Love all the comments here from folks who haven't read the article and are going on about the browser. This article is about Opera's alleged fraudulent loans business. Well really this article doesn't have much of its own to say, it's mostly a rewrite / summary of this article: https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnarou...
Opera was purchased by a China-based investor group prior to its IPO. The group’s largest investor and current Opera Chairman/CEO was recently involved in a Chinese lending business that listed in the U.S. and saw its shares plunge more than 80% in just 2 years amid allegations of fraud and illegal lending practices.
Post IPO, Opera has now also made a similar and dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%.
Most of Opera’s lending business is operated through apps offered on Google’s Play Store. In August, Google tightened rules to curtail predatory lending and, as a result, Opera’s apps are now in black and white violation of numerous Google rules.
Wow, that was a wild report and a good read. The detailed look into the predatory short term load apps is a real eye-opener... the apps would read the device contact list and shame late borrowers to their employer, parents, friends... and in developing places like Kenya and Nigeria. Truly, TRULY fucked up!
It appears only OPesa was taken down so far from Google Play. OKash, OPay and CashBean are still available. CashBean's keyword stuffed app ID [1] is remarkable, this is the first time I've seen such a spammy app ID on Google Play.
So I guess this is what JWZ termed "Brand necrophilia" - taking a brand you bought and using it for another product (in his case it was AOL reusing the brand "Netscape" for a cheap ISP service).
Then again it seems the Opera mobile itself hasn't mutated to a predatory credit app, so it might not apply here.
> Opera ended the day they deprecated their own rendering engine and became yet another Chromium wrapper, which we already have more than enough of.
The real fly in the ointment for me when Opera ditched Presto was the loss of M2. I have tens of thousands of emails it just handles with little to no overhead. Back when I was subscribed to multiple mailing lists relevant to my job, it just handled those, too. The world of mail clients seems to have thinned out to me, but I haven't seriously tried anything else in awhile. I've been holding out for Vivaldi's M3, but given that they've taken so long to get it done, I'll be surprised if it's ever released.
Opera rolled out a weird always-on VPN and acceleration service built in to the browser so every page was partially rendered on Opera servers. This gave them access to the plain text of pages as sites were rapidly moving to HTTPS. Effectively moving in on the ad targeting business where ISPs used to live.
Building a rendering engine didn't really fit in to that business model.
Fortunately the China sale spooked a ton of longtime Opera users who all jumped ship. Now apparently the husk of the company has been used to grow a lending company.
From what the article states, Opera was likely acquired with the explicit purpose of making this pivot. The brand was popular in the developing world, where this sort of predatory lending is still considered socially acceptable.
Been using Vivaldi since the day they released the technical preview and it has been a wonderful 5 years. It in my mind has been true to what 'old Opera' was and since they released the android app I have completely abandoned Chrome.
Not entirely relevant but; RIP Opera. It was a competent browser even after it became Chromium based, now few people trust it and even fewer people use it. Hope some of the features I remember seeing back when I used it, especially the ones in Opera GX, make it to other browsers.
It was a competent browser, but it lost everything that made it Opera. They seemingly nuked its entire feature set and it was no better than a skinned chrome.
I still remember the day, roughly 2 years later when the Technical Preview of Vivaldi launched. I don't even remember how I found it, but I've been using it since day one and it has remained a true spiritual successor to what made the original Opera what it was, aside from the rendering engine.
Opera Mini is simply the best experience for compressed mobile web browsing on low-speed connections. I use it when traveling and when my data plan runs out for reading the news and web sites (I don't log into anything because I don't trust the provider, and they have to MITM HTTPS). I'll be sad if this goes away.
I wish there was a self-hosted solution for compressed mobile browsing that I could put on a server. It'll be hard to replace the aggressive optimizations they have done to make this possible, though it's likely I can get most of the way by inlining everything and replacing script and image tags...
Sad for the company to pivot to abusive loan schemes.
I mean I’m sure it didn’t help when they switched to being yet another chromium wrapper - why pay for essentially the same browser you can get for free? That can’t have helped their revenue
I wish Opera would open source their presto engine. I'm guessing that isn't possible due to some licensing issues. Personally I find it unfortunate that all that amazing work will be lost. While I didn't use Opera due to it's proprietary nature, as a browser engine it was competitive for its time.
I'm having the same feeling now about the EdgeHTML engine which is now being fazed out. This engine was a breath of fresh air compared to trident. It was bringing value to the internet space.
Granted, I do realize there are perfectly valid business reasons Opera and Edge switched to chromium.
Opensource is not about having a source code but having a license to use it. You can easily get in trouble with them if you'll distribute your non-trival modifications otherwise.
>I'm guessing that isn't possible due to some licensing issues. //
As in they're under a license agreement that prohibits open-sourcing?
Presumably unless it's specifically prohibited then they could release their code with holes where the licensed content goes, which would bump the problem up the chain to the next layer of owners and allow people to focus on them? Or let people adapt the codebase to work around the other libraries (or whatever)??
At this point the source is pretty much useless except for archival reasons or HTML support on low-end devices. It will require rewrite from the ground to adapt to modern tech. It did work well for its time but wasn't made for change architecturally as can be seen from the leaked code so any major upgrade will be difficult.
I remember using most of the stuff Opera browser offered. RSS reader was amazing, email client was great. I even used their torrent client. It was all built in the browser.
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
> developers still walled their websites with useragent checks
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.
> I believe at one point they even sent a fake UA string by default.
In fact Vivaldi, the spiritual successor to Opera, just moved to a fake UA string in the latest version (masquerading as Chrome), precisely due to UA sniffing still being a thing, even with Google's sites.
Vivaldi just switched to using Chrome's user agent (even though it was Chromium based a large number of sites failed these kinds of checks). It's not like advertising to the market that you have 1% usage share actually changed anything and you still have your counts of active installs on hand.
FYI: the SEC is investigating how mainland Chinese companies ever got listed on US exchanges as their accounting methods are not compatible with US requirements.
Figure 12 - 18 months before they're mostly delisted.
Exactly. It such a shame that neither Chrome nor Firefox provide this basic Accessibility feature out of the box. All their devs have 20/20 eyesight seemingly.
And if anybody can recommend a good alternative, please tell it.
