Hindenburg alleged that when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days. Opera also falsely advertised longer loan terms and lower interest rates in the app descriptions, because the Google Play Store had rules against predatory loan services.
The loan apps specifically targeted customers in Kenya, India, and Nigeria. Hindenburg also confirmed through user reports and a former employee that two of the apps, OKash and OPesa, asked for permission to the phone contacts during the setup process. The service would then start sending threatening messages to the user’s contacts when a borrower was late on their payments. The issue was also covered by local media prior to Hindenburg’s report.
The money from these loan apps amounted to 42.5% of Opera’s revenue by mid-2019. Yes, almost half of Opera’s revenue came from extracting money from people in developing countries with false advertising and direct harassment.
Corbin Davenport
As if this wasn’t horrible enough, Opera also pushed the usual crypto and NFT scams, and is now chasing that “AI” high by adding spicy autocomplete to its Chromium skin. Much like Brave – good people don’t let friends use Brave – Opera is just a veneer around shady business practices, and you just shouldn’t use this garbage.
Just use Firefox.
Opera used to be good, but their failure in the market let a slow downward spiral.
With no longer having their own rendering engine (which served a niche for low power devices, and high speed performance), and not having any other distinctive features (though GX was a nice attempt), they have to resort to these tactics as they decay.
Agreed, need to stay away from (what is now essentially) malware.
They relied on Opera Mobile and had a SUBSTANTIAL market share on phones for a while, even being the biggest browser in eastern europe. It was all presto based, and once the company switched to blink. they were just “another” blink browser, so there was no longer the mobile advantage.
Opera mini was also fairly powerful and impressive considering it is a java ME based browser.
Opera mini was great, especially on limited data plans.
Right up until they started shoving in their own ads and obnoxiously injecting sponsored links on their speed dial.
True,
I remember my Symbian, and Nokia Maemo devices. The Opera browser was actually usable. Whereas before that the best we could do was “WAP”.
They even had success on the gaming consoles for a while. Now Microsoft has their Edge (again Blink), and Sony is trying to completely bury the browser, since it was used to hack their consoles. (They did the same to Linux).
But I can see why device manufacturers stopped paying Opera. Even though it was good, there was still free “serviceable” options later on.
^This. At some moment in time, there was no other usable browser for Symbian, but Opera Mini, or even better Opera Mobile
The HTC HD2 shipped with Opera browser because the Windows Mobile version of Internet Explorer was so awful. Similarly, the first-party browser on the Nokia N-series (running Symbian S60v2) was so awful that the phone also shipped with Opera.
Note: Symbian S60v2 and later S60v3 an S60v5. But my experience was on a Nokia N70 which was S60v2.
I will stop using it as soon as someone points me to extension that makes gxgames work on Firefox. Tried a variety of user agent switchers, none of these work.
This game works in Firefox: https://gx.games/games/j968wx/archaeogem/
Did you mean something more specific?
Were they ever “Good”. They were small and ultraportable and had by and far the best UX, but in terms of being an interpreter and faithful representative of a website/webapp, No, it never was. It was always less compliant with the actual sites ( standards be darned for webdevs), and slower.
Opera was good back in the day when they had their own browser, but then they were sold.
Now its Vivaldi thats good. (Old Opera boss runs it).
Malware? Spyware?
I loved opera 12.18 with a fiery passion, presto engine is still rather impressive today, considering that it has not had a real update for a very long time, it is still rather capable.
It had features that even modern browser lack today, like native scrollbars.
Today there is only Blink browsers left in the main stream. Gecko, Goana and WebKit is better for me, but never reach the speed and customizability of Opera 12.
NaGERST,
This is interesting, since Blink is essentially a WebKit port, which originated on KDE as KHTML.
And it is the first time I hear about Goana. And from what I read, it seems to be a stale port of Gecko (they mentioned single threaded processing, for example).
That leaves us essentially two active main engine branches:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_engine#Notable_engines
(Or three if we take WebKit sufficiently different than Blink).
@Sukru
in my opinion you can add at least 2 more:
1) Servo https://servo.org/
2) NetSurf https://www.netsurf-browser.org/
I do understand that those do not support yet all CSS and/or JS, however in my opinion this is just a matter of resources and convenience. I dare to predict that both would pick up speed and features promptly, when Blink or Gecko stalled.
I actually love the limited NetSurf capability because it allows me to quickly check the quality of a site. If shown and usable in NetSurf, its a good side. If not its likely garbage and full of ads and scams. OSAlert passed that test btw. and our own website too.
Andreas Reichel,
Using netsurf to check the quality of a modern website is like using reactos to check the quality of a windows application.
I don’t deny that some websites are filled with garbage and bloat. Javascript and CSS can be a part of that, but on the other hand some of my favorite web applications running client side make extensive use of them and are genuinely better for it.
@Alfman
> Using netsurf to check the quality of a modern website is like using
reactos to check the quality of a windows application.
The joke is on you because I actually do consider this a valid approach.
Wine and ReactOS did their very best to follow a clean API re-implementation.
