
Opera’s $1.2B sale: Shocking underdog victory or cruel twist of fate? - wormold
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/17/operas-1-2b-sale-shocking-underdog-victory-or-cruel-twist-of-fate-21-years-in-the-making/
======
JohnTHaller
The way Qihoo 360 operates should give anyone pause:
[https://www.techinasia.com/360-safe-browser-
malware](https://www.techinasia.com/360-safe-browser-malware)

Stolen recolored IE icon, sneaky installs, difficult/impossible uninstalls,
fake "security" ratings, etc.

~~~
zhte415
Stated in another thread on Opera's sale, but to restate and reaffirm:
anything that involves Qihoo|360 in a name should be instantly removed from
your system. It is self-spreading malware. Source: Dealing with this malware
on a daily basis. It replicates itself from USB stick to plugged in phone.

360/Qihoo is, in every sense of corporations or individuals seeking any
semblance of control of their device, a heathen.

Edit: Live in China. Work for privately held Chinese company. Enforced removal
of this 360 entity from company.

------
nly
I used Opera from ~2000, way back when it was still ad-supported. It always
amazed me that they managed to provide a top-notch web browser, a passable
BitTorrent client, newsgroup client, FTP client, IRC client, and email
client... all inside one 4 MiB installer package. I stopped using it the
moment they switched to Chromium and blew away all the features that made it
unique.

Vivaldi aside, hopefully any remaining talent that still works at Opera will
now finally be free to go create more kickass software.

~~~
cm3
Which is a testament to the industry's ability to fill any and all hardware
improvement with more overhead unfortunately. If you compare what 1990s demo
mags did on floppy disks vs the resources it takes to render a 2016 web page,
it's hard not to feel like we're failing as software developers. All the
dynamic features and scriptability can be had with a system that fits on a
floppy disk if only we valued it but we don't. These things do and did exist
but didn't have the marketing department like, say, Sun Java. And one of
Niklaus Wirth's peers made a Java (with applet plugin) alternative in the 90s
as a direct competitor that was a huge improvement and got no traction.
Instead of using faster internet connections for richer content we fill it up
with different (i.e. less efficient) ways of doing the same thing. When I see
that the most trivial mobile app package is larger than 50MB, it's impossible
to respect what the industry as a whole views to be good software. Take Qt5's
30MB base memory overhead for a simplest of simple Qt windows. How is that
acceptable?

~~~
bwat48
Web Pages themselves are far heavier and more complex than they were in the
90's

~~~
cm3
Isn't it a failure of HTML+CSS+WebFoo when the supporting assets are 10 or 20
times larger than the content to be consumed? Pages loading megabytes of
JavaScript, fonts, and large images and videos just on the landing page. I
think we lost it completely when we started to fetch JSON and render it
locally via JavaScript. The whole concept of HTTP GET was nullified that way.

~~~
digi_owl
CSS basically turned the whole thing into a crappy apps UI, though the
appification of the web honestly started back when Microsoft and Netscape was
battling for control over the intranet (and likely why anything and everything
is layered on top of TCP/IP these days, for better or worse).

In a way we have come full circle. The personal computer came to be because
accountants was fed up begging sysadmins for time on the mainframes. And with
CSS and JS "powered" web sites we have returned to the era of the graphical
terminal.

~~~
cm3
It's even worse than TCP/IP only, it's mostly HTTP only these days. Things
like SCTP got pushed into niche use and we're reinventing SCTP on top of
HTPP(2) on top of TCP on top of IP.

I'm hopeful to see the trend go back though, if it's really a circle :).

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah i know. We seem to have turned HTTP into TCP, and use it to carry various
ad-hoc "protocols" encoded in JSON.

Part of that i think we can blame firewalls, as most often they block
everything but HTTP(S) by default.

------
f_allwein
Would be sad if it goes through. I recently found my receipt for an Opera
licence (which I must have bought some time in the 90s). It was amazing back
then just to have an alternative to IE. All today's browsers are indebted to
Opera. E.g., they were the first to use tabbed browsing.

~~~
vidarh
> E.g., they were the first to use tabbed browsing.

That's open for discussion They had MDI at first, not proper tabs. Other early
browsers with tabs include NetCaptor (1997?), and iBrowse2 (Amiga; 1999).
Phoenix (what became Firefox) also had what we'd consider tabs today in
September 2002, while Opera first got that in November 2002.

So it boils down to whether or not you consider an MDI based interface
equivalent to tabs. Personally, I don't - MDI was one of the things that kept
me away from Opera back then..

~~~
digi_owl
Opera used MDI until the last days of version 12.

The tab bar was basically added as a means of easing switching (though control
tab was always an option).

------
nkurz
I've been using Opera on a Macbook for about a year, and have been generally
happy with it's configurability although it has worse battery life than I'd
like. I switched to it when Chrome mucked up the "click-to-play" function:
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRB...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRBzyPcc)

But like many others, I'm thinking this acquisition might be a good reason to
switch again. I've been trying out Safari today. I appreciate how "snappy" it
feel, and it seems more processor-efficient as well. Scrolling on Reddit
(among other sites) quickly caused the fans to roar for Chrome and Opera, but
Safari doesn't seem to break a sweat.

So far, the thing that bothers me most is that my fingers are currently hard
wired to shift-click links when I want to open them in a new window. And every
time I do this, Safari silently "lobs" the link into the hidden reading list
rather than opening it. Is there any way to configure Safari to have shift-
click open a new window, or do I have no choice but to retrain my fingers?

ps. I was excited to see that the HckrNews extension works well on Safari:
[http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions](http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions)

~~~
M4v3R
On Safari, you use Cmd+click to open a link in a new tab. I don't think
there's an easy way to change that.

