“ 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)]
You shouldn't just get to post this passive aggressive crap. Tell me why this outrages you or why you want it to outrage me. Vaguely hinting that I should be distrustful of people who live across some border because they look and talk different and our governments have tension is not enough to get me going.
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.
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?
> People should avoid giving more data to China out of sheer principle
Or self preservation.
Every intelligence agency collects blackmail. The obvious targets are those in high office. But sometimes you need disposable randos to e.g. collect intelligence or place assets. Being able to pass blackmail to an operative who can use it to convince e.g. a farmer to give them pictures of a silo or Air Force base (under the guise of commercial espionage for a domestic competitor or whatever) is valuable.
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.
I think foreign intelligence services are perfectly comfortable "navigating" laws. Obviously every company is vulnerable to this, but it sure is preferable not to have ownership concentrated in a country where all corporations are de facto extensions of the state itself.
You don't have to live in China for Chinese surveillance to be undesirable or even harmful. The Chinese government has made great strides, but they are still a corrupt governing body completely outside our control. I already don't want the US government to spy on me, and I actually have ways of being compensated for damages they do, let alone a government with diametrically opposed ideology and active campaigns to harm Western interests.
Nobody said anything about people looking or talking different. The defining features of the Chinese government, such as its authoritarian nature and its values that are completely opposed to most Western values, have nothing to do with these two things.
>The group’s largest investor and current Opera Chairman/CEO was recently involved in a Chinese lending business that listed in the U.S. and saw its shares plunge more than 80% in just 2 years amid allegations of fraud and illegal lending practices.
>Post IPO, Opera has now also made a similar and dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%.
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!
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
"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."
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.
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).
Oh hey! Small world! I recently used your Static site generator to convert a subset of my Joplin notes into a website which I used as a showcase for employers and that showcase ended up being the thing that got me my initial interview with the company I'm now working for. Thanks for making the converter public and saving me a bunch of time from not having to write one myself from scratch!
Absolutely off topic here — what has your experience with Joplin been, if you don’t mind me asking?
I recently tried to migrate to Joplin from an amalgamation of notes apps (including Standard Notes, via an ENEX converter in between). I really wanted to love it, but it proved to be unusably slow. I think it might have been my WebDAV service, but replacing it wasn’t a project I was interested in. That was with about 3,000 notes, so I’m not sure if my experience is typical.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yep, exactly. The disagreements here come down to a "spirit vs letter" debate. Yes, Chromium is open source by the letter of the law, as it's licensed under a FOSS license, but FOSS comes with certain expectations that you'll be able to use and modify the source code in certain ways.
The fact that Google has managed to make a codebase open, but extremely onerous to actually maintain a fork of, does actually go against the spirit of FOSS a bit, in my opinion.
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.
You remember right, they used to have their own rendering engine and lota of neat featurs like lightning-fast notes and and even email client.
Around 2013 this all disappeared - they switched to Chromium's engine, and dropping all of their special features. Opera 15 was super-generic chromium fork. This was when I've stopped using it.
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.
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.
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
“ 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)]
You shouldn't just get to post this passive aggressive crap. Tell me why this outrages you or why you want it to outrage me. Vaguely hinting that I should be distrustful of people who live across some border because they look and talk different and our governments have tension is not enough to get me going.
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.
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?
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-illega...
People should avoid giving more data to China out of sheer principle, regardless of their personal attachment to China.
> People should avoid giving more data to China out of sheer principle
Or self preservation.
Every intelligence agency collects blackmail. The obvious targets are those in high office. But sometimes you need disposable randos to e.g. collect intelligence or place assets. Being able to pass blackmail to an operative who can use it to convince e.g. a farmer to give them pictures of a silo or Air Force base (under the guise of commercial espionage for a domestic competitor or whatever) is valuable.
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.
> Doesn't this still make them a Norwegian company
No. It's a Chinese company with an office in Oslo (in addition to China) [1].
