True. For fans of Opera 12.x, Vivaldi is the reborn Opera. Though resource heavy and lacking a few features compared to the original Opera, Vivaldi is now stable enough to be my daily driver.
If only they decided that their awesome email client should live in a browser again. I still use Opera 12 solely for emails as their new dedicated email client was lacking a large number of features in comparison.
This reminds me of an interesting thing that happened when I uninstalled Opera VPN on my Android.
After uninstalling it automatically opened up a browser to one of those "Tell us why you uninstalled" pages that you normally see on the desktop, this shouldn't be possible on Android.
I think they are doing this by having Opera Browser watch for uninstallation of Opera VPN and possibly vice-versa and when one detects the other has been uninstalled it launches the page, clever but annoying.
I know that launchers normally detect when the package was installed/uninstalled. That's how they refresh the list of app icons. And launcher is just a regular app with no special permissions. I think some kind of an intent is broadcasted when the list of apps is changed.
Um, before going down the conspiracy theory road, maybe do a simple google search? This is literally the top result for "android app on uninstall": http://stackoverflow.com/a/18816716/4944625
I think what they are describing there runs before the uninstall does it not? Pretty sure mine was after the uninstall completed, which is not possible since the app is already gone by that point.
There are actually networks of unrelated apps that listen for uninstalls. I was contacted by a company wanting to add their SDK to my apps, partly for this purpose. Uninstall activity is just another thing being monitored.
So that's why there are 999 versions of 'flashlight' app. Not because everyone wanted to develop it, but because we now have the equivalent of pre-packaged bloatware/malware for the desktop, now for the phone.
Thanks for chiming in. I didn't know this kind of company or business model existed, so now I will be more wary about installing seemingly benign apps. (I am not an app developer).
I was surprised myself. So much bloat and spying. I saved one of the emails I received:
Subject: Monetize Your Daily App Uninstalls!
Hi Developer,
My name is Kathy Lee, Director of Business Development at [redacted], and I wanted to introduce to you our new (100% Google Compliant) revenue-generating tool that lets you monetize your app uninstalls. If you are currently earning with In-app ads, why not monetize when users uninstall your app? We are the only network that can help you instantly earn $$$ when your users uninstall your app.
The [redacted] SDK, with one line of code, lets you earn the highest eCPM with today’s top global offers. When you sign up and integrate today, we’ll deposit $50.00 FREE into your account!
To get started and claim your FREE $50.00, sign up for your free account.
If you are interested in learning more about app uninstall revenue or have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via email or Skype.
I look forward to you working with you.
Kindest Regards, Kathy
Kathy Lee Director of Business Development Skype: kathy
Mobile: 646-
They were probably using the Opera browser to check for the OperaVPN uninstall [1]. This may actually be possible in the app itself as I believe the intent fires before the app is actually uninstalled giving you time to do one last action (fire up a uninstall questionnaire).
Where to Opera get their money? Building and maintaining a browser seems like an expensive undertaking, and yet despite nobody I know using or even testing their websites on Opera, they've been actively developing and maintaining their browser for years.
The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).
God I'd love to be able to do that in Chrome. Managing tabs totally fucking sucks, I hate that I can't combine multiple tabs into a single drop-down, or easily change the title of a tab, or tighten up the spacing, or anything I should be able to do in a modern browser.
Not being able to move tabs with the keyboard annoys me more than it should. Of course, I also wish the switching used the same method as window-switching, but I really wish tab/window/app switching was globally handled by the OS, and fully configurable in terms of behaviour.
If you wanted multiple sites open you had multiple browser windows on the taskbar.
That became unmanageable quite fast, so we got tabs.
Note btw that even the earliest Opera had "tabs". It used MDI to provide multiple sites within a single browser window. This stuck with Opera all the way to version 12. After that they changed over to being a Chrome clone.
I did not know "Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership" who owns the opera browser also owned a large ad network. Can you provide more details on this ?
Opera ASA the company used to get its money by selling the browser, then moved to an ad supported browser (circa v5 IIRC), then they managed to secured enough funding through commercial partnership (mostly google to be the default search engine, same as firefox) and removed ads from the browser, another source of income source was opera mobile.
A few years back the founders got removed and there was a shift to quarterly profit and they stopped developing and maintaining their own rendering engine and browser to basically become a skin for google chrome, saving costs.
In the recent times they improved their skin status and tried to sell the whole package and managed to do last summer to a chinese consortium of investors.
I suppose right now opera gets its money from the deep pockets of rich chinese investors, the current business model might have something to do with surveillance capitalism.
Also seems very focused on a single use case / user group. Which isn't me, I use separate apps for chat, and maybe only facebook messenger with one person.
It's also a simple rip-off of what Vivaldi already had, thanks to customisable side panels - which, to be fair, is itself a simple update of what Mozilla had back in the '90s.
If this is the best Opera has to offer today, they won't last long.
Hey opera folks who might be reading this - work on simplifying offline access to web content. I want to be able to maintain ~100 GB of offline data store, full text searchable. Wikipedia, stackexchange\stackoverflow, khan academy, zealdocs and whole bunch of other sources of useful browser renderable web content provide dumps of their data.
And then they end up having to build spl apps and extensions and other garbage that work around and hack cross domain/local file policy, just so the content already on my disk can be read and searched by the browser.
When such a treasure trove of web content is accessible offline the browser can and should be the way to access it.
As the web becomes more and more a corporate sponsored attention sink strong offline support can be a valuable browser feature.
Whilst I don't know many people who would be in your situation I do think that an offline, indexed data store could be very useful. Bookmarks even to this day are dreadfully implemented on all of the major browsers.
Bookmarks are obsolete and badly implemented for decades now.
Bookmarks are subject to link rot, having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage, bookmarks are useless when you are offline,... the list goes on and on and I have yet to see any browser even try to do something to address these.
