Which one is faster?
Some friends on Discord say that Opera could be better and, hell, some don't understand why I use Mozilla Firefox to begin with outside of privacy concerns.
Apparently, Opera can do more and is faster.
Thoughts?
Think I should switch to Opera?
Good lord no, what?
Your friends are just wrong. Opera is just another Chrome, with all the security and privacy problems that entails and the impending "no more adblocking allowed" changes coming next month to mainline Chrome will absolutely make their way into Opera with perhaps only a few weeks of delay.
It's open source in the way that Android is open-source. It's a corporation's product that they allow people to contribute to and use freely because it's advantageous to them. They get free labour from other companies and individuals, and they get to sneak their ad network and spyware into every single alternative browser that's based on chromium.
Open-source software is not inherently good or based just because it's open-source, just like a Chinese company isn't inherently good or based just because it's based in China.
Microsoft has similarly used the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model to kill tons of alternative software, and Google has done the exact same thing with Chromium. It's killed off every alternative browser aside from its cousin Safari and Firefox. Everything else but for the small handful of Firefox forks like librewolf are just Chromium with some UI changes and possibly built in extensions.
"Open-source software is not inherently good or based just because it's open-source, just like a Chinese company isn't inherently good or based just because it's based in China."
Thanks for putting it succinctly.
The primary reason Firefox use needs to be pushed is because it has the only rendering engine that is not chrome's. If Firefox dies that gives Google 100% freedom to set every web standard as they please. Every other web browser is a chrome skin, including edge, including opera, etc. The second companies think they can get away with dropping Firefox support they will (some already have, like tandem, the company that makes my insulin pump)
Think I should switch to Opera?
I think you should stick with Firefox or switch to another FOSS web browser
There isn't any. It's either Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox), WebKit (Apple/Safari), or Blink (Google/Chromium).
One might think "oh, KDE makes browsers" but no, it's just f**king chromium again! (or webkit). Gnomes the same, webkit.Here is a cool graph on the history of browser engines :
Show
Opera is a piece of shit with worse privacy than fucking chrome.
Also opeea being faster? lmao, lmfao even. Not that this even really matters on modern hardware.
more features? it just kinda adds some weird extensions, for which better foss alternatives exist for firefox
anyone who tells you to use opera does not know what they are talking about
you can use librewolf, its a fork of firefox, GNU IceCat is a thing, but i never used it. I personally use FireDrafon, which is a custimised LibreWolf (iirc) maintained by the Garuda Linux project
Some friends on Discord say that Opera could be better and, hell, some don't understand why I use Mozilla Firefox to begin with outside of privacy concerns.
Your friends on fed-cord are right. Why would someone use a free program over a proprietary one that clearly has more technical merit and advantages? Just use the right tool for the job (of surfing the Internet for hours each day since today's society demands that you do). Like come on, you don't even have to pay for Opera like how could it possibly be harmful? It's even owned by a Chinese company so hexbear will definitely approve.
Jokes aside: Your friends have no idea what they're talking about. We don't choose Firefox (and libre web browsers) because they are "better" but because they respect your software freedoms. We especially don't do it for "privacy" concerns since Firefox has telemetry, advertising and google search on by default.
Keep using Firefox, if you are concerned about privacy you can look at librewolf (or hardening Firefox). If you need a Chromium engine browser then use Ungoogled Chromium. Shits not complicated.
Firefox isn't based on Chromium and at this time and looking forward its ability to freely allow users to block ads won't be compromised the way it is (and it'll always get worse) with Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Google has been whining about adblockers for years and years and seem to be at the "gun to my head, you better fucking watch these ads!" stage of development. And users said "ok, pull the trigger..." so they are. Or I hope so, but I never underestimate the ability of normie users to open wide for more horse shit to get shoveled down. They'll probably take the increase in ads and barely notice.
But if you care about the ability to block all ads that you want to block without having to jump through whatever loopholes people find, just stick with Firefox.
Apparently, Opera can do more and is faster.
What features are you looking for that Firefox is missing? Has performance been an issue? Don't switch just to switch, do it because there's a trade-off you think is better for your use case. In my personal experience, there's nothing in Opera's feature set that makes me want to switch, and if there are any performance gains I'd be surprised if they're meaningful.
For desktop Firefox or one of its derivatives (Librewolf is a popular pre-hardened option) is your best bet, alongside a backup Chromium browser like Brave for rare instances where a website doesn't play nice with Firefox.
On mobile, a Chromium browser like Brave is actually better for security over Firefox according to PrivacyGuides, but if you're not overly concerned Mull is my mobile Firefox fork of choice.
I use both for different things. Opera's built in VPN is quite useful to me for bypassing reddit bans and I get the peace of mind of knowing for 100% certain that it's on and running each time I click a page. I've had situations where locally running a VPN has toggled off without noticing which is disastrous, having the VPN icon as a clear on screen indicator that it's running for the next click I make is really important to me to ban evade and not fuck up.
They both perform roughly the same. I personally find Firefox's URL autofill really fucking annoying though because it autofills at the bottom of the list so instead of pressing down once like in Chrome or Opera(chrome2) you have to move the mouse and click or press down many fucking times. It's bad UX.
Opera does something fucking weird and annoying with closing a new window that looks like a tab and it makes me mistakenly close all windows when I only wanna close the one tab I unintentionally opened. That's bad UX and fucking annoying too but less frequent than the Firefox URL thing. It has caused me to wipe entire comments I was writing once or twice though.
Firefox is probably better for privacy, I doubt the new Chrome stuff will be removed from Opera.
Change
browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirsttofalseinabout:configto fix the search results showing first :)Holy shit that's a massive improvement why the fuck isn't that the default. Thank you.
Thanks for an actually respectful response that didn't put me down.
Opera (the company) sold off all stock in itself a few years ago to a number of Venture Capital and Private Equity investment firms, with the largest percentage of shares going to a Beijing-based firm called Kunlun Tech Limited.
One of their first moves in controlling Opera was creating OPay, a fintech company based in Nigeria. Weird ass decisions based around predatory financial practices are the name of the game for VC and PE firms, and you should absolutely never trust them with anything as they absolutely sell all your data to anyone who will buy it at any price.
I’ve been using Orion on Mac and iPhone. It’s a WebKit browser by Kagi that has support for Firefox and chrome extension. I recently switched because I don’t know how much longer I can trust Firefox. I still use Firefox, but every time I need to go digging through privacy setting to find some weird thing the enabled by default, I get more skeptical of how trustworthy they will be soon.
I’m sure Kagi is no better, but they have a revenue stream that comes from a paid service, so I want to think they have a better incentive to not taint the product with gimmicks and spying in order to stay afloat.
I don't have Mac, tbh. And yeah, Firefox may be compromised in the future, though currently not now. I just want a browser that's faster and can do more.
Yeah I get that, I still use Firefox on my Windows and Linux machines. Outside of a Firefox fork, I don’t know what else would be worth it. Even then, I am a bit skeptical of forks because I expect them to be victims of attrition especially when it comes to security updates.
