I like Opera, and have used it since ~2003. It was so far ahead of the pack then. It's not been my main browser for a long time, but I've always had it there as a clean and fast alternative. That's mainly because I'm SSH tunneled through Firefox, so when desiring to be untunneled, turn on Opera.
But Qihoo/360? This is a company with the exact opposite moral principles of Opera. Of bloatware and spyware, of unexpected updates, backdoors, and spider-like trojans that install on anything from USB sticks to mobile phones plugged into an 'infected' device. It represents the worse of the worse of China's software market, which can be really really excellent.
I use Quihoo (Total 360) antivirus and find it to be fast, well constructed and non-intrusive. I would like to hear a good reasoned argument why it isn't safe or secure to run it. I have looked into this matter a couple of time and was unable to find any evidence, aside from run of the mill "it's chinese" slander.
Can you uninstall Qihoo360's software easily nowadays? Four years ago I helped a friend to clean up his PC and it took me more than _two hours_ to remove numerous little pieces Qihoo had put in every corners of his system. I had to search the whole hard drive and the whole Windows registry, and delete them one by one manually. The feeling was like battling against something really evil.
I haven't had the need to uninstall it, but it hasn't given me the reason to either - at no point it made me feel like i was using something shady. It also has very little (and in a different forum i would use the word "none") in terms of the shareware aspects that are common to other free antiviruses. I've been using it for a while too, probably over a year.
Here's a 69-page long thread on an antivirus-themed forums that's been running since 2014:
I've been visiting it from time to time seeing whether the community attitude towards the product has changed for the worse, but so far it appears a lot of people use it.
Qihoo is listed at NYSE (went public in 2011), regulations and consumer protections are better enforced in many overseas markets than in China. I usually look for English version if I have to use software produced by certain Chinese software companies.
Something people may not know is Opera the Browser is only a part of the bigger pie. Opera is an ad company (through Opera Mediaworks - they own Ad Colony, for example, that might not mean much to anyone not in the mobile apps/game space, but it's a huge player[0]).
It makes me wonder how much the purchase was about the browser vs. a solid play in the mobile gaming market ad space.
Another less known fact is that Opera used to have a large footprint in the embedded browser markets. (eg. Wii, TVs, players, OS pre-boot environments)
You can actually put numbers to this. In 2015 Opera made 75% of its revenue from their ad business. Calling them a browser maker in this year is straight up false.
Thanks for the explanation. A billion price tag for a browser with a constant low marketshare such as Opera sounded very surprising to me, but with AdColony it makes more sense.
Now that you point that out, this is very interesting. The purchasing company, being in the apps business, may derive more value from advertising its own apps over its own network (thus dodging paying third party ad networks) than it will from actually having a browser.
Sorry, but Vivaldi feels like Chrome. Opera still feels like Opera. Dont believe me? just open both browsers. Spam the Ctrl-T (new tab) key for a while. See the difference? Only one browser remains responsive.This is not some weird/random test case - the whole UI widgetry seems extremely fluid and ultra-responsive in a way no desktop app is.
I still use Opera, and super-apprehensive about this new development. It's still fantastic - the rendering engine change actually benefited Opera, in that it removed so many of the rendering glitches in Opera 12. Some options were lost, but it's still very configurable. I respect Hakum and the team that's still there, but not sure if they'll stick around. It will be a shame if we lose one of the best desktop apps on the planet to spyware/bloatware.
> Spam the Ctrl-T (new tab) key for a while. See the difference?
And that's why browser vendors can never win. Too many cases to optimize for; if you don't get every extremely contrived (non) use case right, it's off to twitter/hn-comments-section to complain. FFS
I don't think having a lot of tabs open is a contrived use case. I have over a hundred tabs open in Firefox, and that's been pretty standard for me for at least a year.
That's me. Tabs are for short term stuff I want to check out, bookmarks for saving potentially useful/interesting stuff for the future.
Since Firefox now only reloads tabs on demand after a restart, it's not resource-heavy to keep many tabs open if one occasionally restarts the browser.
