I have been a Chrome user for many years, and with the recent youtube sponsors I have seen, I am considering switching to Opera, but I am still hesitant.
Can someone give me the pure FACTS without opinions of the flaws and benefits of using Opera over Chrome ?
For me the sidebar is a huge benefit. You basically have a taskbar on the left side of the window. There are a lot of features like built in WhatsApp or discord in there. You also can have multiple sessions wich you can switch using the sidebar. There are many features that help reduce the used ressources. Of course there is also the VPN but ive heard that it is really slow.
For me it’s the mouse gestures. You can get them on Chrome via extensions, but they just don’t work as well (and usually not at all in settings tabs)
Also built in VPN is nice, I’ve used it a few times to watch some geo-blocked youtube videos
For me top features are:
-Mouse gestures, once you get used to them you can’t use browser without them anymore
-Side bar, monitors today are really wide and websites don’t use all the width so having something on the side is great, you can get a lot of things there
-Built in adblock, it is great hovever lately it has some problems on YouTube
-Built in VPN, useful when you want to see something that is geoblocked
-Chrome add-ons, you can use all add-ons that are made for Chrome
For me it’s the total control that GX gives you.
I can tell it how much resources it can use, I can set the down and up limits, which can be super helpful when I’m doing some of my work, then there is a built in WhatsApp, messenger and discord.
It’s lighter than Chrome and doesn’t use anywhere near the memory, so that’s a plus. It has built-in ad blockers which is also nice. It generally feels cleaner and lighter than Chrome.
There’s also one pretty worrying development: Opera was almost completely sold to a Chinese consortium a few years back. It depends how much you trust a Chinese consortium to handle your online privacy through your browser (they don’t exactly respect privacy!), and how much you trust them to have access to your browser-related data. Personally, this means since I found out, I’m switching to Firefox ASAp. Make your own decision.
You can search for yourself as there are plenty of sources to find this info, but here’s a snapshot:
"A consortium of Chinese companies led by Qihoo 360 purchased the browser and several other Opera assets, including the company’s name. Qihoo 360 is known in China for its mobile app store and anti-virus software.
Opera, a Norweigan company, tried to sell the entire company to this same consortium for $1.2 billion earlier this year, but that deal was terminated. The new deal sells off huge chunks of the company, Engadget is reporting. The famous Opera browser, both mobile and desktop versions, are part of this sale. So are Opera’s performance and privacy apps, as well as all of Opera’s tech licensing (outside of the Opera TV ecosystem). The Consortium has also acquired the name “Opera.”
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/opera-sold-600-million-chinese-consortium/
For me, it’s Opera’s dedicated free “VPN” proxy which is quite fast and reliable in comparison with other free proxies (except Tor).
Mouse gestures ? I haven’t herd of them before, what are they precisely ?
Check this help site:
Basically for opening/closing tabs with a mouse movement. For example hold right mouse button and drag down to open new tab