RIP old good Opera browser

Today is the day when I stopped using old good Opera browser that was based on Presto engine. It is sad day for me because I believe that it was one of the best browsers and it is really sad that it switched to use Chromium engine.

Why should I stop using it? Well most web sites are not showing properly because HTML 5 is updating and improving every day. There are a lot of updates around SSL and old Opera obviously does not support them. So

What I really like about old Opera

It was quite fast, due to fact that it is rarely used it was secure, because nobody cares about hacking browser that has 2% market. It uses single process and only for plugins it used one more process.

But that best feature that you can disable image loading, java script, videos and many more things per web site or even per page. Moreover, all pages that you open from current page will inherit settings. Somebody can ask why do I care about these things? Well most of information even today I got thru text. So obviously I got to some web sites to read. I don’t mind one or two ads. But so many sites abuse (or perhaps better word over abuse) ads and placed some many ads that are moving, blinking etc. It just hurt my brain and eyes. Many web sites also force to load ad first and content later. Sure, you can use AdBlocker to block these ads, but it actually removes image from web page, so many web sites now have Java script that checks that image still exists and if not, somehow block page from seeing or transfer to another page. Sure, you can disable Java Script for that web site (you can do it in new Opera) but many sites don’t work well without Java Script.

In old Opera I disabled all videos, sounds and images everywhere and enabled it on few sites that I want to, and it works beautiful. Image is still there, browser just do not render it. There are no video or audio playing until I enable it. And you can right click on image, video or audio and load it. It was perfect for me.

For quite some time I was deciding which browser should be my main one. I tried Microsoft Edge for quite some time, but it is really buggy and unreliable. Once it crashed and I lost all my opened tabs and I had to spend a lot of time looking for them in history. And anyway, looks like Microsoft will use Chromium Engine soon in new browser. I don’t like Chrome and new Opera because it is hard to read text including text on tabs and text in address bar.

For now, I will use Firefox as it looks like only engine that not based on Chromium engine and where I can read text properly. For few sites that had extreme number of ads I have to use Vivaldi. It is also based on Chromium but at least I can switch off images and videos and keep Java Script enabled.

It is truly sad day.