Opera before they moved to Chromium was cool
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
136 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
84646 readers
4297 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- 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, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The developers who wanted to keep the original philosophy of Opera alive moved on and formed Vivaldi instead. I recommend you try it. It certainly gave me a nostalgic sense of what Opera used to be, and has a lot of useful new features.
Still Chrome and slow.
For me it doesn't evoke any nostalgic feelings.
I used Opera between 9 and 12, bookmarks were very convenient, it had a builtin torrent client, and so on. Compact and ergonomic UI, stylesheets and caching modes. And not too nauseating in appearance.
Ummm, the features you described are all in Vivaldi. Browser engine is Blink (Chromium). My experience with it has been that it's very fast and stable. I've used Opera since about version 6. My nostalgia is real.
Ignore people like this. Just bad mouthing a browser to be cool.
Vivaldi is ahead of any other browser in features, control, customization and security. Even AdBlock extensions still work.
Yes, it is Chromium based, so what? I loved Opera before it was sold for parts to a Chinese hedge fund and Firefox is too glitchy for my taste.
Still doing Vivaldi on a daily basic. But I think I'm a very specific use case: an old user who hates to change his ways, and is obsessed with keeping the page tabs on the bottom of the screen.
an old user who hates to change his ways
Ain't we all? this is why I use MATE btw
Being old and stubborn matters. ;)
Norwegians with a clear musical preference.
Big mystery to me, where the hell is opera getting so much money to shove in front of every youtube channel out there. It seems to be one of those things that every creator starts recomending at the same time... which automatically makes me cringe because, well obviously almost everything that has a huge influencer push, is complete garbage (air up, honey. nordvpn etc...)
China
NordVPN
Genuine question, how is NordVPN complete garbage?
I did some research before re-upping, and they consistently test well. They don’t keep logs. Meshnet is awesome.
As far as I can tell the worst thing they do is lie about how a VPN makes using the internet “safer” which probably isn’t true for most use cases. But all of the VPN companies do that, it seems.
I mean to me one of their huge red flags is their advertising. IE my big never using nord, was one of their commercials where basically it was voicing a guys vacuume, smart TV and Alexa, and vacume etc... talking about him behind his back. Which then the narrator is "Your devices are all talking about you behind your back, get nordvpn to protect yourself".
That and many more were just blatent misrepresentation of what a VPN can and can't do. (point being, in the real world... everythings running https or some level of encryption. If your devices are compiling information, it's via their connection to their services. Of which a vpn isn't going to do jack to protect you from.
Also a lot of shady things still within there, 2019 they had a major data breach, Many complaints on their service auto renewing.
you can get a summary of a lot of parts of it with https://windscribe.com/vpnmap
(site catalogs data breaches, complaints etc... with VPN services).
Yeah, the advertising stuff always bothers me. NordVPN is not unique in that sin, but it’s still a sin. Since I know why I want a VPN that misrepresentation doesn’t affect me. I sought them out, not the other way around. But if they want to build a large audience of people who don’t, like, pirate content or use public WiFi or want the Meshnet, they have to come up with bullshit to scare them with.
I’ll check out your link, thank you!
For me it's kind of an honesty thing. The biggest thing is if they are lying to their customers there... also apparently lying about where it's based (They are in Lithuania, which has manditory data retention laws), only using panama as a tax haven.
Bottom line is, it's about trust... They have a history of lying about a lot of small things, which then makes me think twice before trusting them with bigger things.
I'm still pissed at them for closing their old browser and deleting all my stuff. Yup, that was 12 years ago when I used to use Opera for everything - opera mobile was the best!
Let's hope Firefox can hang in there, the last alternative to Chrome. We really need both to navigate the modern web these days
This is old news and I mean really really old news. You might as well claim you can no longer recommend Windows 7 or Internet Explorer.
The last good Opera version was Opera 12. With the version change to 15 and the switch from their own engine to Chromium, the entire browser became static and pointless. That's when I switched back to Firefox.
I had the Java version of Opera on my Sony W800 back in 2006. Shit was amazing. I got the full internet on my little candybar phone, and iirc, it even formatted (some of) the pages to fit the smaller screen.
I use Opera GX or whatever it's called and love it. Guess I'm the outlier? I assumed it was relatively popular.
Opera was garbage 15 years ago.
Arena: Am I nothing to you?