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Opera's browser is now available with chess baked in
- great_psy 3y agoNice to see that the browser toolbars of early 2000s are making a comeback. Just as useless, and they steal even more of your data. /s
- pipo234 3y agoHmm. Let's add some fringe functionality to extend our browser's attack surface. Will surely make 0.01% of our customers happy, while demonstrating our devs are committed and have their eye on the ball.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- repelsteeltje 3y agoLOL. Why have a PM waste time doing market research if you can just scratch your own itch?
- weedfroglozenge 3y agoMakes it easier to have an engine open behind :(
- qsort 3y agoWhat exactly makes "chess" baked in? It sounds like they struck a deal with chess.com to put a bookmark that opens a regular web page. It's no more "baked in" than accessing the same website via Chrome or Safari. By the way, check out lichess.org. Free, open source, no ads, interesting architecture, servers that don't crash, feature parity with chess.com.
- 22c 3y agoOpera has been doing this "custom version" thing for a little while as a kind of marketing tactic. I've seen it with a few popular content creators getting their own "custom version" of Opera where it has an on-brand theme and links to their content directly baked into the browser download. Presumably there is some kind of customisation pass that thinly wraps the regular installation process. I don't personally get the appeal but maybe big brands are more likely to feature the browser if it's customised (eg. live streaming a big chess.com game where the "official" tournament client is the Chess.com Opera Browser).
- RockRobotRock 3y agoOpera GX's Twitter marketing is so insane...Probably to help push their games site: https://gx.games/ https://gx.games/
- rmbyrro 3y agoI hear chess.com is better at combating cheaters. Hard to prove / disprove the claim. Anyways, I guess this is one reason for some people. Sponsoring players and influencers certainly helps cementing their brand.
- 317070 3y ago> I hear chess.com is better at combating cheaters. That contradicts what I have been hearing. And it makes total sense. Unlike on lichess, the incentives are wrong for chess.com to remove whale cheaters.
- not1ofU 3y agoposted 5 days ago - chess podcast with: Fabiano Caruana and Cristian Chirila Special guest - Vladimir Kramnik, who has being researching cheating in chess with stats, quite intersting / disturbing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng3lTBAi4Ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng3lTBAi4Ps
- rectang 3y agoRelated,because it’s another human problem: lichess is way better than other free options I used to play (freechess.org, yahoo chess) at keeping comments under control.
- perihelions 3y ago- "It sounds like they struck a deal with chess.com" Well yeah, it says that right in the first sentence ("exciting new partnership..."). It'd be unlawful if they didn't prominently disclose that this is a paid endorsement. There's a diversity of both paid and free chess servers, and the paid ones don't hold any particular advantage today. This kind of ad (it *is* an ad) takes predatory advantage of people unaware of the internet chess landscape, to funnel them into handing over their wallet when it's completely unwarranted. (See e.g., lichess.org [0]). And all this Opera stuff is baffling to me. Why would anyone choose to put advertisements in their browser, in any form? Ads don't inform you–as this example shows, they mislead and prey on you. The conventional defense of ads is they fill in information gaps: they tell you about services you want but didn't know were available, like an interesting restaurant on a nearby side street you've never visited. But it's so much more often the opposite: this ad convinces people to pay for a service they don't want and don't need. It takes advantage of information asymmetry, of the consumer's lack of familiarity with the product domain: it doesn't flatten that asymmetry, but exploits it. It takes authentic humans, like me right here, to tell you "internet chess is free and you probably don't want to pay for it like all the ads tell you to". No commercial agent will do that. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lichess https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lichess
- stevage 3y agoAs a keen chess player, although I prefer lichess, there are definitely lots of features that chess.com has that it doesn't. Lots of interesting variants for a start, and some pretty cool analysis tools.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThe main thing chess.com has going for it is it's monetised, so it can sponsor more professional chess.
- woah 3y agoHow do you bake a web browser in the first place?
- sergiomattei 3y agoAwesome! They can finally track and sell my ingenious chess strategies to the highest bidder.
- brettermeier 3y agoGiven the fact that Opera is Malware that sends all your data directly to China, I really don't care about there goodies built in to trap people.
- vb-8448 3y agoIs this really different from chrome sending data to google, edge to microsoft or safari to apple?
- bsdooby 3y agoThis Opera bashing. You are right: what exactly makes Opera less privacy friendly compared to the other browsers? Me wonders...
- tored 3y agoTechnically no, but perhaps legally, data protection laws in China is probably non-existant.
