gmail, at least there is a chance they won't cooperate with the local authorities if they ever want to clamp down on my ass for some reaosn.
Do you own a business? Perhaps have some closed source software product? Many state actors would happily lift it from your inbox and pass it to some local startups.
I think most people who either own or work at businesses hopefully would be smart/careful enough to not take this risk (for business purposes I personally would only use open-source software whenever possible, and at least try and encrypt sensitive emails or just use something with E2E like Whatsapp), but people using internet/email for non-commercial purposes (i.e. the majority of users) would probably not care what state actors did.
Might be a bit far-fetched, but an organisation that wanted Chinese companies to ultimately succeed might take and use information you are privy to at a medium to large, competing American (for example) company.
Funny for this to happen on the same week I switched my default browser from Firefox to Vivaldi [1]. That is really "Opera reborn", since it's built and owned by the original team of Opera developers - which is probably why it's so good.
If I can have it as a sidebar to the web browser, this actually solves multiple problems, biggest of which is screens themselves.
Someone, somewhen, had that bright idea of popularizing 16:9 and 16:10 screens, which are now de-facto standard, and that leads to huge amounts of screen estate being wasted. Most of the users (i.e. those not using tiling window managers on Linux systems) don't have proper tools to manage screen space, and especially web browsers when maximized waste most of it.
So TLDR; yeah, I could use a messenger tab side by side with rest of the browser tabs, because I have a shit ton of useless screen space with a maximized browser window.
There's nothing stopping you having a messenger window and a browser window open side by side. You don't have to combine disparate applications into a single application just to show them both on the screen at once.
True, if your WM doesn't suck, which rules out Windows and MacOS (ok, for the former someone wrote a tiling WM overlay in... AutoHotkey). Otherwise it's annoying hassle to keep the windows properly sized and displayed.
Divvy also works on Windows. So this covers the former as well. Plus there are other options [1].
The fact that this keeps coming up makes me think that people have forgotten how customizable the desktop experience can be. Unlike iOS/Android you're not tied down to what the app designer thought a good layout is when organizing your windows.
Things must have changed over the years. I remember that back in times of 2003 and XP, the windowing experience wasn't really that customizable; people were trying to replace explorer.exe with custom "shells", but those were always buggy and easily crashed. I guess I gave up on the whole space after that.
Windows has some tiling features built-in these days (enough to tile a messenger side-by-side with a browser). Winkey+Left/Right (or do a web search for "snap assistant").
I have exactly this setup. My left monitor is portrait, showing my 109 lines of code at a time, 119 characters on a line. If I ever have to deal with longer lines a keyboard shortcut moves the terminal window to the landscape monitor and VIM automatically resizes the content.
Is it? When I've tried that, I've found it impossible to do without placing some, perhaps most, of the panel above my eyeline, which is a recipe for neck pain.
I'm not going to disagree with your point in principle, but pragmatically that is how a lot of people are already using messenger apps. Whether it's having Facebook open in the browser and using FB Messenger, or Electron apps like Slack that have a full instance of Chrome running just for a messenger app.
People use Facebook in the browser because Facebook is a website that happened to have a messenger bolted on.
Electron apps aren't relevant – I'm talking about the user experience, not the underlying technology. As far as the user is concerned, Slack is a standalone application.
> People use Facebook in the browser because Facebook is a website that happened to have a messenger bolted on.
The point isn't why they use a browser. The point is that they do use a browser. So if they're doing it already then the idea of proper IM integration along a side panel is potentially a favourable one for a great many people.
> Electron apps aren't relevant – I'm talking about the user experience, not the underlying technology. As far as the user is concerned, Slack is a standalone application.
I know it's a standalone application but the relevance is down to the performance improvements you'd gain from integrating that into Opera (and thus sharing resources) rather than spinning up a new instance of Blink for each "application". The idea of that is quite appealing to me though sadly it looks like Slack support isn't available yet.
> The point isn't why they use a browser. The point is that they do use a browser.
If you ask somebody why they are using Facebook in their browser, they'll tell you that it's because that's how you use Facebook Messenger. They won't tell you that it's because they want to message and surf the web at the same time. In fact it's terrible for this – Messenger is stuck on the Facebook site, so if you navigate away, it's either hidden away in a separate tab or gone altogether.
People quite clearly don't use Facebook Messenger in a browser because they want to surf and message at the same time, which is quite clearly relevant to the questions of "why would I want this?" and "what value does this have as a product?".
> I know it's a standalone application but the relevance is down to the performance improvements you'd gain from integrating that into Opera
I don't think many people wish for better performance out of their messenger applications, certainly not enough to switch browser over, which again, makes me wonder what the market for this is.
> "If you ask somebody why they are using Facebook in their browser, they'll tell you that it's because that's how you use Facebook Messenger. They won't tell you that it's because they want to message and surf the web at the same time. In fact it's terrible for this – Messenger is stuck on the Facebook site, so if you navigate away, it's either hidden away in a separate tab or gone altogether."
...which is why Opera's solution is better ;)
People don't have to use a browser by the way. There are already desktop clients for Messenger (though most of which people are unaware of and/or require a fair bit of setting up) and popular apps specifically for Messenger on mobile phones and tablets. But the fact remains that many people do still use the web interface. Usually just because it's quicker and easier. Opera's solution ticks all of those boxes while also solving your complaint about how the current web solution sucks.
> I don't think many people wish for better performance out of their messenger applications, certainly not enough to switch browser over, which again, makes me wonder what the market for this is.
Most people wouldn't. But then most people call a browser "the internet" so it's hardly surprising they don't understand what Electron is. However given the millions of techies who do understand, Opera could still make a decent business targeting us. And if we switch then there's a chance we might encourage our non-techie friends and family to switch as well (lets face it, how often are we called upon for free technical support?). This is all hypothetical of course but at least Opera are trying out some new ideas in UI/UX rather than building yet another Chrome-clone (even Firefox these days feels like another Chrome).
To be frank, your complaints sound a lot like "I hate this feature ergo it's stupid and nobody will use it". I say kudos to Opera for trying to do things a little differently. If it works then that's great for Opera, if it doesn't then what difference does it make to you? Either way new ideas - even ones as evolutionary as this one - have always been met with naysayers. Sometimes they're proven right. However frequently they've also been proven wrong (remember the HN thread about Dropbox?).
I've not given my personal opinion on this yet so I'll close with that: With the way how technology is moving, I think having IMs inside the browser is an attractive idea. If I can then do away with Electron then it's doubly attractive. And if I can do away with having half a dozen different IM clients and run it all from one browser then I would close my libpurple-compatible client in a heartbeat and switch to Opera.
I think perhaps you've lost sight of the original point you were making?
* I asked why I would want this, with the implication that this a product without value.
* You then gave Facebook Messenger and Electron apps as examples that there is a demand for this type of thing, basically saying that they've proven the market for this feature.
* I pointed out that the reasons people use those are not because they want to surf and message people at the same time.
You saying that Opera is better because it lets people surf and message at the same time in contrast to Facebook Messenger doesn't support what you were just saying. If anything, it undermines your point because you were originally using it as an example because it was the same as Opera's new offering, and now you're trying to say that Opera's different to it.
> many people do still use the web interface. Usually just because it's quicker and easier.
It's not quicker and easier for messaging-while-surfing because it doesn't actually let you do that. So pointing to it as proving the market for Opera's product that lets you message-while-surfing is a tad silly, don't you think?
> To be frank, your complaints sound a lot like "I hate this feature ergo it's stupid and nobody will use it".
I don't hate the feature – why would I? I don't have to use it. I just think it's pointless. It's more like "I think this feature doesn't have any compelling use-case and it's stupid for Opera to build it because there isn't a non-negligible market for it". And so far, the only answers I've had are:
* Because people do it already (even though the examples given don't show that).
* Because it gives better performance.
* Because Opera fans are weird.
* Because desktop window managers are so bad that having two windows of different applications side-by-side is difficult.
So far I remain unconvinced this feature has value.
> I think perhaps you've lost sight of the original point you were making?
> * I asked why I would want this, with the implication that this a product without value.
> * You then gave Facebook Messenger and Electron apps as examples that there is a demand for this type of thing, basically saying that they've proven the market for this feature.