These are UI complaints that can be addressed with a bit of investment and thought, but it's unfashionable work - Mozilla even tried to outsource it to Pocket, sorta...
> Bookmarks are subject to link rot
That can be fixed pretty easily: when the user bookmarks, submit a job to the Internet Archive, then use it whenever you get an error page from that link. FF already does half of it with the experimental no-404 extension. Alternatively, you can have your own InternetArchive-like service to do that, which is basically what services like Pocket and Pinboard do.
> having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage
You don't really have to manage them - these days they show up as soon as you type in the address bar. Ideally you'd have some sort of AI-powered categorisation system auto-filing them in dedicated folders, which could probably work with a bit of specialized meta tags. It's basically the age-old problem with filing documents of any type.
> bookmarks are useless when you are offline
Yeah well, a browser is also kinda useless when offline...
There was a time when Opera was not a google chrome skin and offered indexed full page search of local cache of visited page. This was incredibly useful and practical. It also had the option to save the whole web page in a single file.
Sadly this kind of feature disappeared when opera moved to a quarterly profit based strategy.
The kind of feature you want is achievable today but requires a set of tools beyond a web browser and some human work. It's also a bit tedious to maintain up to date.
http://zestdocs.org/ is my old project I've abandoned with similar idea. If anyone feels like continuing/rewriting, or perhaps even taking over the domain, GitHub organization, macOS app, or whatever really, you can email me via hn at the website's domain. (Note that I've set up the MX records there only a few minutes ago, so it may take some retries to be able to reach this email.)
Kiwix does. But you have to download the dump and run a couple scripts to convert the XML to kiwix archive format (ZIM). They have a repo on github with the scripts. But Kiwix is built on top of xulrunner which is basically Firefox but not supported by Mozilla anymore. And that goes back to my original post why not just bake the offline functionality into the browser.
I've used their browser since a year now, because it has better battery saving than Chrome and some other cool features, like detaching video windows, built in VPN.
You can now even use all the chrome plugins with another plugin, in Opera.
I'd like to try, but I'd probably not end up using it because it's not open source. I feel silly for rejecting a product based on that, but openness is important to me. Here's for hoping they open source it soon!
Same for me. Some of the changes Opera have been making are interesting, and they do seem to be doing more with the UI than Firefox and Chrome, who are removing as much UI as possible. But the social messenger stuff doesn't interest me, and having stuff like Facebook hard wired into a browser without having the source to know what it's actually sending to them really puts me off. I know Chromium is open source, but the interesting bits are in the stuff they've added on top, which is not.
My reasoning for not using it is largely the same. Especially when there are plenty of high-quality open source browsers, including two major ones (Chromium and Firefox). I'm not willing to switch to a proprietary browser just because it's a bit shinier.
I wonder why [.* ]baidu.com, [.* ]facebook.com, [.* ]google.com and [.* ]yandex.com are in the default list of exceptions when blocking ads. Any ideas?
IIRC Opera has an agreement with Google to make it the default browser. I wonder what they have with Facebook, Baidu and Yandex. Maybe the default browser is region-based.
Very much so. Google is less dominant in many markets where Opera is strong, so the bidding between Google and the local search engines is probably tough.
Or even better, they could have made the side-by-side feature work for any web pages at all as a more general layout feature, with some kind of easy access toolbar to allow you to pop them in and out as desired.
Pretty sure Opera is part owned by a Chinese consortium now, and to my knowledge their revenue comes from ads and adtech.
So not super certain how private it is likely to be...
FTFY: Pretty sure Chrome is part owned by an American consortium now, and to my knowledge their revenue comes from ads and adtech. So not super certain how private it is likely to be...
Opera is now a combination of the Epic Privacy Browser and the Vivaldi Browser. They copied Epic's privacy features and in-built VPN/proxy and Vivaldi's social networking sidebars (which incidentally Opera pioneered and Vivaldi's founder is the Opera co-founder).
I don't really blame the Chinese people myself, it's the ways the Chinese government is embedded in their industries whether they want it or not that worry me, especially with a software like a web browser.
I don't dare to use this since Opera got bought by that Chinese consortium of companies I'm not accustomed with. Not sure if I'm overly cautious? I'm thinking of especially Opera Link (which had a recent security breach to boot!). Wouldn't that leave out my passwords to China? And I do want to use some sort of syncing, I'd go crazy without anything there or some iffy third party addon.
It's not even just about a trust issue with Chinese company culture. It's that the Chinese government have ways of getting into even resisting companies at their whim that are judged alright in completely different ways than in Norwegian law. So; even if I trusted Opera Software, even if I trusted this consortium that I don't know, even then...?
This kind of reasoning also applies to facebook, any alphabet or google product/service, apple, uber, airbnb, and pretty much any company/service that's based in the US where the patriot act pretty much makes all these companies open bar for the US government.
I'm confused. Is "the engine you use to access a large variety of websites" Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway). If it's Google, Chrome is no better, and Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway.
More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
> Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway)
True, if I used Google, or their products.
But, I use Mozilla, who are publicly auditable, and an email provider that is not located in the US.
The majority of visits to websites have no search engine interaction, but those that do, make use of DuckDuckGo and the like.
> More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
Bringing up the US here, isn't entirely relevant. We're speaking about China, who have demonstrated some interesting ethics around people who are non-Chinese over the past few decades. Yes, the US is of concern, but that doesn't mean that China isn't one.
Secondly, your browser doesn't just have your history. It also has your authentication attempts, because it makes them. It also controls what certificates you use, and can trivially be used to MITM every authentication you make, unless pinning or other not-well-adopted practices are used. Which can give them everything.
... and even pinning won't save you unless you use a tool to monitor your connections and confirm you actually are using the cert your browser is saying you're using.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible to build such a tool.