~~~
nkurz
Yes, by default. I tend to remember that immediately after I unintentionally
add another link to the Reading List. I'm sure I can change, but it seems like
I only just got comfortable with shift-click after switching from ctrl-click a
decade ago.

I was very happy, though, to see that on the Preferences/Tabs settings I can
set Command-Click to open in a new window rather than in a new tab. I was
hoping there might be a hidden "non-easy" way to reconfigure this too.

------
jorgecastillo
Opera was my favorite web browser back when they used Presto and they had a
social network (My Opera). Now Opera is more or less just a Chromium skin.

R.I.P. Opera

~~~
skrebbel
I felt the same until I realized that all I really wanted was Chrome without
all that Google-goo all over it. That's Opera in a nutshell.

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Just out of curiosity what are you referring to when you say "Google-goo?"
Does chromium not fit the need?

~~~
paol
Not the OP, but when you're required to create a google account just to
install an extension, I would say 'no'.

~~~
scrollaway
I just opened
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions)
on Chromium, signed out of my google account, and didn't have a problem
installing an extension.

~~~
paol
You're right! I just fired it up and was able to install Advanced REST Client
(the only thing I regularly use Chromium for) without logging in.

When I first installed it - less than a year ago - that wasn't possible.

------
Digit-Al
Firstly a disclaimer: I'm not a user of Opera myself - I tried it back in the
day but found some parts of the interface a bit unfriendly to my conditioned
ways (can't remember what now).

I'm a bit surprised by those saying they are now going to uninstall it because
it is owned by a Chinese ad company. Firstly: did you actually read the
article? The sale hasn't actually happened yet. The article clearly states >
the executives noted (several times in our interview) that it must still win
shareholder approval and likely won’t close for several months.

Secondly: It seems to me that the Opera developers have earned a certain
amount of 'benefit of the doubt'. Surely, if you support the browser and the
developers then the best course is to keep using it and then when the deal
goes through keep a close eye out for any evidence of the new owners trying to
coerce the developers into abusing their users. It seems to me that the devs
would be highly resistant to such proposals and that any attempt to force the
matter could lead to one or more high level defections. I could be wrong
though - but as users of the software: what do you think?

~~~
cataflam
It's not open-source, so you're essentially trusting a binary install with
auto-updates. I was fine with it until now, not sure I will be if the sale
goes through.

~~~
bwat48
From what I've seen Opera seems pretty confident that they will remain an
independent company operating out of Norway (and therefore subject to
Norwegian privacy laws which are pretty strict). I probably wouldn't be too
worried unless they move the actual development of the browser from Norway to
China

~~~
gsnedders
> I probably wouldn't be too worried unless they move the actual development
> of the browser from Norway to China

It's already mostly in Poland.

------
Nux
For people looking at alternatives check Vivaldi.
[https://vivaldi.com/](https://vivaldi.com/)

It's made by some of the original team.

I will probably miss Opera Mini the most though, Vivaldi does not have a
similar product.

~~~
digi_owl
sadly yet another Chrome clone for speed of development.

~~~
Nux
Yes, resources seem low on their end, but fingers crossed.

------
digi_owl
I get the feeling this was in the cards when the remaining founder left the
company a few years back. Soon after they ditched the Presto driven browser
that had been with Opera since the founding, and replaced it with a reskinned
Chrome.

Frankly i would use the release of their Coast concept demo as the turning
point of the company. From that point on designers and MBAs ran the place, not
engineers.

Its is really jarring to see Lie claim that going Chrome helped the
standardization effort. At this point in time i no longer trust his judgment
on things web tech.

------
sandGorgon
Opera is still the best mobile browser. Period. Cannot trust to use it now
though.

~~~
anc84
I noticed that there "traffic-saving" proxy started to redirect direct links
to images on [https://i.imgur.com](https://i.imgur.com) to the full-ad-crap
pages [https://www.imgur.com](https://www.imgur.com). Has anyone noticed the
same? It does not always happen, might be referrer based.

~~~
jorams
Imgur does that, based on referrer: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-
temporarily/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/)

~~~
anc84
I noticed it at least on Reddit. Surely that would be their death note if
Imgur did it?

------
frik
Opera should have open sourced their old Presto code (browser and email
client). The Opera 15 browser is based on Chromium. Now the sold to a Chinese
company known for adware/malware, that chance is gone. The old Opera was
pretty good for its time, and a community could have formed around it.

Some former Opera devs are working on Vivaldi, a promising Chromium based
browser that has an HTML5 based UI. Though, it's not open source.

~~~
sgift
As far as I remember they had too many dependencies that weren't open source
friendly for that move. At least I think that was the reason given back then.

~~~
frik
I doubt that is true.

They ported the Opera browser to very exotic platforms, like Nintendo DS, Wii,
and many other devices I never even heard of:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_(layout_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_\(layout_engine\))

With multiplatform codebase, you try to keep the dependencies to a minimum or
even rely on just C++ and the platform sdk.

~~~
wmil
It might have included a large amount of licensed code. They could edit and
port it, but not relicense it.

------
jest3r1
Just before the sale (a couple months before), Opera acquired SurfEasy .. a
Canadian VPN service. I wonder what the SurfEasy folks think of this deal?

[https://www.surfeasy.com/en/](https://www.surfeasy.com/en/)

------
michaelmrose
Now owned by Chinese ad company delete delete delete

~~~
sccxy
Does it really matter?

USA and its 3-letter-organizations got much more power on spying on users
worldwide.

~~~
cm3
It's probably safer to use software from Russia, China and the USA at the same
time. Why trust any entity more than the other unless you're affiliated with
one's government body in some way.

