Caltrops - Rants - Probably one of five original Opera users

Forum Overview :: Rants

by The Happiness Engine 10/18/2022, 3:30pm PDT

Opera was originally a Norwegian browser that predictably failed by offering useful features instead of being funded by a larger company in an attempt to control web standards. The carcass got sold to a Chinese company who are basically just using it as a loss leader to collect and sell everything you do. The reason they have a free VPN is because every packet by definition goes through a server they own.

The guy who made that started a second browser company, based off chromium: Vivaldi, which is very Opera v12 feeling as much as it can. That plus + uBlock Origin (there are many typo-squatters look for the dev, gorhill's github) goes a long way towards blocking not only ads but any random website element. (e.g. removing "do you want to read these 5 other articles?" breaks from stories.)

Currently Google is planning that Change for chromium 112, Vivaldi is on 104 and both they and Mozilla have made statements to continue Manifest v2 (v3 is what breaks it, on purpose) support past that change.