I'd say they attempt to track you by having various mechanisms to do so. This distinction is important as to no make this tracking appears imevitable.
you can take measures to prevent them from tracking you, a simple and quite effective one is to disable scripting and use a properly set up blocker such as ublock origin.
Except that if you're an American, chances of Chinese government being able to affect you are tiny. Chances of NSA/Homeland Security/FBI tagging you as a "suspicious person - potential terrorist" and making your travel a living hell due to your Chrome history is significantly higher.
There's also this recent piece [1], which was lost behind the Medium paywall until republished (apparently just today?) on urbit.org. It's a very solid introduction to the platform, its intent, and the reasoning which underlies it, and it's refreshingly free of jargon. If you're looking for something to whet your curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend it.
>It's that the Chinese government have ways of getting into even resisting companies at their whim that are judged alright in completely different ways than in Norwegian law.
No, it is not pointless. Don't recall ever seeing the top-voted comment in a Google / Facebook product related post that a person will not use it because of US government surveillance. If the perception is that both governments are bad were true, then we would seeing much more of them. Someone has also (correctly) pointed out in the same thread that being tracked by the US government is significantly higher risk than the Chinese.
The company bought opera is the one with a bad reputation in the field of user privacy. Qihoo is the one which provides a software_you_dont_need installation gateway which covered by a free anti-virus mask. LOL
Let's say, worst-case scenario and this consortium of companies is heavily linked to the Chinese govt. So what? Why would a foreign govt care about me, a citizen in a Western country? For what purpose (other than to maybe sell me stuff)?
It's for this reason I have considered using a Chinese/Russian email service rather than Gmail, at least there is a chance they won't cooperate with the local authorities if they ever want to clamp down on my ass for some reaosn.
Might be a bit far-fetched, but an organisation that wanted Chinese companies to ultimately succeed might take and use information you are privy to at a medium to large, competing American (for example) company.
Do you own a business? Perhaps have some closed source software product? Many state actors would happily lift it from your inbox and pass it to some local startups.
I think most people who either own or work at businesses hopefully would be smart/careful enough to not take this risk (for business purposes I personally would only use open-source software whenever possible, and at least try and encrypt sensitive emails or just use something with E2E like Whatsapp), but people using internet/email for non-commercial purposes (i.e. the majority of users) would probably not care what state actors did.
The EULA does specifically say that the contract is based on Norweigan law, for what it's worth:
> 12. THIS CONTRACT IS BASED ON NORWEGIAN LAW. This EULA will be governed by the laws of Norway without giving effect to any conflicts of law principles that may require the application of the laws of a different country.
Other potentially interesting terms -- "components" from "third parties" may be delivered along with Opera. Operate claims they're not responsible for that software, despite making the choice to deliver it to you:
> 5. COMPONENTS FROM THIRD PARTIES MAY BE DELIVERED ALONG WITH THE SOFTWARE. The Software is delivered along with certain software components provide by third parties (“Third Party Software”). Opera shall not be responsible for any such Third-Party Software.
Opera may come with "additional services", including one that routes your browser traffic through an Opera proxy:
> 6. THE SOFTWARE MAY INCLUDE ADDITIONAL OPERA SERVICES. Various additional Opera services may be offered where available via or as integrated into the Software (“Services”). These Services may include one or more of the following:
> ii. Compression: The Software includes compression functionality to enable users to boost the download of web content such as webpages and/or videos. This functionality requests web content through Opera’s proxy or compression servers. Your browsing experience may change due to increased loading speeds.
This last clause seems to allow Opera to route your web traffic through their servers, where they presumably have the technical ability to examine, record, and modify it. It's not clear to me if the EULA places any restrictions on how they may interact with this traffic, to record it, examine it, etc.
Others of these "additional services" are described as "optional", whereas the compression service is not:
> v. Contextual Hints: The Software may include “Browser Assistant”, a component that provides contextual hints about certain Opera browser features and other useful information which you might be interested in. Browser Assistant is an optional component of the Software.
Though, to be fair: the third-party reference may be referring to open source software (but doesn't appear limited to that); and Opera's compression service is similar to features offered by other browsers like Google Chrome.
But thinking US companies are different because they claim they're not working with the American surveillance state is mostly deluding one's self. If you ask them, Opera can also probably issue a statement saying that they don't let the Chinese surveillance state spy on them, if one says "I believe you" to one class of orgs, and "I don't believe you" to another class, and the difference is the race...
Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
>Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
Without significant prove that this is not the case this handwaving way of comparing the US democratic state to China is just wrong. From Consumer protection to free and fair elections the US system is almost nothing alike the chinese system. Of course the US has massive issues (as do other Western democratic nations) but this handwavy "well they just don't tell you' stuff without actual good data behind is just destroys any credibility and is a huge problem for our democracies. Please stop doing it unless you provide exhaustive evidence.
Consumer protection? Let's ask the people in Flint how their water is. Free and fair elections? Yikes, you want to talk about this during this regime? How about voter suppression, gerrymandering, making sure minority districts have to queue for hours on voting day, electronic voting booths with accessible SD-card slots? Just because it's not covered on FOX News, it doesn't mean the problems are not there.
Or maybe oooh "We have massive issues, but China is worse.".
Also I don't think Obama ever did any curtailing of the NSA's program. Hello to the NSA machine reading this!
Did China's Great Internet Firewall and eager to control how their population access the web somehow pass you?
I am not racist, I am not placing this blame on a Chinese person's race, persona, or anything. This isn't about the governed Chinese people in the first place.
>Did China's Great Internet Firewall and eager to control how their population access the web somehow pass you?
No, neither the US's Great Internet Surveillance, and long track record of working with, arming, helping, and installing in power dictators and friendly lackeys all around the world, from Latin America to Europe.
