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.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who’s entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
I’m using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren’t on Google play.
The amount of people who only feel comfortable downloading on Google Play and also care about privacy I feel like is very small but I don’t know.
Some people would rather give their data to opera then firefox 🤦♂️
Plus the whole exploiting poor people thing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html?guccounter=1
People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).
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.
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. 😅
Then why is Google fighting against ad blockers?
Because they want every little dime they can get, no matter what.
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.
Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It’s time to recognize that average users do block ads.
What is there to recognize? This is a survey conducted on 2,000 Americans. 2,000 is just 0.00057% of the whole US population which is estimated at 345,426,571.
The average user absolutely do not use block ads unless it is enabled by default in the browser. Chrome with the largest market share does not block ads by default and if you are going out of your way to block ads or use a browser like brave that do that by default you my friend are already not an average user.
According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that’s a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side
Frankly, I’m not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.
Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in “48 markets”) use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.
My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they’re not just niche tools anymore.
I’m not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we’ve had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that’s representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.
Hey, I think you’re totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn’t release the full data publicly, and the study was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there’s reason to suspect that the data is biased.
I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don’t subscribe to their data service, I don’t have details of the methodology here, either.
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…
Nah it would make a big dent for sure.
Firefox has ~180 million users
Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.
It would massively change the market.
Numbers according to mozilla and statista
There are at least 3.45 billion Chrome users (not chromium, chrome).
Out of those ~900 million adblocker users, how many are using those adblockers that let paid advertiser’s to get on a whitelist? How many are willing to make an effort to change browsers? Firefox’s 180 million users is the indicative of this, and not all of them user adblockers, so the numbers keep getting thinner.
It wouldn’t make a single dent in Chrome’s dominance.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox
This is the hypothetical we are talking about. This is obviously not realistic so i dont know what your point is.
It would actually.
Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money make. People switching the Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.
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?
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…
good. a massive shakeup like that would be great
i don’t think it’s working
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 🤷
What do you mean substitute Proprietary?
Is it not true?
I seam to remember they got bought, and then their Norwegian presence suddenly got much smaller
No, they’ve definitely been Chinese last time I’ve checked. It’s just that it seems a bit weird to me to distrust software just because it’s Chinese, since foss stuff from china can be trusted as it’s possible to audit it (say, shadowsocks or xray), and proprietary software from outside of china can send your data wherever it’s programmed to (e.g. windows or chrome). Besides, while it’s alleged China could influence Chinese developers to either hand over userdata or backdoor the software, it’s not like other governments can’t, and for an average Joe the consequences are, I suspect, more or less the same
If you’re still using Chrome it’s a you problem.
Firefox + ublock origin + SponsorBlock for youtube is great. Works on mobile too!
To add to this- playback also continues with the screen off too. So ya, ff mobile with those extensions is basically yt premium XD
I’ve been using a chromebook for the last 4 years and it’s been great for my needs (youtube, streaming, porn, etc), but I am shopping for a windows machine now because fuck google.
firefox doesn’t support HDR
Thanks choom, you reminded me to reinstall Sponsorblock.
It works on Android, but I don’t believe it works on iOS.
The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.
I didn’t other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol
I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry
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.
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.
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
