this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn't work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they're also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I'm pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don't see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that's way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.