>How is that relevant in any way to the topic at hand?
The topic at hand is "why trust your data to X".
If everybody trusts their data to Y, which has the same or even worse track record than X, then "how's Y worse than X which you already trust with your data" is a very relevant question to ask. It can make people consider both X and Y in perspective, and even consider moving their data to a safer Z alternative.
>whataboutism
I don't particularly care for knee-jerk accusations of thought crimes like "whataboutism".
"What about" is a very useful question. Only idiots speak of something without placing it on a larger context, and without considering the alternatives.
Invocation of whataboutism basically makes it a thought crime to put things in perspective. It's a tool used to constrain discussion, whereas "what about x" expands the scope of the discussion.
That's a bit of a false equivalence. Letting me do something while you watch is not the same as you stopping (and punishing) me from doing it right away. You can argue which one is worse from a moral perspective, but they are not the same.
As for the shitty foreign policy - if I had to buy only stuff produced in "ethical" countries, I'd be living naked and eating only dried fish.
>That's a bit of a false equivalence. Letting me do something while you watch is not the same as you stopping (and punishing) me from doing it right away.
No, but as a citizen of a third country, you worry about countries with a history of messing with third countries (especially yours), not about countries that mess with their own citizenry.
Someone in Chile for example, would probably worry more about their data falling in the hands of Google, than about falling in the hands of China (since the latter never was in bed with Pinochet, even if it censors the internet from its own citizens).
There's a thing called "chilling effects". People stop talking about "risky" subjects because they know they can get prosecuted arbitrarily for it.
The gameplan is simple:
* Someone says something the government doesn't like.
* A plan is devised to get this person in jail and/or to discredit them and/or to ruin their careers.
* In the case of jail, evidence for a crime is collected (from SIGINT) extralegally, and is used to innocuously find, or let someone else find, admissible evidence for the crime. This is called parallel construction and it is very real.
* Maybe they're only sued with the purpose of discrediting them via the press, while making them unable to keep their jobs. Maybe they're actually put in a cage.
It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism, especially on the part of the population that is more observant and able to affect policy change.
It's not the same, but lets not pretend the US is a lighting beacon of freedom and democracy. Maybe compared to China, but definitely not when compared to e.g. the Netherlands. (I'm biased though.)
> It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism
It's a very different thing, simply because it cannot be deployed on a large scale. It's equivalent to old-school spycraft of honey-trapping and blackmailing. You can apply this process to a few individuals, but not to everyone without massive effort - the framing and follow-up takes too much manpower - and without risking reputation damage from repeated abuses.
On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of the US system but China is still a step below IMHO.
>On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Yes, but on the other hand, speaking of "detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law", China has 1/2 or 1/3 the prison population per citizens that the US has (which is the world leader in this regard, with 25% of the worlds prison population for just 4-5% of its general population).
Previous stands on privacy/security, knowledge of where they make actually make money and widely spread shareholder base/publicly identifiable managers.
3) Firefox(Moz://a)
It's a bit for profit and everything of theirs is open source, and therefore auditable.
Apple PR on privacy is not in line with the icloud based fappening[1] and this one got highly publicized because it involved hundreds of naked celebrities.
Mozilla was historically almost entirely funded by google for fueling their personal data collection and profiling (this only changed when firefox started to become irrelevant and mozilla had to scramble for survival and their first move was to keep the same offense but with a different actor), they refuse to block tracking and ads not to infuriate their income source (gave rise to a free software version that does this and removed the mozilla proprietary "phone home" plugin), firefox includes a remote spying mechanism called "telemetry" and punish users that take step to protect their privacy from this as demonstrated during the recent dropping of alsa support debacle.
Let's not forget their origin, the name "mozilla" stands for mosaic killer and clearly states that they aim to be dominating the web browser market. The move open source was forced and due to circumstances, firefox is a failed attempt at fixing performance issues in the mozilla suite, etc.
Mozilla and Firefox also has a deserved reputation for making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. I'd rather not trust them much either.
The fappening was due to weak password security, and a set of criminals smart enough to sit on the exploit in order to achieve a goal. It wasn't due to some huge error or negligence on Apple's part.
> funded by Google
It's still an in profit producing open source software.
> a remote spying mechanism call telemetry
So does almost every other browser. It's easy enough to disable from memory.
> attempting to dominate the browser market
It's the reason IE isn't the market leader. There's a good reason for it to want market share.
I don't particularly trust Moz://a, I just trust Firefox a butt-ton more than Chrome or Opera.
AFAIK the fappening happened through a security flaw in apple icloud API that allowed for infinite password retries without rate limiting and failure to notice and notify repeated failed attempts.
Yes it still is open source software, but that itself does not mean that it puts user interest before its main income source interest, the point here was that mozilla has a strong stance for refusing to include tracking prevention and ad blocking while marketing itself as privacy minded and user centric software. Says one thing and does another.
What other browsers do or do not is irrelevant to the criticism and trustworthiness of mozilla, but for the record AFAIK there's no telemetry in otter or arora or rekonq or konqueror or pale moon or waterfox or iron or qupzilla or uzbl. Point is free software usually comes without spying mechanisms.
Besides telemetry is only one spying thing among many others that have come and gone or are still in firefox (hello, pocket, automatic geolocation, etc.) and at times disabling them does not actually prevent the behaviour from happening. have a look at the privacy patches for firefox[1] for some examples.
You seem to have missed the point about the objective or market domination, it predates IE but the point was that the vision and priorities are wrong.
That's being said, we hold similar stances here. No trust at all for chrome and opera. A bit of non blind trust for mozilla for lack of a better alternative.
Both Firefox and Chromium are open source so you can compile them yourself. Opera never was AFAIK. I still use Opera Mini on Mobile though, because it has an ad-blocker that saves me hundreds of Mb on my data plan each month.
