Opera ended the day they deprecated their own rendering engine and became yet another Chromium wrapper, which we already have more than enough of.
How did Opera get involved in the short term lending business? How does corporate governance for a public company allow this to happen?
What this really sounds like is Hindenburg Research daring Google to not notice.
Also, please switch the link to the original research, or go upvote the original (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22092095)
Makes me sad. Opera was well positioned ~10 years ago to grow and innovate. And such an incredibly passionate and involved community.
IMO here's the beginning of the end for Opera when Jon resigned, the investors took the reins and his open letter;
https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/opera-founder-jon-s-von-te...
Good luck to the Vivaldi team in getting a bit of 'old Opera' back.
Not entirely relevant but; RIP Opera. It was a competent browser even after it became Chromium based, now few people trust it and even fewer people use it. Hope some of the features I remember seeing back when I used it, especially the ones in Opera GX, make it to other browsers.
Wow, I did use Opera for years and also on mobile when in Africa with limited data plans.
Time flies, I still remember Opera 10 years ago, they probably had the best tech April Fool's I ever stumbled upon with their "Face gestures"[1].
When you had a team that could create that behind your product, you knew that the team cared and was driven by passion and excellent craftmanship.
[1]: https://dev.opera.com/blog/introducing-opera-face-gestures/
Can’t read it on iOS safari, keeps reloading.
Opera Mini is simply the best experience for compressed mobile web browsing on low-speed connections. I use it when traveling and when my data plan runs out for reading the news and web sites (I don't log into anything because I don't trust the provider, and they have to MITM HTTPS). I'll be sad if this goes away.
I wish there was a self-hosted solution for compressed mobile browsing that I could put on a server. It'll be hard to replace the aggressive optimizations they have done to make this possible, though it's likely I can get most of the way by inlining everything and replacing script and image tags...
Sad for the company to pivot to abusive loan schemes.
I mean I’m sure it didn’t help when they switched to being yet another chromium wrapper - why pay for essentially the same browser you can get for free? That can’t have helped their revenue
I wish Opera would open source their presto engine. I'm guessing that isn't possible due to some licensing issues. Personally I find it unfortunate that all that amazing work will be lost. While I didn't use Opera due to it's proprietary nature, as a browser engine it was competitive for its time.
I'm having the same feeling now about the EdgeHTML engine which is now being fazed out. This engine was a breath of fresh air compared to trident. It was bringing value to the internet space.
Granted, I do realize there are perfectly valid business reasons Opera and Edge switched to chromium.
Anybody remember Operas beta feature "Opera Fridge"?
Source: http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/fridge....
ya know what. when opera presto had feature parity with chrome, developers still walled their websites with useragent checks so for your average joe nothing worked and it created a negative feedback loop of users blaming the browser and devs avoiding supporting it. what else could they do? with chromium engine opera suddenly worked (lol).. there was still a lot of value on top of that, like a native speed dial that wasnt harvesting your data, fantastic bookmark management, a free vpn (yeah not for the ultraparanoid but still useful), tons of customization options, etc. its sad opera was sold and its days are probably numbered
FYI: the SEC is investigating how mainland Chinese companies ever got listed on US exchanges as their accounting methods are not compatible with US requirements.
Figure 12 - 18 months before they're mostly delisted.
I wished they Open Source the "Old" Opera Engine.
It was small and Fast. If I remember correctly it had the browser engine, Javascript, Email client, RSS etc all in the sub 15MB download.
Opera browser is still big on Mobile
> Hindenburg Research
Great name and interesting business.
Well that’s all unsubstantiated hearsay at this point, but I think we can all agree that Opera has, sadly, seen its day as a browser.
R.I.P. Opera. Long live Pale Moon, Brave, Vivaldi and WebkitGTK. Chrome, Firefox and Edge could go f--k themselves.
Love all the comments here from folks who haven't read the article and are going on about the browser. This article is about Opera's alleged fraudulent loans business. Well really this article doesn't have much of its own to say, it's mostly a rewrite / summary of this article: https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnarou...