Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertising to
  • MeanEYE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    451·
    10 months ago

    I loved Opera’s own engine. It was snappy and memory efficient. But their developers, at least back then, were very toxic. I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products and they all collectively went on vacation saying it’s a non-issue, instead of delaying the release. Any mention of this on forums guaranteed you a permanent ban.

    They only have themselves to blame for user migration and all this controversy.

      • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        Opera added a user agent header “selector” pretty early so it would tell the webpage it was chrome/IE/Firefox. It was important for compatibility for a lot of websites. I’d trust that listing less for them much less than I would for the bigger/default browsers.

        The migration from their own codebase to chromium in 2012/2013 was…rough. They were the first browser to have cross-device synch and you couldn’t import bookmarks for a long time, much less RSS feeds/everything else people used Opera for. Their original userbase took a sizeable hit.

        • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Yes, but as a user, there was always a broken webpage somewhere or some API it didn’t support.

          When they switched to blink, I immediately got Firefox and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a browser that cares about my privacy, my choice to use an ad blocker, etc.

      • wikibot@lemmy.worldBEnglish
        32·
        10 months ago

        Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

        The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.

        to opt out, pm me ‘optout’. article | about

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products

      I remember that it was Google which intentionally made their sites non-functional with Opera. And that changing user agent alone was sufficient to make them work. I may be mistaken, of course.

      EDIT: But yes, their developers were like that.