> * I pointed out that the reasons people use those are not because they want to surf and message people at the same time.
That's not what happened. I addressed your "Why would I want a messenger application embedded in my web browser?" question with examples of messenger applications that were embedded in a browser while acknowledging that I emphasise with your dislike for the modern day "everything in the browser" mentality. You then raised additional points based off my examples, which I addressed specifically. I never once attempted to answer why you, specifically, would want this.
For what it's worth, I could also have raised points about Chrome / Firefox "apps" that install locally into the web browser (many of which have hundreds of thousands of unique installs) and the desktop notifications feature that websites can implement to push notifications to the user. So what Opera is building isn't that far away from what many people are already using in Chrome - albeit Opera are building a better UI/UX around it.
> > many people do still use the web interface. Usually just because it's quicker and easier.
> It's not quicker and easier for messaging-while-surfing because it doesn't actually let you do that. So pointing to it as proving the market for Opera's product that lets you message-while-surfing is a tad silly, don't you think?
If you re-read the point I actually made (rather than selectively quoting it), what I actually said was it's quicker and easier to open up a Facebook tab in a browser than it is to install libpurple or whatever to install Messenger integration on a PC desktop. I could also add to that and said it's also quicker and easier to type something on a PC keyboard than it is to tap your message on smartphone touchscreen (which was also hinted at in my original comment albeit I left the reader to reach that conclusion themselves).
> I don't hate the feature – why would I?
For someone that doesn't "hate" this feature you put an awful lot of effort into discrediting it :P I acknowledge this feature might not prove popular but am at least open minded enough to let the market decide. Because, and like I said before, it's common for people to dismiss new tech that later gains popularity.
Trying to get the WhatsApp widget running it seems like I must allow access to the camera and the microphone on my computer.
This is ridiculous.
On mobile, this is not needed, and is maybe even fine. When the app is turned off you know it isn't listening or taking pictures.
On a desktop computer there is no such guarantee. On the other hand this applies to all software I'm running. Maybe it's time to put a piece of tape over the camera.
does your camera have an LED? It is supposed to be wired up in a way that the camera cannot be powered up without also turning the led on so you know it is active.
I wonder why [.* ]baidu.com, [.* ]facebook.com, [.* ]google.com and [.* ]yandex.com are in the default list of exceptions when blocking ads. Any ideas?
IIRC Opera has an agreement with Google to make it the default browser. I wonder what they have with Facebook, Baidu and Yandex. Maybe the default browser is region-based.
Very much so. Google is less dominant in many markets where Opera is strong, so the bidding between Google and the local search engines is probably tough.
Opera used to be amazing, a few years ago it had a built in RSS, mail and IRC client, then even later (and right before the acquisition) they were still ahead with their UX by having a "Read Later" section to the browser and allowing you to easily customise and make folders in your "first page".
Now its just a mess and Vivaldi is not much better.
opera is not a mess--it is the best of the browsers...i use it as default browser on my desktop...opera is easily better than chrome or firefox...has far far fewer issues and slowdowns and freezes and crashes...opera is a great browser...
Where to Opera get their money? Building and maintaining a browser seems like an expensive undertaking, and yet despite nobody I know using or even testing their websites on Opera, they've been actively developing and maintaining their browser for years.
Opera ASA the company used to get its money by selling the browser, then moved to an ad supported browser (circa v5 IIRC), then they managed to secured enough funding through commercial partnership (mostly google to be the default search engine, same as firefox) and removed ads from the browser, another source of income source was opera mobile.
A few years back the founders got removed and there was a shift to quarterly profit and they stopped developing and maintaining their own rendering engine and browser to basically become a skin for google chrome, saving costs.
In the recent times they improved their skin status and tried to sell the whole package and managed to do last summer to a chinese consortium of investors.
I suppose right now opera gets its money from the deep pockets of rich chinese investors, the current business model might have something to do with surveillance capitalism.
The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).
God I'd love to be able to do that in Chrome. Managing tabs totally fucking sucks, I hate that I can't combine multiple tabs into a single drop-down, or easily change the title of a tab, or tighten up the spacing, or anything I should be able to do in a modern browser.
