Microsoft Edge (linux ver)

jppelt
Less about the sale itself and more about the decisions being made that annoyed them and many long term users.

Although intended for general users, it is first and foremost targeted towards technically-inclined users as well as former Opera users disgruntled by its transition from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser that resulted in the loss of many of its iconic features. Despite also being Chromium-based, Vivaldi aims to revive the features of the Presto-based Opera with its own proprietary modifications.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)

Opera continually kills things to adopt chromiums implementation. Last I remember was PIP (Picture-In-Picture, users were not happy). While this makes sense from a technical debt standpoint. If you are going to do everything the same way.. why do you exist?

Vivaldi understands this.

In the case of Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former chief executive of Opera Software, the answer is to launch a company that picks up where the old company is leaving off. He and 19 other ex-Opera employees have launched a new site called Vivaldi aimed at people who want a replacement for the My Opera community site, which Opera is closing on March 1.

...

The closure of My Opera isn't the only bone von Tetzchner has to pick with Opera.

He also thinks the company is too focused on mobile advertising and spent too much money on the acquisition of the SkyFire video compression technology. But his biggest complaint is that the company has, in his opinion, squandered its reputation for building a browser with cutting-edge features and high performance.

"If you look at the number of new features during the last four years, then compare that to the four years before that, it's a very significant difference", he said. That's what led Opera to scrap its own Presto browser engine in 2013 and move instead to Google's open-source Blink project that's also at the heart of Chrome.

I would have kept Presto," von Tetzchner. "The decision to move away from Presto was taken after years of negligence. They should have increased the investment to stay competitive. They stopped investing in the engine, then they took the consequences and threw it away.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/ex-ceo-picks-up-where-opera-left-off-launching-vivaldi-site/

WetGeek I just looked it up in Wikipedia, and found nothing about Chinese ownership, so I suspect that's probably just a conspiracy theory.

Opera was indeed sold to a Chinese consortium. https://www.engadget.com/2016-07-18-opera-browser-sold-to-a-chinese-consortium-for-600-million.html

But considering its co-founder and former CEO turned strategic adviser had left Opera due to "disagreements with management" in 2011 -> founded vivaldi in 2013 -> First vivaldi preview release 2015 -> Opera was sold in 2016. It is clear the sale was not the reason Vivaldi's creation.

Harvey Opera was indeed sold to a Chinese consortiu

I had never heard that before. Thanks for the link.

I'll need to give that some serious thought now. I've kept Opera around as a default browser, to open links in places like emails or search results, so that the two instances of Vivaldi that I use daily aren't disturbed for such purposes. But I'm generally not a fan of any software that accesses the Internet and could easily be passing personal information to the CCP.

I could just as easily use Firefox as a default browser, so I'll probably change to that instead. In fact, I'll probably do that today.

EDIT: Opera is now gone from my daily driver laptop. I'll remove it from the rest as I access them to install upgrades. I realize there's very little chance that the CCP is interested in my browsing data, but there are just too many good browsers that aren't owned by China for me to want to take that chance.

@kyrios Also they best make sure they use zero Electron applications since not only does Microsoft contribute to Chromium, but they also have paid engineers that work on Electron for a living

I can sorta understand why you would've been anti-Microsoft before Satya Nadella became CEO, but it's kinda ignorant at this point. Microsoft is a pretty significant contributor to open source software, with even some of their own system applications shipping in Windows being open source under permissive licensing like MIT. They've been contributing to the kernel for years and have been a corporate platinum member of the Linux Foundation, meaning they annually pay at least half a million USD a year and have a say via its Board of Directors, for 4 years now. Hell, SUSE (ya know, the ones that make SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE) is only a "gold" tier member, and Canonical is only a "silver" tier member.

Silver tier is 5-20k. I mean, when Solus accepts donations again, we could even be a silver-tier member. Not saying we would, I'm just saying the bar is that low. Of course, that's ignoring all the engineers Canonical has contributing open source on a daily basis and Canonical was operating at a loss almost exclusively year-over-year for over a decade, but the point is you have a company that used to be so anti-Linux that they used to have anti-Linux marketing campaigns donating at least 25x more (500000 / 20000, if we're being generous about Canonical) on a yearly basis than a company that has contributed to Linux for years and actively has tried to make money off of it (which is fine, seriously) since 2004. Not saying Canonical hasn't contributed more to open source than Microsoft in the long-term, just saying what the situation is now.

It's time for you to re-assess the landscape and your notions of it.

JoshStrobl It's clear that the new CEO clearly gave a new direction to the company and it is a clever move because Microsoft failed to impose Windows on most servers, phones, and other embedded devices. Azure wouldn't be a thing without Linux and open source in general. So instead of doing some more unsuccessful attempts to impose their OS on some segments on which they are clearly too late now, they embrace the technologies they can use to develop their business on these markets.

At the same time, they are making sure to keep their monopoly on the desktop; thanks to WSL many developers/companies won't need to use Linux workstations or a dual boot anymore. Just saying because every year around this period I read that the next year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop... So nope I don't think Linux will get 5% of the desktop market share in 2021.

jppelt The problem with everyone using Chromium is it creates a monopoly on web technologies where Google can basically shoehorn functionality in without it going through the typical W3C standard bodies. With Microsoft Edge dropping EdgeHTML (which was actually more competitive when it came to new ECMAScript / JavaScript standards and was more performant in some areas) and moving to Chromium, we've gone from four competitors in the market to three building their own web engines. And I don't know when "less competition" has ever been a good thing.

You have:

• Google w/ Chromium with Blink (a fork of WebKit) and V8 as its JavaScript engine.
• Mozilla w/ Firefox with Gecko and SpiderMonkey.
• Apple w/ WebKit. I'm including ports of WebKit such as WebKitGTK+ (used by the likes of Epiphany and Midori from back in the day).

Even for Qt, it was always either QtWebKit or Qt WebEngine. Qt5 WebEngine uses Chromium underneath, so that's still not helping to promote competition.

Now instead we're just seeing a bunch of different user experiences on top of existing javascript / web engines. I can't really blame anyone for that, they're basically their own virtual machines and even just the security model around them can be a real PITA to implement. I'm just simply stating what the status-quo is.

Just saying because every year around this period I read that the next year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop...

It's been "year of Linux on the desktop" for me since 2008. I don't believe there is any magical market share number where suddenly Linux is experiencing its "year on the desktop". In my opinion everyone, individually, has their own "year of Linux on the desktop".

Personally, I just don't see the value in using Microsoft Edge. It being ported to Linux isn't surprising though, if they're using something like electron forge or electron builder than its trivial to do. They already have the expertise from doing it for Skype, Teams, and Visual Studio Code. Functionality-wise I think Vivaldi far exceeds it.