We shouldn't be too quick to branding those with a valid criticism of a government (or for that matter, a religion or even culture) as being racist. This prevents valid discussion of difficult topics and perpetuates the idea that we live in an overly politically correct world, which I think only helps to fester true racism.
If someone violates the site guidelines, you don't get a pass to violate them that much further. The rules aren't idempotent! So please don't do this again.
Turns out firefox is a product of the for profit mozilla corporation the twin of the non profit mozilla foundation, clever way to play both sides.
Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel, firefox pocket, talkback, etc.
Then again a free license is not a guarantee of no wrongdoings.
Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture:
- Users asked for blocking of tracking and ads, mozilla repeatedly refused to deliver.
- Users asked for keeping the UI they were accustomed to, Mozilla did not care and pushed the new Australis to fit their agenda of unifying experience over desktop and mobile
- KDE users asked for something more integrated than simply dropping the gnome file selection windows, the bug has been lingering somewhere for more than a decade
- Linux users asked for alsa support, a dev came forward offering to fix mozilla own shortcomings and maintain it, the answer was that they would continue their plan of abandoning alsa for pulseaudio.
- Users have repeatedly ask to not make firefox more chrome like, firefox is still getting increasingly a trying hard to be chrome lookalike.
- Users are asking to keep support for extensions as it is the reason they use firefox, mozilla is adamant they will go on with theirs plans of replacing support of extensions by the one used by chrome.
- Users asked for the return of the removed status bar, Mozilla denied this.
- Users wanted to keep DRM out of firefox, Mozilla put DRM in firefox.
- Users did not want mandatory signed extensions, Mozilla gave then mandatory signed extensions.
This list could go on and on and on, firefox history is littered with such examples of not caring about the interests of users and not listening to them and giving priority to their own agenda.
That been said, google, apple and mozilla are all collecting personal data of their users and they're all us based and as such are all under the effect of the patriot act.
I admit that I do distrust google and apple more than mozilla, but history and experience taught me that I should not trust mozilla/firefox for something else than doing their own thing whatever that is.
As a result I keep away from google/apple as if it was the plague, but I still have firefox around because with the addition of a dozen extensions[1] I can disable most of the crap mozilla put in there, add what they removed, add what they refused to put in and getting closer to be something I can use.
Nonetheless, Firefox is on its way out now that it is unable to provide audio and is about to drop support for extensions that are required to make it useful. I have to admit that it's not as much the dropping of alsa that motivated this but the way mozilla handled this and their attitude. It's maybe the 3rd or 4th time I quit firefox but this time I'm not coming back.
[1]: ublock origin, noscript, classic theme restorer, all-in-one sidebar, all-in-one gestures, downthemall, firebug, new add on bar, privacy settings, self-destructing cookies, tab mix plus, request policy continued, tab groups, tab groups helper, screengrab (fix version), random agent spoofer, SSLeuth, and a few more. I had some extension to make bookmarks usable in firefox but I stopped using bookmarks altogether and now use a combination of wallabag and shaarli instead.
> Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel
Renaming Firefox in Debian had nothing to do with it being only "mostly" free software. If you fork the Linux kernel, modify it and then call it "Linux", Linus Torvalds has the right to ask you to change the name because he owns the trademark. Perfectly fine with the GPL.
> Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users [...]
Please prove that these are the majority of their users. Because I'm perfectly fine with removing the status bar for example or showing KDE users (which are in the minority btw) the middle finger (aka the stupid GtkFileChooser). Also for extensions: Users who still use XUL extension are in a minority (Mozilla did an analysis about this). I know many people who are even using Firefox without any extensions, most people I know only use an adblocker.
So everything this shows that Mozilla doesn't listen to ALL its users, but I guess it's impossible to satisfy everyone. The majority of Firefox users have already switched to Chrome anyway :(
That's one of the things that annoys me about Mozilla. When you complain about something that changes, they tell you you should have spoken up before it got changed. When you speak up about something that is changing, you're always the "vocal minority" and it's never going to happen. I still wake up sweaty in the middle of the night after dreams about "vocal minority" and "WONTFIX".
Also annoying is that a huge percentage of 'power users' have disabled telemetry, which screws us over when it comes time for Mozilla to pick the feature of the week to remove.
Anecdotally, I switched to Vivaldi shortly after Mozilla started removing useful features (like tab grouping) and replacing them with Pocket and Hello. I couldn't be happier and I kind of wish I had joined the Chromium bandwagon sooner.
Edit: "your weird racist overtones" crosses into personal attack, since the commenter was talking about a government. Please don't do that in HN threads.
Opera used to be amazing, a few years ago it had a built in RSS, mail and IRC client, then even later (and right before the acquisition) they were still ahead with their UX by having a "Read Later" section to the browser and allowing you to easily customise and make folders in your "first page".
Now its just a mess and Vivaldi is not much better.
opera is not a mess--it is the best of the browsers...i use it as default browser on my desktop...opera is easily better than chrome or firefox...has far far fewer issues and slowdowns and freezes and crashes...opera is a great browser...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadStill, I was long time Opera user but so far it didn't feel same after they went for webkit. This seems promising, time to try again.
I think they are doing this by having Opera Browser watch for uninstallation of Opera VPN and possibly vice-versa and when one detects the other has been uninstalled it launches the page, clever but annoying.
(I also think what you said is against Google ToS)
Thanks for chiming in. I didn't know this kind of company or business model existed, so now I will be more wary about installing seemingly benign apps. (I am not an app developer).
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https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inte...
And I do use Opera as a default browser.
The correct Ctrl+Tab behaviour which works like Alt+Tab (switch between the most recent tabs, with a small popup list of tabs) is the main reason for that. Much more productive for me than the usual "cycle over all of open tabs sequentially" behaviour that Chrome, Firefox, and everyone else have (except the Vivaldi browser).