Not being able to move tabs with the keyboard annoys me more than it should. Of course, I also wish the switching used the same method as window-switching, but I really wish tab/window/app switching was globally handled by the OS, and fully configurable in terms of behaviour.
If you wanted multiple sites open you had multiple browser windows on the taskbar.
That became unmanageable quite fast, so we got tabs.
Note btw that even the earliest Opera had "tabs". It used MDI to provide multiple sites within a single browser window. This stuck with Opera all the way to version 12. After that they changed over to being a Chrome clone.
I did not know "Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership" who owns the opera browser also owned a large ad network. Can you provide more details on this ?
It's also a simple rip-off of what Vivaldi already had, thanks to customisable side panels - which, to be fair, is itself a simple update of what Mozilla had back in the '90s.
If this is the best Opera has to offer today, they won't last long.
Also seems very focused on a single use case / user group. Which isn't me, I use separate apps for chat, and maybe only facebook messenger with one person.
Are the FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram integrations official (i.e. known by, approved by, and/or supported by their respective companies)?
Asking because I can't find a reverse-shoutout to Opera on either Facebook's, WhatsApp's, or Telegram's blog. This is not altogether unusual (especially given the recency of the Opera announcement) but it still makes me curious.
I believe Opera is simply loading the webapps for these services in a web panel, so it's "official" in that it loads the official UI, but unofficial in that it's not a corporate partnership.
Just because you did not look at the settings does not mean there was no option. I get this from the elderly all the time, "Well how was I supposed to know to click that menu first?"
Chrome is supposed to tie them with the single instance you're running. You can't just copy the Chrome folder and transfer it to another location. You'd have to use Chrome's Sync for that. I'm assuming Chrome has been opened at the same time by the OP, allowing Opera to snatch the passwords and other shit, making an intrusion into Chrome's data.
But, on the other hand, I was able to copy the data from a Chrome extension after a system crash on one machine and extract the data to a new machine just fine by reinstalling the extension and then pasting the extension's folder to the same location where it was on the previous machine.
Since that extension was Mailvelope, I would essentially lose a private key in this case if that wasn't possible, since I didn't have the backup of it. Not sure if I would call that bug or a feature.
What is a menu bar offering you that makes or breaks a program for you versus several political, philosophical, ideological, practical, and technical other differences?
You're not alone. Opera lost me for that reason as well (no menubar plus no -even simulated- MDI), and it's also one of the main reasons why I use Otter and not Vivaldi (Vivaldi does have a menu bar, but with non-native behavior).
Pretty sure Opera is part owned by a Chinese consortium now, and to my knowledge their revenue comes from ads and adtech.
So not super certain how private it is likely to be...
FTFY: Pretty sure Chrome is part owned by an American consortium now, and to my knowledge their revenue comes from ads and adtech. So not super certain how private it is likely to be...
I think this is the 3rd or 4th time Opera has been reborn in recent memory? I actually quite like where they're going with the user experience. But who owns Opera now?
A mix of google who owns the engine opera runs on and a consortium of chinese investors called Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership who bought it from Opera ASA summer 2016 after they were prevented from buying the whole Opera ASA company.
I really like the concept of bringing i3-style tiling management to the browser space, but why is it specific to messengers? Since most well-designed websites work at any size, couldn't you just have a permanent tab at the side of the screen of, say, twitter, or some browser-based IRC client? Admittedly, I'd probably use facebook messenger as this tab anyway, so my needs are covered, but it seems like a missed opportunity. Obviously more technically-inclined individuals on more technically-inclined OS's have this already with proper tiling window managers but Windows and MacOS users probably don't want that system-wide and the browser would be the perfect place to introduce it.
Opera had tiling some 12-15 years ago. By default tabs were just 'maximized' to the full window, and they made it harder and harder to access with subsequent versions. I'm not even sure if it made it to the latest presto release (version 12).
I find vivaldi is not really suited for my several hundreds opened tabs navigation style yet. But I have good hopes for vivaldi and encourage people to try it and even use it as their main browser.
This may or may not be a problem specific to your own installation though. While I don't have 100+ tabs, I've been using quick commands for everything since I started using Vivaldi without any issues - it is very snappy for me.
Could be. I've noticed it slows down more when you have a lot of bookmarks. Ideally you could choose what type of results quick search would return. I'd be perfectly happy only searching tabs and commands.
Vivaldi's "Web Panels" are doing this with a lot more flexibility - you can add any site you want as a custom panel in the sidebar and resize the width to adjust the ratio with your main window.
Granted, a lot of people use it for social/messengers, but it's also super useful for resources and tools like Stackoverflow or Google Translate.
If only they decided that their awesome email client should live in a browser again. I still use Opera 12 solely for emails as their new dedicated email client was lacking a large number of features in comparison.
The core team in Oslo got laid off after the webkit switch in 2013, not sure how many remained in the other teams. But as far as I know there is nothing but sales and admin left in Norway now.
Opera is now a combination of the Epic Privacy Browser and the Vivaldi Browser. They copied Epic's privacy features and in-built VPN/proxy and Vivaldi's social networking sidebars (which incidentally Opera pioneered and Vivaldi's founder is the Opera co-founder).
Or even better, they could have made the side-by-side feature work for any web pages at all as a more general layout feature, with some kind of easy access toolbar to allow you to pop them in and out as desired.
Considering how much I use the web-browser, how desperate for market share and money Opera is, and the fact that opera whatever it's called now is closed source, i would never even install it.
Why hardcode WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger instead of allowing multiple tabs showing up at the same time -- two of them could be WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger like a tiling window manager?
> Browsing and chatting simultaneously is cumbersome and inefficient now, as you need to switch between tabs when responding to a message. We believe this needs to change.
Then:
>If you use more than one messenger, you can easily switch between them by using our shortcut key for quicker access (⌘ + ⇧ + m on macOS, CTRL + SHIFT + m on Windows and Linux).
So, why would this be any better than switching tabs? One thing about a browser, I usually have my hand on my mouse and not the keyboard.
Not really. All of these are mostly user agent modifications to pretend to be Chrome to make certain sites work, as well as some JavaScript event modification (with a similar purpose).
The only "shady" thing is hiding the Chrome ad on Google's home page, though I guess you can consider that as a convenience once you decide to switch fully to another browser.
I don't know how easy it would be to pull an update for that file however, in which case it could become shady in an instant.
Why would they need to update browser.js to do something shady, they can just drop in a brand new binary that does whatever they want it to do and the vast majority of users would be none the wiser.
These moves that Opera now makes remind me a bit of how back in a day WinAmp didn't know how to fend off the competition, so they've started integrating tones of "extra functionality" out of sheer desperation... it never works
how does opera makes money now?
as per my understanding, pre iOS and android era, opera dealt directly with device manufactures and sold their browser as default on them.
Since andriod, how are they even making money now?
I've used their browser since a year now, because it has better battery saving than Chrome and some other cool features, like detaching video windows, built in VPN.
You can now even use all the chrome plugins with another plugin, in Opera.
True. For fans of Opera 12.x, Vivaldi is the reborn Opera. Though resource heavy and lacking a few features compared to the original Opera, Vivaldi is now stable enough to be my daily driver.
Hey this google chrome skin has made some progress since last time I heard about it. It's still light years behind opera 12 and sadly will never regain what it lost.
If you're interested in the actual reborn opera experience, it's vivaldi you're looking for, opera co-founder and many for the original opera team is making vivaldi and though based on blink engine too, hence limited and unable to do exactly what opera used to, it has the same philosophy and vision.
The other alternative is the free software otter[1] browser aiming at recreating the opera 12 experience.
Edit: "your weird racist overtones" crosses into personal attack, since the commenter was talking about a government. Please don't do that in HN threads.
Did China's Great Internet Firewall and eager to control how their population access the web somehow pass you?
I am not racist, I am not placing this blame on a Chinese person's race, persona, or anything. This isn't about the governed Chinese people in the first place.
>Did China's Great Internet Firewall and eager to control how their population access the web somehow pass you?
No, neither the US's Great Internet Surveillance, and long track record of working with, arming, helping, and installing in power dictators and friendly lackeys all around the world, from Latin America to Europe.
That's a bit of a false equivalence. Letting me do something while you watch is not the same as you stopping (and punishing) me from doing it right away. You can argue which one is worse from a moral perspective, but they are not the same.
As for the shitty foreign policy - if I had to buy only stuff produced in "ethical" countries, I'd be living naked and eating only dried fish.
>That's a bit of a false equivalence. Letting me do something while you watch is not the same as you stopping (and punishing) me from doing it right away.
No, but as a citizen of a third country, you worry about countries with a history of messing with third countries (especially yours), not about countries that mess with their own citizenry.
Someone in Chile for example, would probably worry more about their data falling in the hands of Google, than about falling in the hands of China (since the latter never was in bed with Pinochet, even if it censors the internet from its own citizens).
There's a thing called "chilling effects". People stop talking about "risky" subjects because they know they can get prosecuted arbitrarily for it.
The gameplan is simple:
* Someone says something the government doesn't like.
* A plan is devised to get this person in jail and/or to discredit them and/or to ruin their careers.
* In the case of jail, evidence for a crime is collected (from SIGINT) extralegally, and is used to innocuously find, or let someone else find, admissible evidence for the crime. This is called parallel construction and it is very real.
* Maybe they're only sued with the purpose of discrediting them via the press, while making them unable to keep their jobs. Maybe they're actually put in a cage.
It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism, especially on the part of the population that is more observant and able to affect policy change.
It's not the same, but lets not pretend the US is a lighting beacon of freedom and democracy. Maybe compared to China, but definitely not when compared to e.g. the Netherlands. (I'm biased though.)
> It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism
It's a very different thing, simply because it cannot be deployed on a large scale. It's equivalent to old-school spycraft of honey-trapping and blackmailing. You can apply this process to a few individuals, but not to everyone without massive effort - the framing and follow-up takes too much manpower - and without risking reputation damage from repeated abuses.
On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of the US system but China is still a step below IMHO.
>On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Yes, but on the other hand, speaking of "detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law", China has 1/2 or 1/3 the prison population per citizens that the US has (which is the world leader in this regard, with 25% of the worlds prison population for just 4-5% of its general population).
>How is that relevant in any way to the topic at hand?
The topic at hand is "why trust your data to X".
If everybody trusts their data to Y, which has the same or even worse track record than X, then "how's Y worse than X which you already trust with your data" is a very relevant question to ask. It can make people consider both X and Y in perspective, and even consider moving their data to a safer Z alternative.
>whataboutism
I don't particularly care for knee-jerk accusations of thought crimes like "whataboutism".
"What about" is a very useful question. Only idiots speak of something without placing it on a larger context, and without considering the alternatives.
Invocation of whataboutism basically makes it a thought crime to put things in perspective. It's a tool used to constrain discussion, whereas "what about x" expands the scope of the discussion.
But thinking US companies are different because they claim they're not working with the American surveillance state is mostly deluding one's self. If you ask them, Opera can also probably issue a statement saying that they don't let the Chinese surveillance state spy on them, if one says "I believe you" to one class of orgs, and "I don't believe you" to another class, and the difference is the race...
Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
>Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
Without significant prove that this is not the case this handwaving way of comparing the US democratic state to China is just wrong. From Consumer protection to free and fair elections the US system is almost nothing alike the chinese system. Of course the US has massive issues (as do other Western democratic nations) but this handwavy "well they just don't tell you' stuff without actual good data behind is just destroys any credibility and is a huge problem for our democracies. Please stop doing it unless you provide exhaustive evidence.
Consumer protection? Let's ask the people in Flint how their water is. Free and fair elections? Yikes, you want to talk about this during this regime? How about voter suppression, gerrymandering, making sure minority districts have to queue for hours on voting day, electronic voting booths with accessible SD-card slots? Just because it's not covered on FOX News, it doesn't mean the problems are not there.
Or maybe oooh "We have massive issues, but China is worse.".
Also I don't think Obama ever did any curtailing of the NSA's program. Hello to the NSA machine reading this!
