this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
1053 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

59378 readers
2618 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I loved Opera's own engine. It was snappy and memory efficient. But their developers, at least back then, were very toxic. I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products and they all collectively went on vacation saying it's a non-issue, instead of delaying the release. Any mention of this on forums guaranteed you a permanent ban.

They only have themselves to blame for user migration and all this controversy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Opera was always hampered by not being IE or Chrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

the migration to Blink was in 2013, it helped at first it seems

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Opera added a user agent header "selector" pretty early so it would tell the webpage it was chrome/IE/Firefox. It was important for compatibility for a lot of websites. I'd trust that listing less for them much less than I would for the bigger/default browsers.

The migration from their own codebase to chromium in 2012/2013 was...rough. They were the first browser to have cross-device synch and you couldn't import bookmarks for a long time, much less RSS feeds/everything else people used Opera for. Their original userbase took a sizeable hit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yes, but as a user, there was always a broken webpage somewhere or some API it didn't support.

When they switched to blink, I immediately got Firefox and I couldn't be happier. It's a browser that cares about my privacy, my choice to use an ad blocker, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser.

^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I remember them releasing a version which broke GMail and other Google products

I remember that it was Google which intentionally made their sites non-functional with Opera. And that changing user agent alone was sufficient to make them work. I may be mistaken, of course.

EDIT: But yes, their developers were like that.