Why did Opera never get big?
I've been using Firefox since 2004 and heard of Opera but never felt the need to change.
But after getting annoyed by Firefox seemingly getting slower with every update I installed Opera and wow this is great
Faster (doesn't stutter when playing video or large animated images)
Built in adblocker
Nice functional options and easily accessible user oriented privacy options
Why isn't Opera more popular
It's a closed source browser owned by chinks.
i dont know about now but it used to be owned by norwegians
And North America used to be owned by Injuns. Shit happens.
Opera is owned by chinks.
Because this matters in today's time where chrome is the most popular browser
But at least with Chrome you can use Chromium if you want the open source part with full functionality.
Opera 12 was amazing. Fuckton of features you still don't see on normal browsers, and it looks great too. It was less of a web browser and more of a giantic Internet suite, like Seamonkey.
Then they got bought out by some Chinese company, and they gutted Presto in favour of making it a Chromium skin. It's not like the Presto engine was good, but at least it had features.
Apparently a lot of ex-Opera devs went on to work on Vivaldi, as a browser with Opera 12's functionality, but I haven't been keeping up with that. Apparently they're using Chromium as a base too, which I'm not too keen on.
Are you dense?
It's hard to believe there was a time when tabs weren't part of a web browser. Although it wasn't the first we have Opera to thank for popularizing that.
Back in the early 2000's Microsoft was constantly screwing with Opera, first with their MSN site and then Hotmail;
web.archive.org
cnet.com
If they had just a bit more of an internet presence and power combined with competence I'm sure they could have killed it along with other browsers. Nowadays the tech press would never honestly report on a story like this, I'm surprised it's still up on CNET.
Another thing I remember is that Opera used to get hundreds of emails a year intended for Oprah Winfrey and would post a few of them on their site every once in awhile.
Now it's part of some soulless chink conglomerate.
I also wonder why Safari never went big.
Mac only.
Every time they came out with awesome ideas, bigger companies would implement inferior versions and put more shiny on it. Kind of like Apple.
I still remember a commercial for tabbed browsers.
why would it?
and if we're talking about competent users, why does a browser need to be closed source? there's nothing of value in there to hide from competitors
See pic related. Opera used to be commercial, you had to pay to get rid of that banner. And its interface was always amateurish. I think that's the reason why it never got much momentum in the "old days" of the web.
Up until 2-3 years Opera was terrible. Most websites weren't rendered correctly or had bugs that only appeared in Opera.
Safari has a Windows port during verions 3, 4, & 5. I think it became superfluous once Chrome appeared, since it used the same engine as Safari, and was designed around an identical "muh minimalism" focus.
This. Tabs, zoom, smooth scrolling, full screen, sessions, filters and blocking, front page favorites, private mode… Virtually every feature Opera created was mercilessly ripped off by competitors.
The banner ads were only added from version 5.
...
Nah, it's more terrible now. It's basically Chrome with extra spying.
It was because mediocre "web developers" use frameworks instead of actually taking the time to code websites correctly, so small browsers such as opera get shitty support because these abominations only care about their profits.
What about Otter?
otter-browser.org
No matter what I do I'm either a cuck or a fag.
True, before that it was trialware. Even more limiting.
It's more honest, like the difference between classic shareware games and modern "'free' to 'play'" games. I can respect that.
Ya get used to it.
You should use Iridium if you want the open source part with full functionality.
When I was self-learning to write PHP I wrote a shitfuck of an invoicing program that was so shit and full of JavaScript bugs that it only worked *in* Opera. This browser saved my ass.
I was using opera, but with every update they kept adding new ads to my speed dial thing, as well as adding some I other things I didn't want on there. Switched to Vivaldi and it's more comfy
Imo mobile opera is better than chrome
Nah the commercials were bearable
It used to crash all the fucking time and rendered pages like shit.
To be fair to brave, you can set it to just block ads instead of replacing them really easily in preferences. It's not even hidden in about:config somewhere.
Probably because a lot of people just don't know about it. Since it was commercial for so long, it didn't develop the user base that Firefox did and it doesn't stick in their face every time they go to google just to search for youtube or Facebook instead of just going to the site.
• Fast at the expense of buggy rendering
• Banner ads in a browser in current_century
• Never had or even attempted a native GUI on any platform despite mooching off Qt
Opera (last good one being v12) was pretty great. Some sites would not show some elements, flash was occasionally finicky, but 95% of the time it was great. Crash recovery was trustworthy (would not lose any tabs), interface super-responsive as well as keyboard shortcuts.
Was able to make it cache everything in ram, which made it insanely fast, and it still didn't consume that much compared to the rest of the browsers in existence.
Still got the ol' v12 installed, sometimes using it to check a site or two and getting surprised with slick speed and fast menus every time (have to use firefox with inter-fucking extensions).
Alas, Opera's current incarnation is dead. Owned by chinese, presto abandoned, all great features missing and never returning. Had a good run before all that.
Vivaldi? It's ok for youtube, otherwise a memory hog exactly like chrome. The keyboard shortcuts, tabs cuztomization, mouse gestures, and minimalistic interface are great features to have, but not enough to make it completely worth it. It's better than chrome on surface level though.
Iridium is botnet, shit phones home to iridiums servers. There's ungoogled-chromium but it's not at all stable and I doubt they'll ever fully fix it
Best browsers:
Seamonkey - Windows
Pale Moon/Mozzerella Firefox - Linux
IceCat Mobile - Android
What about Naked Browser for Android?
Which the average normalfaggot doesn't care about.
Palememe removed the element inspector - which they quickly added back in the next release - and disabled jetpack extensions
Sorry guys but all these open source browsers LONUXXX type browsers.
Run like shit, look like gtk 1 icons.
Don't work on javascript intensive websites (SLACK BECAUSE GETTING THINGS DONE), and break down when using noscript.
Don't even get me started on the browser agents, that don't pretend to be goyim chrome or firefcuck, so you don't get to even use certain sites.
addons don't work for the firefox clones, and the uis are shit.
Don't even get me started, on things that just are fucking stupid to be in a browser.
Mail client, I have 10 of those installed.
IRC who needs irc in a browser? Hexchat exists.
A vpn that leads to somewhere I don't know?
Fuck that, all these features are shit and don't improve what we all need. An open web that everyone can use.
That gives us freedom
It's almost like you hate freedom
All browsers are terrible, but Firefox and its clones especially. I mean, they don't even have a menu to edit keyboard shortcuts...
So what do you use then?
Because you're going to do SO MUCH with the browser code, right kids?
0/10 should have been saved as a gif waste of 4.73MB
Of course you can. Nobody says that you have to do everything on you own. Open source is all about multiple people working together to get something done. This means finding friends to help one another go through the code bit by bit.
What's so hard about `pkill -9 chrom`?
By the way Chromium also talks to Google and it's not configurable. Just look. Wireshark is there for that.
I was going to delete my previous replies and make a single big post but hur dur "Wrong Password", ib software is just broken.
Anyway, besides what has already been said - "Firefox is slow". True with default configs, it's slower than Chrome. Adjust it for performance (see Arch wiki) and watch it fly past all WebKit browsers you have out there. It even outperforms surf which is basically a window with webkit. "Firefox eats RAM". I don't know if this is a historical problem, a Windows problem or what, but it's not there for me for years. And it didn't "have" problems with H.264, it HAS problems. There simply isn't H.264 hardwere decoding on Linux. There is an option to enable it, it even complains that it isn't available because it wasn't with ffmpeg if you build it without, but even if you link ffmpeg, Firefox still doesn't support H.264 hw decoding on Linux. Check about:support linuxfags.
I also don't see how native bloat is a "pro" for Opera, and for Safari... Every browser has 0days. It may have more than others (I have no clue), but worth pointing out.
A lot of half-decent browsers failed to have a honorable mention as well, namely surf, xombrero, w3m, NetSurf, and dillo.
My big beef with Firefox is its monopolization of Gecko for years. I never liked XUL, clear back to Netscape 6, and always preferred properly native browsers like Camino/K-Meleon/Epiphany.
Opera sucked
It had this odd google search bar embedded in the homepage and the extensions were few and far between. It also had illogical keyboard shortcut commands. It made me angry when I tried to use it.
there will never be a perfect browser since everyone wants to spy on you. and open source is made by a bunch of cucks who can't complete a project without getting their ego's stroked so they release half working mostly shit products that are 100% of the time inferior to proprietary software.
Opera didn't have boatloads of cash to present it.
Netscape Navigator got popular because Marc Andreessen was able to get huge financial backing early on when all other browsers at the time were one man projects or university experiments.
Microsoft then came in, threw money at Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows, effectively killing Navigator.
Mozilla Firefox is the only browser whose bank accounts weren't instrumental. IE 6 was the lone player in the browser market by 2002 and Firefox was able to integrate several new features and win over the FOSS crowd.
Then, much like Microsoft, Google took advantage of it's leading search engine position to promote Chrome, which overtook Firefox in 2013. Since then Mozilla has been throwing resources at their failed Firefox OS and neglecting their flagship product.
Throughout all of this Opera missed several boats. Up until 2000 Opera was trialware but it displayed ads until 2005 when all other browsers did not. A version for iOS and Android wasn't even released until the end of 2013. And to top it all off, Opera was and still is closed source, relying on an internal development team to fix bugs and provide programming input.
opinion discarded
trips
I think your entire post can be corrected by boiling it down to this.
Netscape was basically the only browser ISPs bundled with their software in the caveman days
MS bundled IE with everything, and its position as a loss-leader asphyxiated Netscape
Firefox was just the best-known alternative to IE in a time when IE was so awful every techie in the universe was screaming at their customers/readers to stop using IE
Chrome is forced down normalfags' throats by every one of the botnet's tentacles (not just search)
Opera simply didn't get a schweet deal with anybody to railroad users in their direction.
I actually used Opera until some stupid update broke it to something I wasn't used to. Now I use Firefox.