We shouldn't be too quick to branding those with a valid criticism of a government (or for that matter, a religion or even culture) as being racist. This prevents valid discussion of difficult topics and perpetuates the idea that we live in an overly politically correct world, which I think only helps to fester true racism.
Previous stands on privacy/security, knowledge of where they make actually make money and widely spread shareholder base/publicly identifiable managers.
3) Firefox(Moz://a)
It's a bit for profit and everything of theirs is open source, and therefore auditable.
Apple PR on privacy is not in line with the icloud based fappening[1] and this one got highly publicized because it involved hundreds of naked celebrities.
Mozilla was historically almost entirely funded by google for fueling their personal data collection and profiling (this only changed when firefox started to become irrelevant and mozilla had to scramble for survival and their first move was to keep the same offense but with a different actor), they refuse to block tracking and ads not to infuriate their income source (gave rise to a free software version that does this and removed the mozilla proprietary "phone home" plugin), firefox includes a remote spying mechanism called "telemetry" and punish users that take step to protect their privacy from this as demonstrated during the recent dropping of alsa support debacle.
Let's not forget their origin, the name "mozilla" stands for mosaic killer and clearly states that they aim to be dominating the web browser market. The move open source was forced and due to circumstances, firefox is a failed attempt at fixing performance issues in the mozilla suite, etc.
Mozilla and Firefox also has a deserved reputation for making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. I'd rather not trust them much either.
The fappening was due to weak password security, and a set of criminals smart enough to sit on the exploit in order to achieve a goal. It wasn't due to some huge error or negligence on Apple's part.
> funded by Google
It's still an in profit producing open source software.
> a remote spying mechanism call telemetry
So does almost every other browser. It's easy enough to disable from memory.
> attempting to dominate the browser market
It's the reason IE isn't the market leader. There's a good reason for it to want market share.
I don't particularly trust Moz://a, I just trust Firefox a butt-ton more than Chrome or Opera.
AFAIK the fappening happened through a security flaw in apple icloud API that allowed for infinite password retries without rate limiting and failure to notice and notify repeated failed attempts.
Yes it still is open source software, but that itself does not mean that it puts user interest before its main income source interest, the point here was that mozilla has a strong stance for refusing to include tracking prevention and ad blocking while marketing itself as privacy minded and user centric software. Says one thing and does another.
What other browsers do or do not is irrelevant to the criticism and trustworthiness of mozilla, but for the record AFAIK there's no telemetry in otter or arora or rekonq or konqueror or pale moon or waterfox or iron or qupzilla or uzbl. Point is free software usually comes without spying mechanisms.
Besides telemetry is only one spying thing among many others that have come and gone or are still in firefox (hello, pocket, automatic geolocation, etc.) and at times disabling them does not actually prevent the behaviour from happening. have a look at the privacy patches for firefox[1] for some examples.
You seem to have missed the point about the objective or market domination, it predates IE but the point was that the vision and priorities are wrong.
That's being said, we hold similar stances here. No trust at all for chrome and opera. A bit of non blind trust for mozilla for lack of a better alternative.
Both Firefox and Chromium are open source so you can compile them yourself. Opera never was AFAIK. I still use Opera Mini on Mobile though, because it has an ad-blocker that saves me hundreds of Mb on my data plan each month.
Turns out firefox is a product of the for profit mozilla corporation the twin of the non profit mozilla foundation, clever way to play both sides.
Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel, firefox pocket, talkback, etc.
Then again a free license is not a guarantee of no wrongdoings.
Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture:
- Users asked for blocking of tracking and ads, mozilla repeatedly refused to deliver.
- Users asked for keeping the UI they were accustomed to, Mozilla did not care and pushed the new Australis to fit their agenda of unifying experience over desktop and mobile
- KDE users asked for something more integrated than simply dropping the gnome file selection windows, the bug has been lingering somewhere for more than a decade
- Linux users asked for alsa support, a dev came forward offering to fix mozilla own shortcomings and maintain it, the answer was that they would continue their plan of abandoning alsa for pulseaudio.
- Users have repeatedly ask to not make firefox more chrome like, firefox is still getting increasingly a trying hard to be chrome lookalike.