- vb-8448 3y agoAccording to Court of Justice of the European Union(Schrems II verdict) even data protection laws in US are non-existant.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThe problem with the USA isn't actually the lack of data protection itself, that can be handled through contract law. The problem is the lack of protection from the US government through the PATRIOT ACT and its successors. The laws themselves exist to a certain extent, but the government places itself above the law in ways that aren't acceptable inside the EU and the other states who implemented the GDPR. This is because Europe is not part of the USA, which means the protections against tyrannical government interference don't apply; those protections only apply to Americans.
- prmoustache 3y ago
- jiofj 3y agoFunny they've struck a deal to put ads in the browser and they tell you as if they were doing you a favour.
- have_faith 3y agoAm I reading it right that there's a custom build of the browser that only adds a shortcut to the sidebar?
- maweki 3y agoProbably more like a custom installer with an extended default configuration.
- roydivision 3y agoGood to see companies like this concentrating on the important things.
- birracerveza 3y agoBetween this and Opera GX's twitter, I guess they are going 200% in on memes. Maybe it's a valid strategy to give up on seriousness if you can't tackle mainstream competition head on... I am not saying this to throw shade, it might legitimately be a good idea. Of course, attack surface, spyware, blah blah, but users don't care about that, sadly. Someone might install it just because it's le funny browser. I'm expecting Opera's logo to change to doge any day now.
- robin_reala 3y agoTbf they’d just be copying Firefox: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/heres-whats-happening-with-the-firefox-nightly-logo/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/heres-whats-happening-with...
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt works though, a younger generation is a big fan of Opera GX. In part because it's aimed / branded for GaMeRs, in part because it comes with a free VPN so they can get around parental controls.
- b112 3y agoAnd I imagine, data/info right into China's hands.
- dobladov 3y agoI wish they focus more on gaining parity with other browsers in caniuse.com
- pachico 3y agoSomeone thought this was a good idea...
- pjmlp 3y agoReally? As if that is something I want a browser for.
- moomin 3y agoMeh, give me a Firefox extension connecting to lichess anyday.
- tux1968 3y agoWhat functionality would you like from such an extension? Lichess is pretty full-featured already.
- nextlevelwizard 3y agoI guess you have to gimmicks when you have literally nothing to offer for the problem space
- galangalalgol 3y agoI was hoping this was an easter egg. I remember those fondly. Having a "flight simulator" hidden in excel doesn't seem professional now, more room for security vulnerabilities blah blah. I think nostalgia for a time software didn't take itself that seriously is a large part of it.
- redder23 3y agoThis is just a desperate move to gain some users because nobody is using Opera. I stick to Brave/Firefox
- imiric 3y agoIt's a shame how far Opera has fallen. From industry leaders with a lightweight web browser with arguably the fastest rendering engine, and one of the earliest implementation of tabs, novel web experiences with Opera Unite, most compatible and fastest mobile web browser in the pre-smartphone era, to... a Chinese owned Chrome copycat with gimmicky features and practical irrelevance. I'm surprised it's still alive, but I guess the advertising business model and these marketing deals are lucrative enough to keep it running.
- lbourdages 3y agoI barely even remember the non-gimmicky Opera. Seems like forever ago, they added a Bittorrent client to Opera, and I thought it was so incredibly dumb.
- jeroenhd 3y agoI actually used Opera for a while because of its built in mail and torrent integration, but I uninstalled it the moment they switched to Chromium and got rid of everything that made them unique. It beat the download manager (remember those?) I used at the time. Their bandwidth saving proxy was quite good when I needed to use it on shitty 3G back in the day.
- josefresco 3y agoYou know about Vivaldi* right? https://vivaldi.com/download/ https://vivaldi.com/download/
- ajdude 3y agoI was so heartbroken when they moved to chrome. That seemed like the beginning of the end
- yyyk 3y agoOld Opera was something else entirely - the fastest browser available, with features which still don't entirely exist in modern browsers even with extensions, like mouse gestures. Then it switched engines and got sold to some Chinese company. The modern reincarnation isn't called Opera, it's Vivaldi. I didn't use it because it was too slow (implementing the old Opera features on Chrome must have been difficult).
- mrweasel 3y agoIt's still a little sad that they discontinued the Presto based version of Opera. I used it pretty exclusively from around 2006 until the switch to Blink in 2013. I really liked the developer tools, the UI and speed. I can see why it couldn't continue, keeping up with Chrome must have been a huge financial burden with very little profit.
- pluc 3y agoAh yes, in the browser wars where everything is getting absorbed by Chromium, the end users really want reads notes fucking chess.