• @Matriks404@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Actually after Opera switched engine from Presto to Blink and become another Chromium-based browser I was a bit lost, and switched between different browsers while never really had that “good connection” I had with Opera, but I eventually switched to Firefox and I don’t really see any other alternative right now. It just works, and supports free and open web.

      • @Defaced@lemmy.world
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        81 year ago

        Tried using Vivaldi at one point and I really liked it but it was noticeably slower than both Firefox and chrome even though it’s just another chromium fork. I’ve since switched back to Firefox and haven’t looked back.

        • Fushi
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          01 year ago

          firefox is slower for me lmao, still use it but compared to vivaldi, it uses more cpu and ram somehow

    • @uuhhhhmmmm@sh.itjust.works
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      41 year ago

      I don’t see regular Opera being used, but often Opera GX. Their marketing is so powerful, and those edgy features attract gamers.

  • @s_s@lemmy.one
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    91 year ago

    Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it’s spyware.

  • @lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1661 year ago

    I knew not to use Opera GX as soon as they started sponsoring youtubers. I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.

    • @FrostKing@lemmy.world
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      21 year ago

      Agreed. I think (and I’m not sponsored lol) that the only product from YouTube that’s actually good is Harry’s razors

    • @CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      721 year ago

      When I see a product I already use being promoted by YouTubers in sponsored segments, I immediately question if I should be using it, even if I’d have happily continued had I never seen that sponsorship.

      • Neshura
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        411 year ago

        Absolutely true. I remember every YouTuber and their mother shilling out for LastPass a few years back. Now that their reputstion is kind of in the dumps after several “noncritical” hacks I see those same YouTubers shilling out for Dashlane.

        It just gets worse if you try to think of any serious sponsorship program by companies that are, to date, trustworthy. There are none because they don’t need them. Word of mouth is good enough for them because the customers they have will stay being customers for a long time. Long enough that they bring in more people just by being happy about the service.

        • Funwayguy
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          171 year ago

          Same with Express/Nord VPN sponsorships. Many people debunked the adverising BS they were spinning about blocking tracking when really it only masked a tiny subset.

          As someone who studied infosec, those ads were infuriating. Now I just sponsor block it all because I’m beyond tired of it.

          • Neshura
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            131 year ago

            Really like Mullvad for that. They don’t pretend a VPN alone makes you invisible for tracking nor do they pretend it makes your browsing much more secure. They don’t do any BS sales either. You get what you pay for and they are very upfront about what you get (mostly ISP block and region lock bypass).

            Haven’t seen a YT sponsorship for them yet either so that’s another plus in my book.

        • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I left LastPass as soon as they started screwing with the free product. Same with Evernote. It’s fine to make a non-free product. But if you make a free product with premium settings you can’t go back and pinch the original user base by taking features away. Those companies *products always fail.

    • @AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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      321 year ago

      Lol, now that I think of it I had never seen a YouTube ad or sponsor where I would say “this is an ethical and fairly priced product without a catch that I would like to buy”…

      • lad
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        31 year ago

        I only saw a decent product once, it was Henson razor. Not sure if it’s ethical and fairly priced (those are somewhat hard to tell, imo). If I weren’t using it already, the sponsorship would have deterred from trying 😅

    • @akrot@lemmy.world
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      51 year ago

      I swear, youtube sponsorships are like anti-ads. 9 times out of 10 they’re doing something sketchy.

      We’re the minority though.

  • Retrowizard
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    21 year ago

    I tried Opera years before, but the UI wasn’t my cup of tea at the time. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me; but, when, I tried it ones again a year or two ago it was much more, like it was honestly and objectively bad.

    Which is sad because regarding of my tastes and needs it was a good browser

      • @Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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        61 year ago

        privacy hardened

        Can you elaborate? I looked at the page for LibreWolf and as best as I can tell they just change some default settings and add Ublock as a pre installed extension.

        • megane-kun
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          11 year ago

          I tried using hardened Firefox before moving on to use LibreWolf. Manually hardening Firefox is arguably more powerful than what you’d have with LibreWolf out of the box, but the effort involved in making those changes in the settings and remembering what they are (what they were by default, and what they were changed to) makes it hard to maintain.

          • @Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            makes it hard to maintain.

            Do you mean across devices? I don’t think it changes the settings when it updates but i could be wrong.

            • megane-kun
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              11 year ago

              Back when I tried it, I only had it in one device–which is great, since I dunno if I can do it on more than one device, let alone worry how a hardened Firefox mobile would even look like.