I use it the same way but it was bugging me so I installed an add-on called TooManyTabs and you can set a limit to the amount of tabs you can have opened.
I also reserve some time to clean them up about once a week, I start with the oldest tab and "take care of it", sometimes it's just a news story I want to read, sometimes it's something I kept opened because of the information on that page.
If I don't do that I will have a thousand tabs opened and will never actually do anything about it.
I use it more as a glorified low priority to do list. For example some page I was reading (from HN) linked to a recommended article "How to Build Stable Systems" (https://medium.com/@jlouis666/how-to-build-stable-systems-6f...). I ctrl-clicked the link to open it in a new tab, because I'd like to read the article eventually even though I don't have time at this particular moment. So when I have a little bit of time I'll work through reading/dealing with my open tabs.
Open all the blue links on a Wikipedia article in tabs. When you are done, move to the next tab and repeat. After a while, you will have hundreds of tabs. Read them all and you will gain general knowledge on a subject that will be much better than if you were to read only the first article.
That's only Wikipedia. I do the same things with forums, documentation, stackoverflow, etc.
Hmm. I hope they don't do anything with FastMail.fm. This was a company whose email product I was so impressed with that I still pay $15 a year for email.
I am literally typing this on 12.17... Which may be a bad idea, but that one of the main reasons I use it is because it has a built-in quick way to enable/disable Javascript, and it's usually off.
I like to think that it leaves me safer than newer browsers with a broader attack-surface, but really it's just so much faster 95% of the time.
>I am literally typing this on 12.17... Which may be a bad idea, but that one of the main reasons I use it is because it has a built-in quick way to enable/disable Javascript, and it's usually off.
Can't you do that in ALL browsers, with a plugin that adds a button to your toolbar?
In the Old Opera I can do every imaginable setting on per-site basis, and all built in, no overhead of extensions. My default were browsing with javascript disbaled, and enabled only for a few critical sites.
Much beter than the "ad blocker" extensions that make deal with some ad providers. Real control.
> The overhead for running a few select extensions, compared to native code, would be minimal.
Only if the browser is designed that way. If the browser has only global settings implementing per-site handling can impose the need of extension reimplementing half of the browser (in extreme case, see how Google made their "extension" of the IE which effectively installed the 90% of the Chrome inside of IE).
And you have to trust extension authors, they can do their own things.
Old Opera had what I needed built in, it worked without the need of even enabling javascript subsystem. I don't know of any other browser able to work that way.
>Only if the browser is designed that way. If the browser has only global settings implementing per-site handling can impose the need of extension reimplementing half of the browser (in extreme case, see how Google made their "extension" of the IE which effectively installed the 90% of the Chrome inside of IE).
That's not an extension running on IE to deactivate JS. It's a completely different rendering engine running inside an IE shell.
The two concepts are so different it's not even worth commenting.
>Old Opera had what I needed built in, it worked without the need of even enabling javascript subsystem. I don't know of any other browser able to work that way.
It's trivial (one setting toggle) to disable Javascript in both Chrome and Safari (and I presume Firefox too).
> It's trivial (one setting toggle) to disable Javascript in both Chrome and Safari (and I presume Firefox too).
Only globally it is trivial, but locally per web site, even in the same tab, certainly not:
You know, one single page can fetch the scripts from different addresses. Opera allowed me to run the script from site A but not from site B while opening the page on site C, from which the script is also not run.
The effect is that you can enable, for example, some real functionality on some site but even if some annoying trackers or ad are included they are never executed. And it's not about being ad-hostile, it's about me as a user selecting which sites I want to ever let run dynamic content and consuming other sites as the static content. Breaks post on Google's "blogger" but the rest of the web is mostly better, faster and much safer.
Only if you never even thought about that, and especially if you've never considered what you would have to do if you would write such an extension can you even argument with the "global toggle" which does something completely different, and really simple.
But what Opera had is something completely different, built in natively.
I recommend you stop commenting on software whose functionality you have never experienced and are judging based on your interpretation of second-hand descriptions.
I'm not sure what software is that. When you assume, etc...
