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Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 10 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] viking@infosec.pub 53 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Opera was effectively the first software I bought, back when they had a trial version in 2001. They had tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, a solid DECADE before they came to any other browser. Lightyears ahead of the competition and worth every penny. I think in 2003 they made it free, and I wasn't even mad.

I was forced to switch to Firefox at some point when a website I had to use for work was incompatible due to some Java applet that wouldn't load properly, and then slowly migrated over.

Shame to see what happened to this amazing piece of tech.

[–] iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 21 points 10 months ago

It's really tough to run a business when your competitors are all free as in freedom (Firefox) or free as in funded by monopolistic megacorps (Google, Apple, Microsoft).

[–] erwan@lemmy.ml 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, Opera in the 2000's was craming every single feature they could think about in their browser.

So sure, they got some interesting features before the others but they also had hundreds of useless features cluttering the UI.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

But it was still fast and didn't gobble up RAM so much (well other than memory leaks, but none of the competitors were free of those either and IE crashing would also crash the desktop because it was the same instance of the same app for some reason).

[–] Fades@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

imagine buying a web browser

[–] butterflyattack@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Netscape navigator was free on CDs!

[–] viking@infosec.pub 1 points 10 months ago

You bought the ad-free version, they had a small banner on top. And of course there were key generators and such, back in the days there wasn't any online key validation. Or you could kill the banner with a local proxy. Still, I actually wanted to support the development, just like I donate to good FOSS software now, or buy android apps to remove ads although I'm already killing them all with adaway on a rooted phone.

Sure, there were free browsers out there, but back then Opera was really way ahead of the bell curve.