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The main driver for innovation and growth of the open web was that it is open. The diversity we got from that was tremendous. Anyone could make a website with w
by eis 9y ago
The main driver for innovation and growth of the open web was that it is open. The diversity we got from that was tremendous. Anyone could make a website with whatever content they could think of and people all over the world could access it. There was some kind of "web neutrality" in browsers. They didn't prefer one site over the other. The second big boost came from extendability and customizability of browsers through extensions which gave people even more control over what they would consume. And on top of that, the browers became open source, a big win all around.
Opera is going the other way. They have a closed source browser that directly integrates some specific products into the browser. You can't completely get rid of them, you can't integrate another product in the same way and I'd guess an extension can't mess with these pre-packaged addons. It's nice that you can have a messenger in a sidebar next to your current browsing page. But it's taking control away from users and that's not the way forward in an open web. Why can't this be an extension? Why can't it have a feature that lets me run two tabs side by side so I can choose what products to use there?
In general I think this Opera Reborn is still far behind say Firefox or the official Chrome. Just now you can change the filter lists in their Adblocker something that adblocking extensions could do for years. Now you can change Operas theme, i could make Firefox look like whatever I wanted forever. For all the love that the old Opera deserved, I don't think Opera is the future of web browsing.
- ReverseCold 9y agoVivaldi is a pretty good replacement for old Opera. Its based on the latest chromium (updated within a day or so of downstream updates), and has a lot of the "power user" features Opera had.
- james_pm 9y agoI've been using Opera Beta for about a year now but with Vivaldi adding some more of the core features that were missing in earlier releases (bookmarks), it's probably worth another look.
- aepiepaey 9y agoI tried Vivaldi recently and found it unusable. Much slower than other Chromes (Chrome, Opera), and the "open new tabs adjacent to current" functionality is buggy (something causes the tabs to open in an unrelated location).
- niutech 9y agoAnother good replacement for legacy Opera is a very lightweight and cross-platform Otter Browser (http://otter-browser.org http://otter-browser.org).
- bwat49 9y ago> You can't completely get rid of them You can, just right click and remove the icon from the sidebar. They are literally just glorified links to websites (e.g. if you click the messenger icon on the sidebar, it's literally just loading messenger.com as a web panel).
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoI personally prefer a browser full of built-in functionality, such as the old O12, rather than relying on extensions. Extensions add friction to browser updates and run into compatibility problems sooner or later.