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
1. Go to about:config
2. Search for browser.ctrlTab.previews
3. Change value to `true`
4. Close tab
Now your ctrl+tab should work as you want.
If you wanted multiple sites open you had multiple browser windows on the taskbar.
That became unmanageable quite fast, so we got tabs.
Note btw that even the earliest Opera had "tabs". It used MDI to provide multiple sites within a single browser window. This stuck with Opera all the way to version 12. After that they changed over to being a Chrome clone.
A few years back the founders got removed and there was a shift to quarterly profit and they stopped developing and maintaining their own rendering engine and browser to basically become a skin for google chrome, saving costs. In the recent times they improved their skin status and tried to sell the whole package and managed to do last summer to a chinese consortium of investors.
I suppose right now opera gets its money from the deep pockets of rich chinese investors, the current business model might have something to do with surveillance capitalism.
If this is the best Opera has to offer today, they won't last long.
And then they end up having to build spl apps and extensions and other garbage that work around and hack cross domain/local file policy, just so the content already on my disk can be read and searched by the browser.
When such a treasure trove of web content is accessible offline the browser can and should be the way to access it.
As the web becomes more and more a corporate sponsored attention sink strong offline support can be a valuable browser feature.
Bookmarks are subject to link rot, having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage, bookmarks are useless when you are offline,... the list goes on and on and I have yet to see any browser even try to do something to address these.
They are not designed to be used as a personal knowledge base or a wiki.
Edit: One of my most used bookmarks is to a specific url on localhost. I'd say bookmarks are as useless as a browser gets while you're offline.
> Bookmarks are subject to link rot
That can be fixed pretty easily: when the user bookmarks, submit a job to the Internet Archive, then use it whenever you get an error page from that link. FF already does half of it with the experimental no-404 extension. Alternatively, you can have your own InternetArchive-like service to do that, which is basically what services like Pocket and Pinboard do.
> having more than a hundred of them is a timesink nightmare to manage
You don't really have to manage them - these days they show up as soon as you type in the address bar. Ideally you'd have some sort of AI-powered categorisation system auto-filing them in dedicated folders, which could probably work with a bit of specialized meta tags. It's basically the age-old problem with filing documents of any type.
> bookmarks are useless when you are offline
Yeah well, a browser is also kinda useless when offline...
Sadly this kind of feature disappeared when opera moved to a quarterly profit based strategy.
The kind of feature you want is achievable today but requires a set of tools beyond a web browser and some human work. It's also a bit tedious to maintain up to date.
kiwix doesnt support stackoverflow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockmelt
I think "Reborn" is a bit of a stretch here.
http://www.goldenbrickcapital.com/en/Aboutus.html
Opera is now a combination of the Epic Privacy Browser and the Vivaldi Browser. They copied Epic's privacy features and in-built VPN/proxy and Vivaldi's social networking sidebars (which incidentally Opera pioneered and Vivaldi's founder is the Opera co-founder).
I'm no tinfoil-hat but this combination doesn't really strike as "privacy focused".
It's not even just about a trust issue with Chinese company culture. It's that the Chinese government have ways of getting into even resisting companies at their whim that are judged alright in completely different ways than in Norwegian law. So; even if I trusted Opera Software, even if I trusted this consortium that I don't know, even then...?
This kind of reasoning also applies to facebook, any alphabet or google product/service, apple, uber, airbnb, and pretty much any company/service that's based in the US where the patriot act pretty much makes all these companies open bar for the US government.
More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
True, if I used Google, or their products.
But, I use Mozilla, who are publicly auditable, and an email provider that is not located in the US.
The majority of visits to websites have no search engine interaction, but those that do, make use of DuckDuckGo and the like.
> More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.
Bringing up the US here, isn't entirely relevant. We're speaking about China, who have demonstrated some interesting ethics around people who are non-Chinese over the past few decades. Yes, the US is of concern, but that doesn't mean that China isn't one.
Secondly, your browser doesn't just have your history. It also has your authentication attempts, because it makes them. It also controls what certificates you use, and can trivially be used to MITM every authentication you make, unless pinning or other not-well-adopted practices are used. Which can give them everything.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible to build such a tool.
you can take measures to prevent them from tracking you, a simple and quite effective one is to disable scripting and use a properly set up blocker such as ublock origin.
I particularly hate Facebook though, for turning most everyone around me into US informants.
If I see the opportunity to contribute to their obsoletion I'll dedicate years of my life to that.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpy5vt4zfuwgzax/the%20not%20so%20d...
Here you go: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/diaspora
So, just like the US government?
Do these tangents on "the US bad too" and "no China worse" bore anyone else?
It's for this reason I have considered using a Chinese/Russian email service rather than Gmail, at least there is a chance they won't cooperate with the local authorities if they ever want to clamp down on my ass for some reaosn.
Particularly as people use this to browse private repositories, corporate intranets, etc.
> 12. THIS CONTRACT IS BASED ON NORWEGIAN LAW. This EULA will be governed by the laws of Norway without giving effect to any conflicts of law principles that may require the application of the laws of a different country.
Other potentially interesting terms -- "components" from "third parties" may be delivered along with Opera. Operate claims they're not responsible for that software, despite making the choice to deliver it to you:
> 5. COMPONENTS FROM THIRD PARTIES MAY BE DELIVERED ALONG WITH THE SOFTWARE. The Software is delivered along with certain software components provide by third parties (“Third Party Software”). Opera shall not be responsible for any such Third-Party Software.