              I actually don’t remember if the settings change with updates. But I suppose they don’t (as they don’t either with Librewolf). What I meant with “hard to maintain” is basically keeping note that the hardened Firefox config doesn’t behave like vanilla Firefox (and isn’t expected to). Making some temporary changes to accommodate a “necessary evil” website, you’d have to make note what setting you “temporarily” have to change it to, what the hardened config should be for that setting, and most importantly: remembering to change it back to the hardened config.

              So, I guess it’s not really a matter of maintaining the config than being aware of all those config changes (from default). With LibreWolf, I’m just brushing it off as “yeah, that’s how LibreWolf works.”

    • @Bruncvik@lemmy.world
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      171 year ago

      I used Opera because you could place tabs at the bottom of the window. When Opera became just a Chrome skin, I switched to Firefox because through the Tab Mix Plus extension I could place the tabs to the bottom. When Firefox killed the extension (and many more), I switched to Vivaldi (made by the former Opera team) because it offered tabs on the bottom. Very recently I switched to Waterfox, because @jh34@lemmy.world told me the browser also allows for tabs to be placed at the bottom. What can I say… I’m a bottom kind of guy…

      • Druid
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        41 year ago

        Any particular reason you want your tabs at the bottom of the window? Aesthetics, work flow, grouping?

        • @Bruncvik@lemmy.world
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          61 year ago

          Just something I’m used to. I have windows tabs on the bottom, so I’d like to have everything in the same place, rather than move the cursor all over the screen. I guess it’s a holdover back from Netscape days when I had several separate windows open, and they all had their own tab on the Windows task bar.

      • Alex
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        11 year ago

        Floorp also has that feature, and Vivaldi’s split tabs

  • @DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Holy shit.

    I thought this was just going to be a matter of poor security implementation or crappy feature sets.

    Turns out they converted the company into a loan shark operation owned by Chinese ad companies

    when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days.

      • @Skyhighatrist@lemmy.ca
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        61 year ago

        Yeah the surprise in this thread is surprising to me. I’ve considered Opera to be untrustworthy for years now.

      • @takeda@lemmy.world
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        251 year ago

        Yeah, I was a huge fan but the moment they changed the engine it was just Chrome in different skin. And later the news that they were bought by a Chinese firm doing shady stuff just confirmed that it was the right decision.

        I am sad that they did not open source the engine. Somebody leaked it, but no one serious would touch it for legal reasons.

        • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          21 year ago

          For me old Opera is an artifact of the bygone era, together with old Skype and Hamachi, when some proprietary software would really work well and even support Linux.

          Opera actually even released FreeBSD versions, if I’m not mistaken.

          Skype - we all know what.

          Hamachi still works =)

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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      1561 year ago

      This behavior is just beyond batshit. Before anyone decides tl;dr, the article is well worth a read.

      I had a hunch that Opera was circling the drain when I started seeing them sponsor Youtubers. A general rule of thumb is that no company that has anything worth a shit devolves to sponsoring Youtube videos. I had no idea about the predatory loans thing, or the crypto scam chasing thing, or the ripping off ChatGPT thing…

      Back here in reality, there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox. There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.

      • @hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
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        201 year ago

        I do not agree with your generalisation of YouTube sponsorships, but with the rest I absolutely agree with.

        Honestly, I read something about Opera being vaguely connected to shady Chinese companies right before I started recommending ppl to switch away from Opera or Opera GX. Glad I stuck to that, looks like my intuition did not fail me.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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          61 year ago

          You, uh, really feel that the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Nord VPN, Honey by PayPal, Raycons, and HelloFresh are really making a positive contribution to the world that we can’t do without?

          • @Syrc@lemmy.world
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            21 year ago

            I mean, what’s the problem with NordVPN? Pretty much every youtuber I respect who does sponsorship promotes it, and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. Generalizing like that is always bad (or well, mostly always, or ironically I would be generalizing).

          • @obbelusk@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            I think there might be a few exceptions, but generally it’s just loot boxes and predatory games.

      • Engywook
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        1 year ago

        there is no reason anyone should be using any other browser than Firefox.

        Yeah. And everybody should use the same brand of shoes, drive the same model of car, buy at the same store, eat the same food…

        God forbids people having different tastes, opinions and needs.

        There is one organization left in this arena still devoted to protecting privacy, maintaining open standards, and a fair and open web for all. And it ain’t Google, it ain’t Microsoft, and it ain’t Opera.

        Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

        • @fernandofig@reddthat.com
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          Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

          Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.

          • Engywook
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            1 year ago

            Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here.

            I simply don’t assume that an org/com actually exist which is concerned users’ privacy. Mozilla just follows the money, as any other corp.

            Protecting my privacy is a task I prefer to delegate to mybrain(.org).

