5 ms·

Opera will always help you block ads natively

33 points by josephcsible 2y ago

josephcsible 2y ago
> We plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Opera independently of what will happen to other browsers. Once Google rips the MV2 code out of Chromium entirely next year, are Opera's developers really going to have the resources necessary to maintain such a hard fork?
- whatyesaid 2y ago
  Maybe if Opera, Arc, and Brave people joined forces... Without a combined effort they lack the power of Chrome store and developer docs. Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine. The MV2 extensions don't need much work to leap over for Firefox
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    This is why it’s so critical that we don’t consolidate onto monocultures. It is crucial that Firefox and WebKit continue to be viable alternatives to Chromium.
  - bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
    My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Is this something that Mozilla is focusing on at all? That would seem like an important step towards actually protecting the heterogeneity of the web (or what's left of it).
  - wruza 2y ago
    Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine I wish that was the outcome. I could finally try firefox with a ui that fits my workflow.
- stavros 2y ago
  How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it. That's a definition, but I think that stavros was proposing that, much like Microsoft's "open" formats for Office, if a codebase is so complex that no-one else, not even with the resources of a full company, can maintain it, then at best its open sourceness is pro forma.
      - murderfs 2y ago
        By that logic, Linux isn't open source. Plenty of companies have abandoned products because maintaining a downstream fork of the kernel is too hard. Companies not being willing to invest resources into maintaining a fork doesn't mean it's not open source.
        Spivak 2y ago
        But companies do maintain what are essentially forks of the kernel, both Redhat and Canonical carry their own patches and have ship different kernel variants. It's not politically a fork but it's the same sort of thing.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        So whether something is open source depends on whether others bother maintaining it? Even if that doesn’t change that an individual cannot?
- Jach 2y ago
  I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes, but we'll see. The thing about Opera (and MS with Edge) is that they've already bitten the give-up bullet once by moving to a Chromium-base in the first place, rather than continue with their own separate browsers, so it seems likely to me that if the challenge of maintaining a significant difference is too great they'll bite the bullet again. Somewhat related, I read this about OpenBSD today: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd... "Robert Nagy in our group maintains 1280 patches to make chrome work on OpenBSD. Google ignores them and will not upstream them. Some of these changes are security related, and they ignore them. Other changes are to cope with security work we've done on our own, for example: JIT changes from Stephen@google for mandatory IBT which google hasn't upstreamed yet, impacts due to PROT_EXEC-only mappings, etc." As far as I can tell, most of these patches (https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium/patches/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...) are just checks for whether the code is on openbsd or not. Still, even in 2019 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5...) the author made the expected complaint trying to upstream them about how "it is getting really hard to follow all the code moving and new features". Keeping v2 compatibility will predictably get harder and harder over time.
cebert 2y ago
“ As of the end of 2023, Opera Software was 72.4% owned by Kunlun, a Chinese public company, making it a subsidiary of that company. Opera CEO James Yahui Zhou is a controlling shareholder in Kunlun.” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)]
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - cebert 2y ago
    I don’t personally want a browser, which is such an important element of my personal and professional life, owned by a Chinese company. Additional, Opera isn’t fully open source. I also don’t trust Google.
    - zztop44 2y ago
      I’m curious, what’s the rationale for this? Is it corporate espionage? Or do you live in China/have family there and engage in online activity that might cause problems?
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        You don't need to live in China or have family there to be worried about China: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illegal-overseas-police-station-chinese-government https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega... People should avoid giving more data to China out of sheer principle, regardless of their personal attachment to China.
        doctor_radium 2y ago
        Agreed, and I know Opera is Chinese-owned, but Opera's web site still lists their headquarters as Norway. Doesn't this still make them a Norwegian company, with some safeguards against abuse? Not sure if any EU laws might also come into play.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
Well we'll see in a year when Google completely shut mv2 support. Until then it's very easy to speak, especially when you have very few market share and everything to gain with marketing stunt and not much to lose.
- troymc 2y ago
  Opera already does ad blocking before you add any extensions, so the manifest v3 thing is a bit of a red herring.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Doesn’t it do that because chrome still has the corresponding api? How exactly will chrome deny chrome-based browsers of ad blocking (aka ending mv2 support in marketing speech)? The same applies to opera either way.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Opera's built-in ad blocking were internally implemented as a web extension. In any case, we'll see once Chrome drops Manifest V2; until then, promises of ongoing support are very cheap.
yapyap 2y ago
ugh, hate Opera personally. 1. Their GX twitter account is insufferably cringe, we get it, you allow your social media manager to be edgy because you saw the engagement it has driven to KFC_ES and Wendys. 2. It’s just a shit browser
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > 2. It’s just a shit browser Fallen from grace... I used Opera like 20(?) years ago. At the time it seemed better and had tabs. Do I remember it wrong? Was it way better at some point?
  - Stagnant 2y ago
    I remember Opera as being decent in the very early 2000's before Firefox took off. I also occasionally used it in the early 2010's but switched it for Vivaldi when Opera was sold to chinese ownership. Opera mini was also great for pre-touchscreen Nokia sybian phones in the mid 2000's as it made browsing the internet somewhat bearable.
  - sergiotapia 2y ago
    Opera was at it's best and cutting edge when it used Presto rendering engine, and Dragonfly for devtool. It took a shit on the competition, easily and handily! I still miss and lament the loss. We lose something beautiful! Now I follow ladybird browser, I have very high hopes for a true fresh take on a browser.
    - wruza 2y ago
      Vivaldi replaced opera for me. I was using opera since presto until around 2020 but then it decided to go gaming ui nonsense. Never cared about it being chinese. It sending anything suspicious^ will be discovered instantly and kill the product. It’s delulu for an average joe to consider this as a personal attack vector. Journalists and politicians - maybe. But not the tinfoil club. ^ above the usual info that all browsing regimes collect either way and lose in breaches
  - 2y ago
AzzyHN 2y ago
Fun fact, the built-in adblocker for GAMER BROWSER OperaGX (of YouTube sponsorship game) excludes search engine pages by default, and is happy to report "zero trackers" on google.com But I'm glad Opera is committed to providing a terrible product. The marketing seems to be working!
butz 2y ago
For me Opera died when they abandoned their own rendering engine Presto and moved to Chromium. UI was simplified greatly and many customization options disappeared. Vivaldi is spiritual successor to classic Opera browser, still using Chromium, but has all possible customization options and additional tools, like RSS reader and email client.

