Offers? Opera's board likes Qihoo, says shareholders should too Opera's board has recommended its shareholders accept a Chinese consortium's buyout offer of $1.2bn, about 53 per cent above where it has recently been trading. According to an email sent to shareholders by Opera's board, board members are unanimously in favour of the deal. If completed, the buyout would see Opera gain access …
I wish that Mozilla would look at what happened to Opera and realise that the fun side projects and useless minority features they seem hell bent on implementing in to Firefox ultimately dooms the browser. No one cares about having a Firefox OS. All people really care about is having a fast, efficient browser that is open source and isn't from Google.
There is plenty of money in Mozilla - too much I feel - so there should be no excuses. Do your job Mozilla and make Firefox great.
Have an up-vote sir!
Firefox need to be *different* from Chrome and better in a way that users appreciate, things like:
1) Not sucking. Seriously, try to keep memory use, etc, under control.
2) Value privacy. This might mean returning 'anonymous' browser info so everyone's installation looks largely the same (maybe just info that might be needed by the web site or useful for stats, such as major browser and OS versions, something like ~3 bits entropy)
3) Value privacy. For the hard of thinking, again, think! Do stuff like small dither to drawing so browser fingerprinting (like canvas draw / hash) is different *every* time they test on the same machine.
4) Respect the user's wishes. So offer the ability for all audio/video and animated images to be "click to play". I do not want web sites to start stuff in adverts, etc, and waste my bandwidth an patience. If its worth it, *I* will chose to play it.
5) Allow legacy plug-ins on demand. Sure they are not secure but there is a shed load of stuff out there that might be wanted. Make it default-off, of course, but still give me the *choice*.
6) Don't dick around with the GUI for no bloody good reason.
Release a proper Vivaldi then, that's more than just Chrome in a slightly different wrapper.
The promised mail client, and forget that webmail junk you're trying to push.
Some semblance of compatibility with Google Chrome plugins (i.e. ChromeCast just doesn't work).
Anywhere near the level of customisability and control that Opera offered.
I'm DYING to get Vivaldi, the promised one from over a year ago, that can do this stuff. But at the moment, it remembers URL's so if you type "facebook.com" and then press enter, it tends to pick up the last facebook.com/aotuoirehfdkgjhakjdfghad URL that you had and send you there. I've been to the same BBC News story a thousand times in the last month because whenever I type bbc.co.uk/news and press Enter, it sends me to that same long URL that I once clicked on an age ago on the BBC News website. Let's not even get into the fact that one option (disable single-key shortcuts) actually stops you pressing Enter in the address bar at all.
I can't arrange bookmarks with drag/drop, I can't even get them onto the bookmark bar half the time because it's so sensitive. And at the end of the day, it's Chrome because there's not much else of value there, and at least Chrome lets you Chromecast and use the other extensions.
And every time mail, etc. are mentioned, they are "coming soon". If that.
I want to sell this Vivaldi browser for you. I'm typing in it now. And it's quirks still bug me enough that I can't, despite being an INSANE Opera 12.0 fan who still has it on their laptop at home (apart from Google Play streaming, everything I use still seems to work).
Well, some of the amazing things on Opera <12 depended on hooks deep in the browser engine, they might be difficult to re-do under Chromium. This week's Vivaldi update tried to solve some Chromecast and extension issues, maybe you should try that (I don't use Chromecast - I have Kodi, natch) but all the Chrome extensions I tried work on Vivaldi.
Yep. progress on Vivaldi has been slower than I expected, but thankfully Opera 12 doesn't rot.
Yep. progress on Vivaldi has been slower than I expected, but thankfully Opera 12 doesn't rot.
Yes, still waiting for it to mature so I can make it my default browser but the return of the listening to users culture is very welcome.
I understand why Opera dropped Presto for Blink – let's face it Vivaldi does much the same thing – but the rest of the crap: getting rid of bookmarks only to reintroduce them; discover; no extensions on mobile; etc. hardly counts as innovation. I used to enjoy reading the release notes for each version of Opera, now they're just about making it shinier.
The mobile package is more coherent but just not very interesting for me.
I'm sure the developers in Poland are working flat out, I just don't know if they know they're supposed to be working on a web browser.
Opera 12 does rot
It's an unsupported browser that started rotting the moment opera stopped supporting it. It's now very likely little more than a malware router. Let's hope you don't have anything you wouldn't want hackers looking over on you PC
This is before you even consider half the web doesnt work and isnt tested against an obsolete presto rendering engine.
Check out Opera Max in the Android store..
It is essentially a man-in-the-middle interception of all unencrypted internet communications on your device.
Comms are funneled through Operas servers and compression ensues. They can also reduce some encrypted comms by informing the server site (such as YouTube) that less bandwidth is available.
They *sell* the free app on it's ability to compress your communications so you can listen to more music and watch more videos.
Because, all unencrypted comms go through their servers; you can turn OFF networking on an App by App basis.
Because it does this, and a rather slick control panel, you can immediately see what apps are chatting in the background. No device root needed. Very slick.
You also get a free VPN so, even if you are on public Wi-Fi no one can snoop on your comms. (I'm assuming Opera is not stupid and is encrypting their data stream between your phone and their servers of only for protecting their revenue stream from attacks such as ad replacement.)
It is a well behaved app, and does not have the ability to start on device boot, and every time you start it, you get a legal notice asking your permission to add it's certificate to your device.
http://www.opera.com/help/max/android
..interesting that it's not available for tablets..
I did notice on reading the legalese on installation, that all of it's servers for this behavior are US based.. not in the Netherlands. <grimace>
They also have a proper business strategy in selling the collected information to the phone carriers. They are also getting the app pre-installed on phones now including Samsung.
http://www.operasoftware.com/products/operators/opera-max
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2015/11/opera-max-100m-phones-2017/?utm_source=mainrss
Unfortunately it would be quite trivial to change the programs behavior to launch on device boot, and doing a proper man-in-the-middle attack (such as Apple recently found in their Apple Store for some ad blocking apps) on even encrypted communications.
I'm already rather uncomfortable with the servers being here in the US rather than in the Netherlands where data rights are a bit more stringent (I'm guessing it varies for each country), but if a Chinese company owned the servers.. Well..
Share and enjoy!
I've been a happy SeaMonkey user for years now, I especially like the non-changing interface and the overall no-nonsense approach (as I tend to call it). I'm of course referring to the fact that SeaMonkey is not a browser which gets all sorts of stuff crammed into it which no one would really use.
However, last year I gave Opera (28) a try and I was pleasantly surprised with its speed and features. I especially liked the fact that it could import all my bookmarks from both Internet Explorer (which I used very sporadically) as well as SeaMonkey. Next I was happy to find out that most of the plugins which I liked having around on SeaMonkey were also available for Opera (here's looking at Adblock Plus for example) and slowly but steadily I've been using Opera quite often.
The features which I like best is the speed dial screen; this is an overview page which can contain bookmarks to often used sites, the easy to activate private mode, the extensive developers extensions / modes, the Opera services (news section) and the instant access to multiple search engines (with the ability to add more yourself); this is actually a Chrome feature. So say I want to search something on Wikipedia (English) I simply enter: "we <stuff to search>" and it'll fire up the search and show me the result page on Wikipedia. 'we' stands for 'wikipedia english' and its a search engine which I manually added.
I still keep SeaMonkey around because I also like that browser a lot, but the main browser so far has definitely shifted towards Opera.
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