- Users are asking to keep support for extensions as it is the reason they use firefox, mozilla is adamant they will go on with theirs plans of replacing support of extensions by the one used by chrome.
- Users asked for the return of the removed status bar, Mozilla denied this.
- Users wanted to keep DRM out of firefox, Mozilla put DRM in firefox.
- Users did not want mandatory signed extensions, Mozilla gave then mandatory signed extensions.
This list could go on and on and on, firefox history is littered with such examples of not caring about the interests of users and not listening to them and giving priority to their own agenda.
That been said, google, apple and mozilla are all collecting personal data of their users and they're all us based and as such are all under the effect of the patriot act.
I admit that I do distrust google and apple more than mozilla, but history and experience taught me that I should not trust mozilla/firefox for something else than doing their own thing whatever that is.
As a result I keep away from google/apple as if it was the plague, but I still have firefox around because with the addition of a dozen extensions[1] I can disable most of the crap mozilla put in there, add what they removed, add what they refused to put in and getting closer to be something I can use.
Nonetheless, Firefox is on its way out now that it is unable to provide audio and is about to drop support for extensions that are required to make it useful. I have to admit that it's not as much the dropping of alsa that motivated this but the way mozilla handled this and their attitude. It's maybe the 3rd or 4th time I quit firefox but this time I'm not coming back.
[1]: ublock origin, noscript, classic theme restorer, all-in-one sidebar, all-in-one gestures, downthemall, firebug, new add on bar, privacy settings, self-destructing cookies, tab mix plus, request policy continued, tab groups, tab groups helper, screengrab (fix version), random agent spoofer, SSLeuth, and a few more. I had some extension to make bookmarks usable in firefox but I stopped using bookmarks altogether and now use a combination of wallabag and shaarli instead.
> Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel
Renaming Firefox in Debian had nothing to do with it being only "mostly" free software. If you fork the Linux kernel, modify it and then call it "Linux", Linus Torvalds has the right to ask you to change the name because he owns the trademark. Perfectly fine with the GPL.
> Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users [...]
Please prove that these are the majority of their users. Because I'm perfectly fine with removing the status bar for example or showing KDE users (which are in the minority btw) the middle finger (aka the stupid GtkFileChooser). Also for extensions: Users who still use XUL extension are in a minority (Mozilla did an analysis about this). I know many people who are even using Firefox without any extensions, most people I know only use an adblocker.
So everything this shows that Mozilla doesn't listen to ALL its users, but I guess it's impossible to satisfy everyone. The majority of Firefox users have already switched to Chrome anyway :(
That's one of the things that annoys me about Mozilla. When you complain about something that changes, they tell you you should have spoken up before it got changed. When you speak up about something that is changing, you're always the "vocal minority" and it's never going to happen. I still wake up sweaty in the middle of the night after dreams about "vocal minority" and "WONTFIX".
Also annoying is that a huge percentage of 'power users' have disabled telemetry, which screws us over when it comes time for Mozilla to pick the feature of the week to remove.
Anecdotally, I switched to Vivaldi shortly after Mozilla started removing useful features (like tab grouping) and replacing them with Pocket and Hello. I couldn't be happier and I kind of wish I had joined the Chromium bandwagon sooner.
If someone violates the site guidelines, you don't get a pass to violate them that much further. The rules aren't idempotent! So please don't do this again.
I don't really blame the Chinese people myself, it's the ways the Chinese government is embedded in their industries whether they want it or not that worry me, especially with a software like a web browser.
Opera is going the other way. They have a closed source browser that directly integrates some specific products into the browser. You can't completely get rid of them, you can't integrate another product in the same way and I'd guess an extension can't mess with these pre-packaged addons. It's nice that you can have a messenger in a sidebar next to your current browsing page. But it's taking control away from users and that's not the way forward in an open web. Why can't this be an extension? Why can't it have a feature that lets me run two tabs side by side so I can choose what products to use there?
In general I think this Opera Reborn is still far behind say Firefox or the official Chrome. Just now you can change the filter lists in their Adblocker something that adblocking extensions could do for years. Now you can change Operas theme, i could make Firefox look like whatever I wanted forever. For all the love that the old Opera deserved, I don't think Opera is the future of web browsing.