33 points by josephcsible 2y ago

> We plan to continue supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Opera independently of what will happen to other browsers. Once Google rips the MV2 code out of Chromium entirely next year, are Opera's developers really going to have the resources necessary to maintain such a hard fork?

whatyesaid 2y ago
Maybe if Opera, Arc, and Brave people joined forces... Without a combined effort they lack the power of Chrome store and developer docs. Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine. The MV2 extensions don't need much work to leap over for Firefox
- _mlbt 2y ago
  This is why it’s so critical that we don’t consolidate onto monocultures. It is crucial that Firefox and WebKit continue to be viable alternatives to Chromium.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
  My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Is this something that Mozilla is focusing on at all? That would seem like an important step towards actually protecting the heterogeneity of the web (or what's left of it).
- wruza 2y ago
  Worst comes to worst they can use the Firefox engine I wish that was the outcome. I could finally try firefox with a ui that fits my workflow.
stavros 2y ago
How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > Open-source-ness only depends on the source code being released under a suitable license. It has nothing to do with complexity or maintainability of it. That's a definition, but I think that stavros was proposing that, much like Microsoft's "open" formats for Office, if a codebase is so complex that no-one else, not even with the resources of a full company, can maintain it, then at best its open sourceness is pro forma.
    - murderfs 2y ago
      By that logic, Linux isn't open source. Plenty of companies have abandoned products because maintaining a downstream fork of the kernel is too hard. Companies not being willing to invest resources into maintaining a fork doesn't mean it's not open source.
      - Spivak 2y ago
        But companies do maintain what are essentially forks of the kernel, both Redhat and Canonical carry their own patches and have ship different kernel variants. It's not politically a fork but it's the same sort of thing.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        So whether something is open source depends on whether others bother maintaining it? Even if that doesn’t change that an individual cannot?
Jach 2y ago
I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes, but we'll see. The thing about Opera (and MS with Edge) is that they've already bitten the give-up bullet once by moving to a Chromium-base in the first place, rather than continue with their own separate browsers, so it seems likely to me that if the challenge of maintaining a significant difference is too great they'll bite the bullet again. Somewhat related, I read this about OpenBSD today: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/19404.1697568901@cvs.openbsd... "Robert Nagy in our group maintains 1280 patches to make chrome work on OpenBSD. Google ignores them and will not upstream them. Some of these changes are security related, and they ignore them. Other changes are to cope with security work we've done on our own, for example: JIT changes from Stephen@google for mandatory IBT which google hasn't upstreamed yet, impacts due to PROT_EXEC-only mappings, etc." As far as I can tell, most of these patches (https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium/patches/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium...) are just checks for whether the code is on openbsd or not. Still, even in 2019 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b57hDs8yE4g https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/b5...) the author made the expected complaint trying to upstream them about how "it is getting really hard to follow all the code moving and new features". Keeping v2 compatibility will predictably get harder and harder over time.

