Ask HN: Why do so many people dislike the Opera browser?

[tavro]

i have noticed that Opera tends to get a surprisingly negative reaction in technical communities. but i have not yet seen a clear and technically grounded explanation that justifies the level of dislike. from what i can tell, common criticisms seems to be that the company was acquired by a Chinese consortium or a questions about privacy.

what are your strongest technically accurate arguments against using Opera in 2026?

[GaryBluto]

It used to be excellent but is now just Chrome à la Chinese consortium.

[tavro]

can you ellaborate on "Chrome à la Chinese consortium"?

[yareally]

I used to love Opera, until they dropped the Presto Engine for Chromium's and sold off the company. These days, Vivaldi is more like Opera than current Opera since the founder is the former co-founder of Opera.

[tavro]

why do you think they dropped the Presto Engine?

[PaulHoule]

It's a Chrome fork. If you want to use Chrome... just use Chrome.

[tavro]

opera includes several built-in native features that chrome does not offer by default, doesn't that make it a valid choice to use it instead of chrome?

[LambdaComplex]

Personally, I'm diametrically opposed to the idea of letting Google dictate how web browsers must function, which is what happens if everyone uses Chrome (or a fork) and web developers start targeting features that are only supported by Chrome (and its forks).

The question is not "Is Opera a valid choice instead of Chrome?"

The question is actually "Is Chrome, or anything that's based on it, a valid choice?" and the answer is "no."

[tavro]

> The question is actually "Is Chrome, or anything that's based on it, a valid choice?" and the answer is "no."

yes! and this is what i am interested in. why is the answer "no.", please try to convince me in more detail. i am not interested in "no.", but why is your answer "no"? :-)

[PaulHoule]

e.g. I still have to use Chrome for testing and to use the occasional site that is Chrome-dependent, and I even use the Chrome-based Polypane because it has some really useful features for testing, but when it comes to ordinary browsing non-Chrome is table stakes for me. I'm willing to put up with the completely dysfunctional organization behind Firefox to do that but I'd love to have an alternative.

[PaulHoule]

Like what?

Tab islands just encourages people to have too many tabs open.

Who wants to chat with Opera AI when you can chat with so many other AI? I think in 2026 the only way to communicate that your product is different is to reject AI.

Free VPN? Aren't those all scams?

[tavro]

> Tab islands just encourages people to have too many tabs open.

i think they exist because people already open tons of tabs. instead of encouraging overload this helps manage it by grouping related pages into clusters. that is actually useful in my opinion. you can see this feature making it into other browsers as well, like firefox, for example.

> who wants to chat with Opera AI when you can chat with so many other AI? I think in 2026 the only way to communicate that your product is different is to reject AI.

i do not like this aspect myself, but all browsers make use of AI to some extent. don't you think this might be a way to survive the competitive browser market?

> Free VPN? Aren't those all scams?

some definitely are, yes, i agree. but i would argue opera's VPN is a browser level privacy tool, it is not meant to replace a full security VPN. i would guess it is mainly used to hide your IP address for websites. does it not do that? you should not view it as a hardcore anonymity solution, i do not think.

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these are not the technically accurate arguments i was looking for, your arguments are true for many browsers.

[PaulHoule]

It’s a reason why I have very little interest in alternative browsers, mostly they subtract value instead of adding it, I mean if you are just a skin around Chrome what can you do?

[tavro]

what browser do you use? and why?