I've started with Mosaic and Netscape (and on Sun OS for that matter), used Mozilla for a few years, then FF on Windows, and finally Safari and then Chrome for as long as both existed on the Mac (and have even used KHTML --in the form of Konqueror-- for light browsing on my dev box for a couple of years in the early 00s). Those, as an end user.
As a web dev for testing, besides IE, I have also fired up Opera for years, including back when it had an ugly QT facade and with its own rendering engine. I've never liked it though, and it never stuck to be used as the main browser.
Being able to toggle Javascript on/off with a single checkbox: all browsers have that.
"Oh, but Opera has it built-in and I can't be bothered to install a third party exception", on the other hand, might be true -- that doesn't make that much of a valid reason to stick to an older browser to me eyes.
As far as I read the source of the extension it's still per tab, not dependent on the origin of the script but just the URL of the whole tab and then it's all or nothing, completely different from Old Opera's behavior?
So I went poking around, and the first result that came up for Chrome was Quick Javascript Switcher [0]. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like Opera, because it only lets you add site-tweaks that deviate from the global JS on/off setting. To change the global setting you need to keep navigating to advanced-settings dialogs.
Digging into its JS source-code, the extension calls a browser-API chromeContentSettings.javascript [1]. Now, it sounds like at one point in the past that setting was asynchronous, meaning that disabling JS before visiting a suspect page wasn't guaranteed to work anyway [2], but no recent bug-reports or docs mention it, so maybe Chrome fixed that.
Still not sure whether there's an exploitable race-condition between when the page URL is available versus when the plugin disables JS, I'm not familiar enough with the relevant events/callbacks.
That has marginal benefit for something that can be implemented as an extension that you install once and forget about it -- namely, just the installation part.
In return, you get to use a modern browser without a bizarro rendering engine.
If I recall, from an investor presentation I was pitched on, Qihoo's crazy user and revenue growth comes from apps that claim magical things, such as speeding up your phone while lowering the CPU temperature and, while at it, removing all viruses/spyware/adware/malware. There are also claims that their 4.5 star ratings on said apps are the result of fake reviews: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-antimal...
I always wondered why, for the longest time, they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea when they didn't have any compelling durable advantages and had distinct disadvantages like not being able to set alt search engines as default until recently and it's basically Chromium with "richness" tweaks and branding.
Their investors were lucky to get an exit.
The well-upholstered lady sung the swan song, I'm afraid... I hope those guys refocus on something that does change the world for the better rather duplicate what others are already did.
> I always wondered why, for the longest time, they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea
Because Jon von Tetzschner was and is passionate about building a good browser, and didn't really care that the odds were (are?) against him.
But when Opera is brought up, the focus is always on the Desktop browser. However, the money was always in devices - Opera has traditionally been really big on a plethora of devices.
Also, Opera both on desktop and mobile, has long been big in markets other than the US, especially eastern Europe.
NCSA was before them, and Netscape (and later Mozilla after server business didnt materialize) basically clean-room copied NCSA from scratch. Pioneers in new directions can define space but still get slaughtered because the next entrant (Chrome) doesn't have product inertia and has/should learned lessons of what didn't work.
Some of it maybe popularity/marketing of not having a huge org behind them, but odd rough-edges did more to sabotage stickiness. Plus, competing with deep pockets giving away something for free is an unnecessary competitive war of attrition, especially by not differentiating: most secure browser or best browser for X/Y/Z.
TBH, Opera was a much better browser than either Firefox or Chrome until version 11 or so.
Unfortunately, technical prowess is not enough to gain traction. Being closed-source and costing money (until version 8) was a much bigger factor for their failure.
Still, back then there was simply nothing that was as fast or usable as Opera. Rest in Peace.
But Qihoo/360? This is a company with the exact opposite moral principles of Opera. Of bloatware and spyware, of unexpected updates, backdoors, and spider-like trojans that install on anything from USB sticks to mobile phones plugged into an 'infected' device. It represents the worse of the worse of China's software market, which can be really really excellent.
I'm uninstalling Opera right now.