cebert 2y ago

“ As of the end of 2023, Opera Software was 72.4% owned by Kunlun, a Chinese public company, making it a subsidiary of that company. Opera CEO James Yahui Zhou is a controlling shareholder in Kunlun.” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)]

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
[flagged]
- cebert 2y ago
  I don’t personally want a browser, which is such an important element of my personal and professional life, owned by a Chinese company. Additional, Opera isn’t fully open source. I also don’t trust Google.
  - zztop44 2y ago
    I’m curious, what’s the rationale for this? Is it corporate espionage? Or do you live in China/have family there and engage in online activity that might cause problems?
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      You don't need to live in China or have family there to be worried about China: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illegal-overseas-police-station-chinese-government https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega... People should avoid giving more data to China out of sheer principle, regardless of their personal attachment to China.
      - doctor_radium 2y ago
        Agreed, and I know Opera is Chinese-owned, but Opera's web site still lists their headquarters as Norway. Doesn't this still make them a Norwegian company, with some safeguards against abuse? Not sure if any EU laws might also come into play.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

Well we'll see in a year when Google completely shut mv2 support. Until then it's very easy to speak, especially when you have very few market share and everything to gain with marketing stunt and not much to lose.

troymc 2y ago
Opera already does ad blocking before you add any extensions, so the manifest v3 thing is a bit of a red herring.
- wruza 2y ago
  Doesn’t it do that because chrome still has the corresponding api? How exactly will chrome deny chrome-based browsers of ad blocking (aka ending mv2 support in marketing speech)? The same applies to opera either way.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Opera's built-in ad blocking were internally implemented as a web extension. In any case, we'll see once Chrome drops Manifest V2; until then, promises of ongoing support are very cheap.

yapyap 2y ago

ugh, hate Opera personally. 1. Their GX twitter account is insufferably cringe, we get it, you allow your social media manager to be edgy because you saw the engagement it has driven to KFC_ES and Wendys. 2. It’s just a shit browser

rightbyte 2y ago
> 2. It’s just a shit browser Fallen from grace... I used Opera like 20(?) years ago. At the time it seemed better and had tabs. Do I remember it wrong? Was it way better at some point?
- Stagnant 2y ago
  I remember Opera as being decent in the very early 2000's before Firefox took off. I also occasionally used it in the early 2010's but switched it for Vivaldi when Opera was sold to chinese ownership. Opera mini was also great for pre-touchscreen Nokia sybian phones in the mid 2000's as it made browsing the internet somewhat bearable.
- sergiotapia 2y ago
  Opera was at it's best and cutting edge when it used Presto rendering engine, and Dragonfly for devtool. It took a shit on the competition, easily and handily! I still miss and lament the loss. We lose something beautiful! Now I follow ladybird browser, I have very high hopes for a true fresh take on a browser.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Vivaldi replaced opera for me. I was using opera since presto until around 2020 but then it decided to go gaming ui nonsense. Never cared about it being chinese. It sending anything suspicious^ will be discovered instantly and kill the product. It’s delulu for an average joe to consider this as a personal attack vector. Journalists and politicians - maybe. But not the tinfoil club. ^ above the usual info that all browsing regimes collect either way and lose in breaches
- 2y ago

AzzyHN 2y ago

Fun fact, the built-in adblocker for GAMER BROWSER OperaGX (of YouTube sponsorship game) excludes search engine pages by default, and is happy to report "zero trackers" on google.com But I'm glad Opera is committed to providing a terrible product. The marketing seems to be working!

butz 2y ago

For me Opera died when they abandoned their own rendering engine Presto and moved to Chromium. UI was simplified greatly and many customization options disappeared. Vivaldi is spiritual successor to classic Opera browser, still using Chromium, but has all possible customization options and additional tools, like RSS reader and email client.