Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it
Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it
As Google Chrome disables uBlock Origin and other unsupported extensions, rivals like Brave and now Opera have confirmed they will support it. The latter has explained how it hopes to do so.
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn't mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I've been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn't any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I'm also asking myself whether it's that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I'm neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it's on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
A better title: Opera explains shit on how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support. Will talk to developers so see if anyone has a good ideas.
They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there's that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they'd have to maintain independently.
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.
Impostors, in other words.
~Why is that? Any extra resources on it not being trustworthy?~
Nevermind, I just read other comments below :)
A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn't trust the browser for privacy reasons.
Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.
s/owned by a Chinese public company/proprietary/Although another problem is that it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Yet another chromium browser with built-in proxies and data collection 🤷
I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome's sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.
If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?
I just did research on this. Up to 33% (according to some sources) of Americans use an adblocker. That feels like a dent to me...
It would actually.
Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money to make. People switching to Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.
That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.
I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...
Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...
People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅
Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.
And let's not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren't using adblocker with custom filters.
Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.
Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only "mainstream" browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don't get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they're taking, but I don't see how Opera could do what Firefox can't when Opera is very reliant on Google.
I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera's move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.
If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree...
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn't say how long Opera will continue, but I'm guessing its the same deadline of July too.
good. a massive shakeup like that would be great
I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens! (Switched to Apple after 12 years of being an Android enthusiast.)
Unfortunately, I doubt it. Chrome made it as big as it did because it had one of the biggest tech and advertising companies in the world behind it. Other than Microsoft with building in Internet Explorer into Windows, thereor Apple doing that with Safari, isn't anything else that could compete as easily, and we all how that went for Microsoft.
And it would only be harder today, since they'd not only have go contend with Chrome, but also that a lot of websites are being built around Chrome/browsers using the Chromium engine. People would go to a website that either refuses to work, or doesn't work properly for their browser and hop over to Chrome instead.
Netflix requires specific DRM addons that are really only available for the major browser engines, as an example. If someone is rolling their own, like KDE does, then that's going to refuse to work outright.
i don’t think it’s working
They explain nothing. They're in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
Doesn't even matter since it is a Chinese browser. Anyway, the only way to potentially save the www, is to massively take away market share for Chromium based browsers. And unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Since last year, Chrome market share went up, while Firefox market share went down. People are clearly too stupid to make their own fucking decisions.
Probably because they market to gamers, who tend to hate ads even more than the common pleb.