Opera may come with "additional services", including one that routes your browser traffic through an Opera proxy:
> 6. THE SOFTWARE MAY INCLUDE ADDITIONAL OPERA SERVICES. Various additional Opera services may be offered where available via or as integrated into the Software (“Services”). These Services may include one or more of the following:
> ii. Compression: The Software includes compression functionality to enable users to boost the download of web content such as webpages and/or videos. This functionality requests web content through Opera’s proxy or compression servers. Your browsing experience may change due to increased loading speeds.
This last clause seems to allow Opera to route your web traffic through their servers, where they presumably have the technical ability to examine, record, and modify it. It's not clear to me if the EULA places any restrictions on how they may interact with this traffic, to record it, examine it, etc.
Others of these "additional services" are described as "optional", whereas the compression service is not:
> v. Contextual Hints: The Software may include “Browser Assistant”, a component that provides contextual hints about certain Opera browser features and other useful information which you might be interested in. Browser Assistant is an optional component of the Software.
Though, to be fair: the third-party reference may be referring to open source software (but doesn't appear limited to that); and Opera's compression service is similar to features offered by other browsers like Google Chrome.
Obviously in the US there's more checks and balances, to make a company's statement more believable. Or that's what we believe anyway...
Without significant prove that this is not the case this handwaving way of comparing the US democratic state to China is just wrong. From Consumer protection to free and fair elections the US system is almost nothing alike the chinese system. Of course the US has massive issues (as do other Western democratic nations) but this handwavy "well they just don't tell you' stuff without actual good data behind is just destroys any credibility and is a huge problem for our democracies. Please stop doing it unless you provide exhaustive evidence.
Because "it's obvious in the case of China"?
Or maybe oooh "We have massive issues, but China is worse.".
Also I don't think Obama ever did any curtailing of the NSA's program. Hello to the NSA machine reading this!
I am not racist, I am not placing this blame on a Chinese person's race, persona, or anything. This isn't about the governed Chinese people in the first place.
No, neither the US's Great Internet Surveillance, and long track record of working with, arming, helping, and installing in power dictators and friendly lackeys all around the world, from Latin America to Europe.
The topic at hand is "why trust your data to X".
If everybody trusts their data to Y, which has the same or even worse track record than X, then "how's Y worse than X which you already trust with your data" is a very relevant question to ask. It can make people consider both X and Y in perspective, and even consider moving their data to a safer Z alternative.
>whataboutism
I don't particularly care for knee-jerk accusations of thought crimes like "whataboutism".
"What about" is a very useful question. Only idiots speak of something without placing it on a larger context, and without considering the alternatives.
Invocation of whataboutism basically makes it a thought crime to put things in perspective. It's a tool used to constrain discussion, whereas "what about x" expands the scope of the discussion.
As for the shitty foreign policy - if I had to buy only stuff produced in "ethical" countries, I'd be living naked and eating only dried fish.
No, but as a citizen of a third country, you worry about countries with a history of messing with third countries (especially yours), not about countries that mess with their own citizenry.
Someone in Chile for example, would probably worry more about their data falling in the hands of Google, than about falling in the hands of China (since the latter never was in bed with Pinochet, even if it censors the internet from its own citizens).
There's a thing called "chilling effects". People stop talking about "risky" subjects because they know they can get prosecuted arbitrarily for it.
The gameplan is simple:
* Someone says something the government doesn't like.
* A plan is devised to get this person in jail and/or to discredit them and/or to ruin their careers.
* In the case of jail, evidence for a crime is collected (from SIGINT) extralegally, and is used to innocuously find, or let someone else find, admissible evidence for the crime. This is called parallel construction and it is very real.
* Maybe they're only sued with the purpose of discrediting them via the press, while making them unable to keep their jobs. Maybe they're actually put in a cage.
It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism, especially on the part of the population that is more observant and able to affect policy change.
It's not the same, but lets not pretend the US is a lighting beacon of freedom and democracy. Maybe compared to China, but definitely not when compared to e.g. the Netherlands. (I'm biased though.)
It's a very different thing, simply because it cannot be deployed on a large scale. It's equivalent to old-school spycraft of honey-trapping and blackmailing. You can apply this process to a few individuals, but not to everyone without massive effort - the framing and follow-up takes too much manpower - and without risking reputation damage from repeated abuses.
On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of the US system but China is still a step below IMHO.
Yes, but on the other hand, speaking of "detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law", China has 1/2 or 1/3 the prison population per citizens that the US has (which is the world leader in this regard, with 25% of the worlds prison population for just 4-5% of its general population).
I don't trust them.
2) Apple
Previous stands on privacy/security, knowledge of where they make actually make money and widely spread shareholder base/publicly identifiable managers.
3) Firefox(Moz://a)
It's a bit for profit and everything of theirs is open source, and therefore auditable.
Mozilla was historically almost entirely funded by google for fueling their personal data collection and profiling (this only changed when firefox started to become irrelevant and mozilla had to scramble for survival and their first move was to keep the same offense but with a different actor), they refuse to block tracking and ads not to infuriate their income source (gave rise to a free software version that does this and removed the mozilla proprietary "phone home" plugin), firefox includes a remote spying mechanism called "telemetry" and punish users that take step to protect their privacy from this as demonstrated during the recent dropping of alsa support debacle.
Let's not forget their origin, the name "mozilla" stands for mosaic killer and clearly states that they aim to be dominating the web browser market. The move open source was forced and due to circumstances, firefox is a failed attempt at fixing performance issues in the mozilla suite, etc.
Mozilla and Firefox also has a deserved reputation for making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. I'd rather not trust them much either.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...
> funded by Google
It's still an in profit producing open source software.
> a remote spying mechanism call telemetry
So does almost every other browser. It's easy enough to disable from memory.
> attempting to dominate the browser market
It's the reason IE isn't the market leader. There's a good reason for it to want market share.
I don't particularly trust Moz://a, I just trust Firefox a butt-ton more than Chrome or Opera.