      • @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
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        781 year ago

        And it’s always been Firefox since day one. Out of the ashes of Netscape Navigator rose Firefox and Mozilla have been one of the only bastions of the free and open web ever since. I honestly don’t understand why anyone would use another browser.

        • @TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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          81 year ago

          Sadly chromium is often the only supported browser for a lot of web apps. Sometimes not even chromium but just chrome in particular. Chrome has basically inherited all the downsides of internet explorer of yesteryear except it doesn’t run like shit yet.

            • @A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              and google sabotaging shit so it only works on their platform.

              Like they did with youtube and Edge (before they finally gave in to googles terrorism and switched edge to chrome base)

              like they are doing with youtube and adblockers.

        • @Wermhatswormhat@lemmy.world
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          31 year ago

          I’ll say this. I use chrome and I KNOW I need to switch to Mozilla. It’s just such a pain to switch that I inevitably go back. Maybe this is the wake up call I need.

        • @Demdaru@lemmy.world
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          11 year ago

          Cuz Firefox was for a long time just some shiiiiiiit. It was overloaded, blocky, seemed outdated etc., so ie wasn’t any worse. When chrome came, whooo.

          Now tho, I am simply still prejudiced against it. And I found Edge suits me ideally so I don’t care for any other browser. Until my adblock stops working, then I’ll run.

          • @foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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            21 year ago

            I also left Firefox for Chrome many years ago during that time period, but Firefox has been good again for quite some time. They did a big refresh called Quantum several years back and solved most of those issues. Give it a try.

            • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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              11 year ago

              They also solved the “issue” of XULRunner and all associated functionality, not offering anything instead.

              I had to move from conkeror, and now jump between FF and SeaMonkey. The latter lags behind a bit in porting FF functionality.

              To each his own, I guess.

          • @TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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            -521 year ago

            Actually it’s an effective cloud-based password manager that doesn’t rely on local storage or weird plugins or backups.

            That’s what keeps me using chrome. I could lose everything in a house fire, pick up any device, log in and have access to all my stuff without any further action on my part, right out of the box.

            That’s the only feature I care about, and chrome is the only browser I’ve seen that provides it.

            Get me that in firefox, and I’ll switch today.

            • @dasJot@feddit.de
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              71 year ago

              That’s great until Google finds that one picture of your child at the pool and immediately deletes your CSAM-harboring filthy account.

            • Deebster
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              1 year ago

              I’m confused since Firefox Sync has been letting you sync/backup your passwords, bookmarks and history for a decade or two at this point, and you can even self-host the sync server.

              I don’t know the complete FF password manager details (Bitwarden user here) but where does Firefox fall short for you?

            • Swaziboy
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              241 year ago

              I have all that functionality today with FF… Not sure when you last checked, but if you create a Mozilla account and log in to FF you can sync all the same stuff as Chrome does.

              • @TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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                -231 year ago

                Checked it out: apparently I had a mozilla account at one point in time. Hit ‘forgot password’:

                Note: When you reset your password, you reset your account. You may lose some of your personal information (including history, bookmarks, and passwords). That’s because we encrypt your data with your password to protect your privacy.

                Forgot your password: fuck you.

                This is the exact fucking opposite of the behaviour I’d ever want from a password manager.

                • @feannag@lemmy.ml
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                  291 year ago

                  I think that’s what most people want in a password manager. The only way to have a truly secure pw manager is to encrypt it and failsafe to delete. That way if your identity gets stolen or email compromised, it limits the damage.

                • @Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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                  51 year ago

                  Forgot your password: fuck you.

                  This is the exact fucking opposite of the behaviour I’d ever want from a password manager.

                  Wait wait wait wait, you’re telling me you want the people who hold your password to be able to view them without your explicit permission (entering a secret that unlocks your vault)? Because that’s what you’re asking for - if they can reset your password and provide you your plaintext passwords, that means they can 1) read your passwords if they chose to and 2) you can be phished and have your account stolen and passwords provided to some rando.

                  The convenience offered by that “feature” is outweighed by the potential consequences of it existing. Passwords should absolutely be a Trust No One (TNO) solution.

            • 📛Maven
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              1 year ago

              What are you talking about? Firefox has had literally Sync since before Chrome existed.

              Firefox Sync initial release: December 21, 2007

              Google Chrome intial release: September 2, 2008 (Beta), (1.0) December 11, 2008

              A full year, my guy.

            • @mystik@lemmy.world
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              291 year ago

              You can lose your Google account in the blink of an eye with no recourse, no access to support or anything.

              With local and my own backups, I can choose to put them at any location, cloud or local.

  • @viking@infosec.pub
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    551 year ago

    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
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      221 year 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).

