News Chinese consortium to buy Opera's core business

Slightly ironic, a company advocating privacy, being bought out by a Chinese consortium.

 

I find it weird that a company would want to get into the browser business. Yes you can turn a few quid on it, but it doesn't seem like the sort of asset or profit generator that would warrant a buy out.

 

It is not a profit acquisition as such, more an information filtering and control initiative.

 

Looks like I'll be moving browsers again then

 

I've been using Opera for 13 years now, but I think that's the final nail in the coffin. Ever since they switched to the Chromium engine I've basically only been using it because there's no point in swapping over to Chrome when they're the same browser just with slightly different skins, but this is the end.

They got rid of many of the best features of the browser already, it's just chrome with a different skin, and I really can't see any reason to keep using any Opera products at this point, given that I trust Chinese companies about as far as I can chuck the Eiffel Tower with my information security.

 

I too have been using Opera for many years. Will have to see what happens if the purchase goes ahead but, I think there is a good chance this will see me moving-on from Opera too.

 

lol I didn't think about that but that's a funny observation.

Kind of annoying though. Just yesterday I was saying how I was disappointed in how there are so few world-wide European tech companies, and yet here goes another one (Opera was Norwegian).


I used to be a big fan of Opera. It was my favorite browser, until they ditched Presto.

 

I switched to Vivaldi a couple of months ago and have been liking it (after being a long time Opera user and gradually liking it less and less)

 

Does the Vivaldi browser include a facility similar to Opera's Speeddial?

 

End of an era when the deal goes through, been using Opera since the days of the centimetre-thick advertising bar and even if it was just a Chrome reskin recently it was still a good alternative that I'm using right now. Can always give MS another try and see how Edge performs in Win 10 though.

Have got a few months left on the proper separate Surfeasy VPN software left and if they leave that support centre based in Canada with a UK number then I'll see where that goes as the service has been excellent. If they cut jobs though and generally muck about with the program then I'd look elsewhere.

 

When you open a new tab with Vivaldi it opens Speed Dial, with 10 or so (possibly adjustable I haven't played around with it) pages you can click on.

It's being developed by some of the original guys behind Opera as far as I'm aware who didn't like the direction Opera was going.

 

It's disconcerting, but until chrome gets a proper ad block built it I will have a hard time switching back, at least on Android.

 

Ehem.... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-plus/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb

For Android... https://adblockplus.org/android-install

 

Methinks I should have a look at it.

 

And the reviews I've seen say both the ad block plus workaround and the Adblock browser suffer from serious performance issues.

 

Not a bad idea, but I do like the ability to quickly disable the ad-blocker if needed as well as the element hider which is a god send on the forum, where I find some animated avatars very annoying.