Yes it still is open source software, but that itself does not mean that it puts user interest before its main income source interest, the point here was that mozilla has a strong stance for refusing to include tracking prevention and ad blocking while marketing itself as privacy minded and user centric software. Says one thing and does another.
What other browsers do or do not is irrelevant to the criticism and trustworthiness of mozilla, but for the record AFAIK there's no telemetry in otter or arora or rekonq or konqueror or pale moon or waterfox or iron or qupzilla or uzbl. Point is free software usually comes without spying mechanisms. Besides telemetry is only one spying thing among many others that have come and gone or are still in firefox (hello, pocket, automatic geolocation, etc.) and at times disabling them does not actually prevent the behaviour from happening. have a look at the privacy patches for firefox[1] for some examples.
You seem to have missed the point about the objective or market domination, it predates IE but the point was that the vision and priorities are wrong.
That's being said, we hold similar stances here. No trust at all for chrome and opera. A bit of non blind trust for mozilla for lack of a better alternative.
[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=202766
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
If someone violates the site guidelines, you don't get a pass to violate them that much further. The rules aren't idempotent! So please don't do this again.
It's pretty outrageous to lump these three together.
1) Google is an advertising company that makes its money selling user data/impressions to advertisers.
2) Apple is a hardware company that makes its money selling gadgets to consumers.
3) Firefox is free/libre software produced by Mozilla, a nonprofit foundation that champions the interests of users.
Then there's history that shows that firefox is mostly free software but not entirely see icecat, iceweasel, firefox pocket, talkback, etc.
Then again a free license is not a guarantee of no wrongdoings.
Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users asked for blocking of tracking and ads, mozilla repeatedly refused to deliver. - Users asked for keeping the UI they were accustomed to, Mozilla did not care and pushed the new Australis to fit their agenda of unifying experience over desktop and mobile - KDE users asked for something more integrated than simply dropping the gnome file selection windows, the bug has been lingering somewhere for more than a decade - Linux users asked for alsa support, a dev came forward offering to fix mozilla own shortcomings and maintain it, the answer was that they would continue their plan of abandoning alsa for pulseaudio. - Users have repeatedly ask to not make firefox more chrome like, firefox is still getting increasingly a trying hard to be chrome lookalike. - Users are asking to keep support for extensions as it is the reason they use firefox, mozilla is adamant they will go on with theirs plans of replacing support of extensions by the one used by chrome. - Users asked for the return of the removed status bar, Mozilla denied this. - Users wanted to keep DRM out of firefox, Mozilla put DRM in firefox. - Users did not want mandatory signed extensions, Mozilla gave then mandatory signed extensions.
This list could go on and on and on, firefox history is littered with such examples of not caring about the interests of users and not listening to them and giving priority to their own agenda.
That been said, google, apple and mozilla are all collecting personal data of their users and they're all us based and as such are all under the effect of the patriot act.
I admit that I do distrust google and apple more than mozilla, but history and experience taught me that I should not trust mozilla/firefox for something else than doing their own thing whatever that is.
As a result I keep away from google/apple as if it was the plague, but I still have firefox around because with the addition of a dozen extensions[1] I can disable most of the crap mozilla put in there, add what they removed, add what they refused to put in and getting closer to be something I can use. Nonetheless, Firefox is on its way out now that it is unable to provide audio and is about to drop support for extensions that are required to make it useful. I have to admit that it's not as much the dropping of alsa that motivated this but the way mozilla handled this and their attitude. It's maybe the 3rd or 4th time I quit firefox but this time I'm not coming back.
[1]: ublock origin, noscript, classic theme restorer, all-in-one sidebar, all-in-one gestures, downthemall, firebug, new add on bar, privacy settings, self-destructing cookies, tab mix plus, request policy continued, tab groups, tab groups helper, screengrab (fix version), random agent spoofer, SSLeuth, and a few more. I had some extension to make bookmarks usable in firefox but I stopped using bookmarks altogether and now use a combination of wallabag and shaarli instead.
Renaming Firefox in Debian had nothing to do with it being only "mostly" free software. If you fork the Linux kernel, modify it and then call it "Linux", Linus Torvalds has the right to ask you to change the name because he owns the trademark. Perfectly fine with the GPL.
As Debian stable doesn't ship bug fixes this reflects back on Firefox / Mozilla, because user will complain about it. See https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop... for another example.
> Lastly mozilla definitely not champions the interests of users, there what they say and then there's what they do and here history again depicts a different picture: - Users [...]
Please prove that these are the majority of their users. Because I'm perfectly fine with removing the status bar for example or showing KDE users (which are in the minority btw) the middle finger (aka the stupid GtkFileChooser). Also for extensions: Users who still use XUL extension are in a minority (Mozilla did an analysis about this). I know many people who are even using Firefox without any extensions, most people I know only use an adblocker.
So everything this shows that Mozilla doesn't listen to ALL its users, but I guess it's impossible to satisfy everyone. The majority of Firefox users have already switched to Chrome anyway :(
Also annoying is that a huge percentage of 'power users' have disabled telemetry, which screws us over when it comes time for Mozilla to pick the feature of the week to remove.
Anecdotally, I switched to Vivaldi shortly after Mozilla started removing useful features (like tab grouping) and replacing them with Pocket and Hello. I couldn't be happier and I kind of wish I had joined the Chromium bandwagon sooner.
Racism is hate due to (tl;dr) skin colour and/or ethnicity.
The comment you don't agree with quoted nationality (a totally different subject).
Edit: "your weird racist overtones" crosses into personal attack, since the commenter was talking about a government. Please don't do that in HN threads.
Perhaps it could reside in a little "window", then it could be moved anywhere! ....wait, this sounds familiar.
/s
Now its just a mess and Vivaldi is not much better.