      • @viking@infosec.pub
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        11 year 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.

    • @erwan@lemmy.ml
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      131 year ago

      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
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        11 year 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).

    • @ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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      121 year ago

      Vertical tabs are honestly one of the single most important features of a web browser for me these days. I honestly can’t believe how much of a difference it makes.

      • Schrodinger's Dinger
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        1 year ago

        Every time I have tried a different browser than Firefox I could never get it set up quite right. I never strayed from Firefox only because of the openness of the add-ons and customization, even when Firefox was miles behind when it came to browsing speed in the early 2010s as Chrome was popping off.

        Anyone who tells me Chrome is better hasn’t seen my multitude of tab add-ons which are the only thing that hold my online life together.

        Plus, I recall google limiting adblockers and such on Chrome at a certain point. Firefox would never

        • @AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
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          11 year ago

          I want to see your multitude of tab add-ons. I’m always looking for ways to improve my experience but I never even considered messing with tabs and now I wonder what I’m missing out on!

          • Schrodinger's Dinger
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            21 year ago

            Sorry for the extremely late reply. But anyways, I use Auto Tab Discard - Frees up ram with unused tabs

            Sideberry - a vertical option to organize and search tabs with a overwhelming plethora of options

            Tab Session Manager - To make sure I don’t lose my tabs if my browser crashes

            Tab Stash - to hide away bundles of tabs so I can sort through them later

            Window Titler - To name my different windows I have open in order to keep things organized on my windows toolbar. I use the old school windows toolbar layout which has text beside the icon. I like it this way instead of going through little popup windows to sort through my shit.

          • @meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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            21 year ago

            Session buddy was a big one for me in college when I had an overwhelming number of tabs open but didn’t want to forget about what was on them. Basically just archives all your open tabs to a single page you can refine and look back at, so you can quickly just close everything and start fresh without actually losing anything meaningful or cluttering up your bookmarks.

            The marvellous suspender helped prevent those tabs from using so much memory. Chrome hogs enough memory as it is lol.

            I have one called tab manager plus which looks handy but I honestly forgot it was there before I ever actually used it lol

  • @selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    They did some awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn’t think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.

    • @COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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      191 year ago

      And despite being designed to run on potatoes with a 2G connection it somehow felt just as smooth as modern mobile browsers (at least as I remember it). It’s crazy how well it worked considering the hardware and network limitations of the time.

      • @selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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        11 year ago

        Amazing piece of software. Reliable on the server side, agile and full of features on the mobile side. And they even made sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook could be used in the browser. What a pity the Opera branding ended like this.

      • @Itsamelemmy@lemmy.zip
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        141 year ago

        Didn’t opera cache images on their server and feed you a lower res version instead of what the website had? Granted with the limited bandwidth available back then, that was fine but now I don’t think many people would want that.

        • @COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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          121 year ago

          Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.

        • @privatizetwiddle@lemmy.sdf.org
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          71 year ago

          In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn’t do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.

      • kratoz29
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        31 year ago

        I remember an ex-girlfriend daily driving it on her phone for all kinds of communications, so maybe this is why she preferred it, I never wondered why, I was very happy with my Linux machine and I barely used my mobile phone at those times anyway.

    • @tleb@lemmy.ca
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      351 year ago

      As a developer, Safari is the browser that supports the least standards and is holding the browser ecosystem back.

    • @shaked_coffee@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      I think there are some better alternatives out there such as Firefox + uBlock Origin extension, Brave, Vivaldi (maybe Arc? Haven’t tried it yet) that gives you some extra features that are missing in safari (for example Multi-account containers, vertical tabs, split tabs,… just to mention the ones I enjoy the most)

      But if you just want a browser that works from a normal usage I don’t see nothing wrong in using Safari.

      +it uses an engine different from Blink (aka Chromium) which keeps a little bit of variety in the browser engine market. So while using Safari you’re also doing something good for the internet imho

    • @Allero@lemmy.today
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      151 year ago

      While inferior to Firefox due to reason outlined by another user, it is infinitely better than going with Chromium-based browsers.

      Keep on using it if you feel comfortable with it

        • @Haha@lemmy.world
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          11 year ago

          Apparently There is beef between apple and google, and google won’t allow you to watch content in 4K on their video players (say youtube) for newer chip like the M1. There is no sound explanation apart from being a petty org. So to be able to watch stuff in the resolution you like you need to enable dev mode and add “experimental features” and some arent even on after that. Ask me why apple doesn’t battle it? I didn’t care enough to find out at that point, they’re both assholes fighting but the users pay. I simply switched to firefox on macbook pro and i can actually use a retina to its full potential. Can enable 4K there on video players with no hassle.