Is Opera a better alternative to Chrome?

VPN
1

Chrome makes my laptop lag + I’m a student

I heard Opera is a great browser and all - especially for gaming. There’s a VPN & stuff. Does it sell my info like Google? Any people who good experiences with Opera?

2

It’s like Chrome but with more features and it doesn’t send your browser history to Google

3

I see questions about Opera’s privacy a lot.

People seem to distrust Opera because it is owned by a conglomerate of Chinese investors. But Opera itself is a Norwegian company. It is unclear the exact nature of the relationship between the Norwegian company and the Chinese investors.

I dug into some of the details to get a sense of what is going on.

TL;DR, Plenty of advertising companies work with Opera. All are based in the US or Europe. It is unclear what data these ad companies receive. If you have Opera Sync enabled, you browsing history is uploaded to Opera as is not encrypted by default.

Privacy Statement

Opera has two privacy statements, one for the European Economic Area (https://www.opera.com/privacy/eea) and one for the rest of the world (https://www.opera.com/privacy/row).

According to the ROW privacy statement:

User-submitted Data

[…]

We will use this data only to provide the services you have requested and will not retain your data any longer than necessary to fulfill that specific purpose. If you’re not comfortable with us using submitted data for a limited purpose, then don’t provide it to us.

Third Parties

Our applications and services include third-party technology or code, some of which may use your data in different ways. When such third-party technologies use previously collected data, they typically act as data processors for us. When they collect data on their own, they typically act as independent data controllers. For convenience, we have included links to their privacy policies below. Data controllers are marked with an asterisk.

[…]

[…]

[…]

In this privacy statement, Opera explicitly says the they can use any user provided data to “provide the services you have requested”.

The privacy statement lists many targeted ad companies in their list of third-parties who may process or control your data. All of these ad companies seem to be based in either Europe or the US. None are based in China.

History Sharing

If you have Opera Sync enabled, then yes, your browser history is being sent to Opera.

According to the privacy settings in the browser, this history is not encrypted by default.

You must enable “Encrypt all synchronized data with your own sync passphrase” in the “Advanced sync settings” to ensure that this data is encrypted on Opera servers and that Opera themselves will not be able to decrypt it.

Closed Source

Now, Opera is closed source so we have no way to verify anything. We cannot be sure that encryption is actually happening or that the key used to decrypt the data is not being uploaded to Opera or a third party.

We must trust Opera to behave ethically and in compliance with their own privacy statement.

4

I’ve been using Opera since it was available - years.

Always been stable for me on Windows and Linux. I’ve never really had any issues with it.

Currently is is a partnership with original company and a Chinese company. I’ve seen no issues for me.

I find sip memory overall. Much better than Chrome in my opinion. I have used all the browsers over the years. Opera is my favorite still.

5

I wouldn’t use the vpn. It’s just a proxy. Rule of life is any free vpns are pretty dogshit. If you want a vpn get a paid one. I started using Opera GX yesterday and really like it so far. Big fan of the side panel with some added stuff I visit regularly. My main reason for leaving Chrome was because of how non cpu friendly it was and it’s a big difference to Opera. The fact you can limit with cpu limiter is also great. Not sure how much it works but so far so good. There’s some things I wish they added but they’re not gamechanging. Will probably test it for a few weeks.

6

I’m considering leaving Opera for Edge after 3 non removable ads have appeared on my homepage.

7

Yes, it doesnt send your info to google. Instead, it sells it to china. Use firefox.

8

Having used it for two weeks and chrome for years. it’s just seems like a worse chrome. It’s missing small UI touches you notice when managing favourites or dragging windows and tabs around etc…

It has settings to throttle it’s resource usage, but as the browser itself requires comparable resources to chrome. throttling it less than chrome will just make the browser slow.

9

I Opera on the phone because it the only browser I found that reformats text when you zoom in or out. But I use Firefox on the desktop. I feel it has more and better features. In any case, no Chrome no matter what.

10

i’ve been using opera to watch twitch, and yesterday i did a test between all the browsers i had installed to see on which one it run the best, i found that Edge was the most performant, then opera GX, then opera, then firefox and chrome.

11

Instead it sends it to the chinese

12

Firefox’s main source of revenue is Google - so it’s not really all that much better.

13

Theoretically they are bound to Norwegian law. In practice, hard to prove what’s going on as it’s closed source