When an application runs on those environment, you know that no dirty tricks were involved. Its almost a guarantee.
Otherwise it could be a failure of Wine/ReactOS or just another one of those shady deviations from the standard.
Look a the OpenOffice specs and you will know exactly what I am talking about.
Also please note: I wrote “Web site”, since Web Applications are a different beast really. Discussing if “Web Applications” should be in Java Script is an entirely different and even more fierce discussion.
Although I agree, that deployment of Web Applications via WebAssembly is a very useful and valid case.
Andreas Reichel,
Haha. That’s your prerogative, although I still push back on the notion that something isn’t a “quality” website/app if it doesn’t run on NetSurf/reactos. If a developer targets mainstream platforms and an alternative platform lacks the necessary features, then I understand why you would be unhappy as an alternative user. Still, it’s up to a developer to define their target audience and use the features that they find useful. We shouldn’t be forced to avoid standards & features that don’t work on platforms that don’t even have 1% market share.
Well, not necessarily. If there’s enough demand for a title, you are more likely to see wine adding compatibility for the title than the other way around. Wine and proton use tons of dirty hacks for the sake of improving compatibility with mainstream titles.
They’re all technically “websites”. This distinction may not meaningful to users or developers who are deciding what features to implement / use.
Webassembly is a different topic to me.
@Andreas Reichel,
Thank you for the recommendations.
I still have a “backlog” plan of “living on” RISC OS / Raspberry PI, at least for testing purposes. Maybe that could be an opportunity to try netsurf out.
I fired up my dual 60Mhz sparcstation 20 a few years ago and was amazed how much of the web you could still use with Opera 9.x
If you want to use “Opera” you should be using Vivaldi.
The company name was tarnished and the products became little more than scam engines after the Chinese “investment” in 2016. You could see the rot as soon as they launched their own VPN that secretly routed traffic to Chinese servers.
What’s a real shame is the loss of such innovative work coming out of the company for 20+ years in the name of (dodgy) profit
Adurbe,
Unfortunately, I think all of the browser makers have discovered the same thing: they cannot make a living “the normal way”. It is basically impossible to compete with the dominant platforms legitimately given that they can bundle and afford to be a loss leader indefinitely, These alternatives have no path to profitability using conventional means that we won’t criticize them for. So they’ve turned to fads like NTFs. crypto, etc to make some money,
So, although I agree with you, it’s far easier to criticize from the couch than to come up with a solution for them. And I bet you they’re pretty desperate for one. Maybe it’s time for them to give up and close up shop because competing with a browser is non-viable if you need to make a living from it. Even giving up can be hard when it’s something you are passionate about and have invested your life into. Nobody wants to go through that. Still, I am afraid that more of us may be headed for this future. Many of us are in denial about it but the tides are changing and AI is coming for more of our jobs.
While you might not become a unicorn company, you can certainly make a profitable company if you charged as a product. Opera did follow this model for a couple of decades and they sold that business to the Chinese consortium for $600m. That (to me) that shows they Could make a living from it. And indeed the founder then repeated it with Vivaldi, further proving the point. Although in fairness he is likely doing it more as a hobby than to ‘make a living’ after selling Opera.
What you are conflating is that its easier, more profitable and requires less effort to sell people’s personal data and/or pyramid schemes. Many video games have found the same, loot boxes and avatar upgrades generating more than full blown games. It doesn’t mean that’s the only model available though.
Adurbe,
As I understand it, that sale wasn’t just the browser but most of the company’s assets. I’m under the impression it wasn’t that profitable, hence the reason they were looking for buyers. They accepted $600M after a deal for $1B+ fell through. At the time opera had 10% of the mobile market, but given the trajectory it seems to me that it was the right financial call to sell the browser before market shrank further. They probably could have made much more selling it several years sooner.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263517/market-share-held-by-mobile-internet-browsers-worldwide/
I agree that greed has driven a lot of these negative trends. But as time goes on it’s not merely easier and more profitable, but increasingly necessary and unavoidable just to survive in markets that are largely collapsing around a few dominant entities. This is sad. IMHO we wouldn’t be witnessing the collapse of alt-browsers If creating them were truly profitable. People don’t want to pay for something they already got bundled for free
I paid for using Opera since v.4x until they stopped this model and I quit using it some months after leaving Presto engine.
Vivaldi is the spiritual sucessor to Opera since the founder founded them both.
I don’t remember why I don’t like Vivaldi. Anyone have any idea? Like did they make a deal with the devel and give into crypto? Or Something dark like that? Maybe I just have enough blink based browsers? I like Thom think firefox is a good choice for many reasons.
Opera back in the day was amazing and trailblazed a lot of features that became popular. Vivaldi, uses the blink engine (aka chromuim codebase) and is very customizable so if you do not like look/feel you can play with it. I don’t think they went into Crypto, yet I have not used it in a couple years.
So true, they had the first ad blocker IMHO. And it freed up the ad’s screen real estate, unlike modern ad blockers, which is a whole other cat and mouse story.
