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No Opera
Opera (GX/One/Crypto Browser) is a closed-source browser owned by a company with a track-record of selling user-data, censorship, backdoored software, involvement in predatory loans and anti-competitive behavior. While the link for this page is "OperaGX", this applies to every browser made by Opera browser as well.
Company Related Issues
- Opera was acquired by Chinese company Qihoo 360 for $600 million in 2016. Wikipedia source, Engadget news article, Google search
- Their other browser, "360 Secure Browser" was released in 2008 and is very popular in China. It was exposed by a whistleblower in 2012 for having a backdoored DLL (ExtSmartwiz.d11) that regularly connects to external servers allowing it to remotely download an execute files, 2. The whistleblower was verbally attacked by the company's Product Director. The situation eventually resulted in the app being temporarily pulled from the iOS App Store.
- The same browser also manually blocked access to certain sites advocating for better workplace conditions in China. In one case, they redirected certain GitHub repositories to 404 pages making it appear as though they didn't exist. Translated Version
- Opera was sold to Qihoo 360, but 48% was also sold to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co, which tried to buy Grindr in 2019 but had a controversy over user data.
- Qihoo 360 has had a bunch of other controversies (aside from the section on Wikipedia, there's a whole second article dedicated to it). some of the most notable are:
- Another backdoor was found in a children's watch.
- Qihoo 360 has also had a sketchy 'cleaner' that came preinstalled on Samsung phones, which sent unknown data to their servers.
- Before the browser backdoor was discovered, Qihoo 360 had some of it's other software fake an important "high-risk vulnerability patch", designed to look like a windows update, which installed the 360 Secure Browser.
- Qihoo 360 was part of the Great Firewall project, along with many more controversies. Translated
- In 2017, Opera released 4 different predatory loan apps on the Play Store. These apps falsely advertised statistics on their store pages and invaded on user's privacy, sometimes directly sending threatening texts to the user's contacts if payments were late. All of these apps were in direct violation of Google's Terms of Service and have since been removed. Hindenburg Research article, Android Police article, ghacks article, Engadget article, CNET article, Spacebar article.
Browser Related Issues
- All modern builds of Opera are forked from Chromium. While that isn't inherently a bad thing (Unless you're 100% anti-Google), it shows that most of the proclaimed performance benefits seem to be negligible. While the resource limiting features of Opera GX may slightly improve performance of other running applications, it only really serves to slow down whatever sites you have open by taking away needed resources.
- Opera changes your default web browser while installing it with no obvious way of turning it off.
- Opera adds unsolicited websites to its "Speed Dial" without a clear option to disable them. Here (reddit) and here.
- On November 28, 2023, Opera GX added a screamer when you start up the browser. While this seems innocent and yet another Opera GX gimmick on paper, it can very well scare people if they unknowingly have their volume on full blast, which is what a browser shouldn't even do to begin with. When confronted about it, they responded with "Chill brah it's only for one day", showing how they are unable to see the bigger picture.
- Subjectively, most of Opera's other advertised/exclusive features are either very gimmicky, pointless, or have outright better alternatives. For example, the RAM and CPU limiter does next to nothing but make your browsing experience worse. If your computer is powerful enough, what's even the point of it?
Alternatives
Here are some alternatives to Opera, which includes alternatives to most of the features they advertise at the top.
Browser
- Firefox with Betterfox, alongside with forks like Floorp, Zen Browser, or LibreWolf are great alternatives to Opera while being able to provide alternatives to Opera's features. These browsers also include:
- Video pop-out (as Picture-in-Picture)
- Snapshot (as Firefox Screenshots)
- Dedicated account system (Mozilla accounts)
- A syncing system
- Vivaldi is an alternative owned by the former CEO of Opera, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. Some users report that it's a bit sluggish, but it has many similar features to Opera.
- Zen Browser is another similar alternative to Opera, only this time it's a Firefox fork and, from my personal experience, not as sluggish feeling.
- If you need a good Chromium alternative, Ungoogled Chromium is a solid choice.
- Brave is another potentially fine alternative assuming you're turning off all the AI and crypto garbage that gets shoved down your throat on install.
Adblock
- uBlock Origin is the best content blocking extension, period.
- If you're using Safari on iOS, AdGuard is a fine alternative.
Free VPN/VPN Pro
- It is recommended that you actually pay for a VPN as a lot of free ones aren't that good/have limits. If you can't afford one, then look at FreeMediaHeckYeah's free VPN section, which has some good paid and free ones.
Integrated Messengers
Aria AI
- Consider looking at FreeMediaHeckYeah's AI section.
My Flow
Questions And Answers
- Q: I like the look of Opera! I like it more than other browser aesthetics!
- Q: My extensions are not on Firefox!
- Try looking for alternatives. There are many great ones, some even better than the original extension.
- The extension could have gotten removed, but the file might be floating around somewhere. For instance, RoPro got removed from the Firefox extension store, but the file for it is still available here.
- If none of these work, you can use a good Chromium browser. There are a few listed in the Alternatives section.