Had they run it as an independent subsidiary there might have been a claim that it remains Norwegian. But they haven't and so it isn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)#Acquisition_an...
I think foreign intelligence services are perfectly comfortable "navigating" laws. Obviously every company is vulnerable to this, but it sure is preferable not to have ownership concentrated in a country where all corporations are de facto extensions of the state itself.
You don't have to live in China for Chinese surveillance to be undesirable or even harmful. The Chinese government has made great strides, but they are still a corrupt governing body completely outside our control. I already don't want the US government to spy on me, and I actually have ways of being compensated for damages they do, let alone a government with diametrically opposed ideology and active campaigns to harm Western interests.
> because they look and talk different
You’re complaining about “passive aggressive crap” while falsely insinuating OP is racist?
The problem they cite is Opera is Chinese. Not that the people involved are ethnically Chinese.
Nobody said anything about people looking or talking different. The defining features of the Chinese government, such as its authoritarian nature and its values that are completely opposed to most Western values, have nothing to do with these two things.
There you go
https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...
>A Chinese super app is facing claims of predatory consumer lending in Nigeria, Kenya and India
https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnarou...
>The group’s largest investor and current Opera Chairman/CEO was recently involved in a Chinese lending business that listed in the U.S. and saw its shares plunge more than 80% in just 2 years amid allegations of fraud and illegal lending practices.
>Post IPO, Opera has now also made a similar and dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%.
This seems like a much better reason to be suspicious of Opera.
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!
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.
Opera already does ad blocking before you add any extensions, so the manifest v3 thing is a bit of a red herring.
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.
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.
> 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?
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...
"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...) 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/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.
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
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.
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.
My impression is that it's much easier to embed chromium than Firefox’s engine
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).
How open source is a browser if entire other companies can't maintain a fork?
Oh hey! Small world! I recently used your Static site generator to convert a subset of my Joplin notes into a website which I used as a showcase for employers and that showcase ended up being the thing that got me my initial interview with the company I'm now working for. Thanks for making the converter public and saving me a bunch of time from not having to write one myself from scratch!
Absolutely off topic here — what has your experience with Joplin been, if you don’t mind me asking?
I recently tried to migrate to Joplin from an amalgamation of notes apps (including Standard Notes, via an ENEX converter in between). I really wanted to love it, but it proved to be unusably slow. I think it might have been my WebDAV service, but replacing it wasn’t a project I was interested in. That was with about 3,000 notes, so I’m not sure if my experience is typical.
Oh nice! I'm really glad that was useful, I use it for myself but I didn't know if anyone else did!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
So whether something is open source depends on whether others bother maintaining it? Even if that doesn’t change that an individual cannot?
Yep, exactly. The disagreements here come down to a "spirit vs letter" debate. Yes, Chromium is open source by the letter of the law, as it's licensed under a FOSS license, but FOSS comes with certain expectations that you'll be able to use and modify the source code in certain ways.
The fact that Google has managed to make a codebase open, but extremely onerous to actually maintain a fork of, does actually go against the spirit of FOSS a bit, in my opinion.
What’s much harder about maintaining a chrome fork than a fork of the Linux kernel?
Open source and open format/specification/protocol are quite different concerns, and in fact the problem here is with the latter, not the former:
The modern web stack is so complicated that any current browser engine has a significant moat.
In other words, the problem isn't that Chrome is not open source; the problem is the amount of work it takes to maintain or compete with it.
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
> 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?
You remember right, they used to have their own rendering engine and lota of neat featurs like lightning-fast notes and and even email client.
Around 2013 this all disappeared - they switched to Chromium's engine, and dropping all of their special features. Opera 15 was super-generic chromium fork. This was when I've stopped using it.
Its rendering engine, leadership, and ownership got swapped out completely: The Ship of Theseus as a browser.
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.
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.
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
It used to be a good browser, but nowadays it's just another chromium wrapper.
i know Vivaldi is also just wrapper, but it feels more like the old Opera.