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by modzu
2337 days ago
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ya know what. when opera presto had feature parity with chrome, developers still walled their websites with useragent checks so for your average joe nothing worked and it created a negative feedback loop of users blaming the browser and devs avoiding supporting it. what else could they do? with chromium engine opera suddenly worked (lol).. there was still a lot of value on top of that, like a native speed dial that wasnt harvesting your data, fantastic bookmark management, a free vpn (yeah not for the ultraparanoid but still useful), tons of customization options, etc. its sad opera was sold and its days are probably numbered |
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Opera was, I think, the first browser to make UA-switching a first-class feature, precisely to avoid this phenomenon. I believe at one point they even sent a fake UA string by default. This sort of thing was really not the reason they hit the rocks.
The truth is that making a browser is hard work for little reward. Keeping up with web standard was pretty hard already, for an operation running on thin margins and based in an expensive country; when Google got in the game, brutally accelerating the development of features and hammering people with adverts for Chrome, Opera struggled to compete. They found some margins in the developing world, where their bandwidth-optimizing services were popular; but targeting the low end of the market only buys you some time (if you exist because connections are bad, as connections improve people will leave you).
Eventually, their perennial search for cash ended with an inevitable sale to this or that financial shark, and here we are.