this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 44 points 11 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.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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

[–] turmacar@lemmy.world 4 points 11 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.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 1 points 11 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.

[–] wikibot@lemmy.world 2 points 11 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^

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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.