this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
1048 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
60073 readers
2964 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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
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.
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.
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^
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.