I can’t think of any big faux pas.. If anything, they’ve been keeping google “features” in check (Idle Detection API)
Fact: Normal Effective Interest Rates for Consumer Loans in Indonesia and Nigeria easily exceed 30% at normal endorsed commercial banks, with often close to 50%.
“Flat interest loans”, weekly instalments. Loan amounts of less than 1’000 USD based on domicilated salary.
Keep in mind that inflation rates are above 20% and 1 year probability of default is another 11-15%.
Some banks in the muslim world operate without interest, since that is a big haram in Islam. They instead use fixed fee.
I’ve been using Opera since early 2000’s and continued after they abandoned Presto engine. I think it is a bit unfair to say Opera today does not offer anything that others don’t. I’m continuously testing Vivaldi and Firefox in parallel and keep coming back to Opera. Last time I decided to try and switch to Firefox at the beginning of January pushed by the article on OSAlert and I failed again. I’d really like for Firefox to stay around and if half of what’s stated in linked article is true I’ll keep trying.
Scrolling tabs are a big turn-off for me (and for many others from what I’ve seen) and lack of configurable pop-up panels like in Opera are biggest showstoppers at the moment. I took a look at some of the extensions that may introduce similar functionality in Firefox bit it is not quite there yet.
I’ll keep trying….
I’m like you: I have tried other browsers but functionality-wise Opera is still the best for me. I know about extensions for other browsers, but finding the right ones is usually a problem for me.
Someone here mentioned Vivaldi, as an Opera successor and how customizable its UI is, but I just find it ugly and unusable and don’t feel like spending hours tweaking it to turn it into something I somewhat like, it so I never more than toyed with it.
Falkon (I’m a Fedora KDE user) is also a very nice browser with some Opera-like features (single-key shortcuts are great!) but I’m not sure if it can be my main browser.
Now I discovered Min, which I want to give a try, at least as a second or third browser.
https://minbrowser.org/
Anyone using it has an opinion ti share?
>Much like Brave – good people don’t let friends use Brave
Can someone enlighten me about this?
They tout themselves as the most privacy respecting browser out there, yet they are actually the most privacy-invasive one. You once could read all about it on Wikipedia but a while back someone scrubbed the entire, factual, “Controversy” section of the article and there is zero negative information there anymore. The Wiki article now reads like an advertisement for the browser and whenever someone tries to restore the actual history of the browser, it gets reverted and sometimes they get banned from Wikipedia. Obviously there is some shady backroom stuff going on there.
Here are some links to some of their privacy-adverse and user hostile actions:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
https://decrypt.co/31522/crypto-brave-browser-redirect
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/brave-browser-under-fire-for-alleged-sale-of-copyrighted-data/491854/
This isn’t so much user hostile but it is definitely self-serving and possibly criminal, and again is a privacy issue (“Brave will scrub sites of ads and ad tracking, then replace those ads with its own”):
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-begins-controversial-ad-repeal-and-replace-tests.html
Bottom line: If you’re smart enough to know you want to use Brave, you are smart enough to tweak Firefox or an un-Googled Chromium to have the same or even better privacy features, without the shady bullshit that Brave uses to actually monetize your browsing habits and data while lying to you about it. Brave is pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining.
Wow I didn’t know that, thanks. I’ve been testing Thorium, a user-built fork of chromium with some compiler optimizations turned on.
Unfortunately on Chrome for Android you can’t install extensions and Firefox for Android is a bit slow the last time I tried it, so I use Brave on Android (Firefox on desktop/laptop) in order to have adblock.
Can you even install an adblocker on Firefox for Android?
Of course you can. I have uBlock Origin installed on mine, same as dekstop. Mozilla Sync (formerly Firefox Sync) works great too, keeps my bookmarks and settings synced across desktop and mobile on every OS I use (I recently switched from my iPhone to the Pixel 8 Pro and am going through the process of locking it down for privacy and security).
And I haven’t had a single issue with performance or stability with Firefox on Android, it’s on par with the testing I did with the native Chrome installation.
I can second that.
I don’t use Opera because I consider it an overloaded browser with gadgets. But what we see above is simple media manipulation. Below are some facts:
1. The Hindenburg Report about Opera was published in the end of January 2020:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/opera-and-the-firm-short-selling-its-stock-alleging-africa-fintech-abuses-weigh-in/
2. The article was published EXACTLY, it comes out about how Hindenburg buried another company a year ago: https://www.reuters.com/world/india/adani-vs-hindenburg-research-what-you-need-know-2024-01-03/
2. Quite coincidentally, on the same day the author (Corbin Davenport) writes an article (on his own blog – not in a credible media outlet) whose main point is a report by …. Hindenburg!
3.In his article from January 22, 2020 about Hindenburg and Opera (the date is probably also ‘coincidental’), he mentioned Opera’s share prices: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory-loans/…
Please forgive me, but the similarity of dates implies the accusation that either:
1. Hindenburg will soon publish another report and you are part of their PR activities (to create buzz)
2. Someone are trying to influence the share price…https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ia-rumors
Sorry, but quoting a short-seller company is very controversial.