While I understand the IE/Edge hate, why do people hate Opera so much?
Moved from Chrome to Opera like a year ago and had awesome experience with it.
Is there anything I'm missing?

Opera is basically an extension of chrome. No difference there

The people i know that dislike opera dislike it because in 200x it was a shitty browser xD

@Codex404 I'd expect some better arguments from a dev community, you know

@Wiciaki we are not lawyers 😝

Opera used to be the most innovative browser of them all. Many of the features people take for granted in Chrome/Firefox were developed for Opera first.

R.I.P Opera 12.18 💔

Opera was created and ran by someone who thought that we needed a new browser which, while working very good/having a good interface and being conveniant, also respect the users' privacy (I've read about that on their site once, back when it was still in good hands).

Although it was based on the same engine as Chromium (the one google's chrome also runs on), it was (at least when I tried it) a lot lighter on resources and it just worked.

It really tried to bring something new into the world of browsers and I really liked that.

Then, they introduced a VPN service which was pretty alright imo but there was hardly any transparency as for what it logged etc (about the most crucial thing when it comes to VPN).

But then, a chinese investor/company/thingy bought them. They came with a new browser, only for mac and windows (they really used to keep Linux in the release cycle when they started). Next to that, it was closed source while opera was very much open source and the founders stood behind the open source principle as well.

Now it's a closed source browser, has a buildin vpn service which is known to sell user data (it's literally in their ToS) and owned by a chinese party.

Yes, I'm done with opera as everything it stood for, next to being a good/usable browser (ethics and everything), is gone.

@linuxxx they kinda went the same way that Google did with Chrome. There was Chromium, an open source engine which wasn't wildly popular but it was very fast and open.

Then Google build Chrome on top of Chromium, basically adding data collection/proprietary libraries on top of a very good browser/engine.

@linuxxx that's a nice backstory. Yeah, the VPN feature would ring my bell if I ever was to use it. That kinda doesn't answer the question, though - if it repeats the mistakes of Chrome, why do people prefer Chrome over Opera?

@Wiciaki Because I don't think many people see the chrome thing as a mistake.

Chrome integrates your google account (if you choose for it) into your browser so you have everything in one place which is very useful of course only that comes at the cost of Google getting to know everything about you. Emails, internet use, often location data, voice data when using stuff like google now and the voice thingy on the keyboard, chat stuff through hangouts/allo and more, your visuals through video calls maybe and so on.

Opera isn't as bad in that case but I find it very dangerous if one company focused on collecting data and selling that to the highest bidder and integrated in one of the biggest surveillance engines ever created knows literally everything about you (approximately). (This is why I avoid google like the fucking plague)

@linuxxx Almost :) The first iteration of Opera (up until 12.18) used their own rendering engine (Presto), and was the one where most of the innovations happened.

Then in 2013 they dropped their own engine completely and switched to a Chromium based browser (the current iteration). Only later (2016) were they bought by a Chinese company, and they were always (apart from the Chromium bits) a closed source browser.

@wizzzard Close enough then :P