I've been using a chromebook for the last 4 years and it's been great for my needs (youtube, streaming, porn, etc), but I am shopping for a windows machine now because fuck google.

It works on Android, but I don't believe it works on iOS.

Thanks choom, you reminded me to reinstall Sponsorblock.

I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry

I didn't other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol

If you use android, just use adguard private dns. It will get rid of third party apps ads. For youtube you need revanced or newpipe

Sure, but it is still the most usable alternative we have for now. I would avoid stock FF and use either Librewolf or hardened FF because the default browser spies too.

Really have hopes for Servo/Ladybird!

Plus the whole exploiting poor people thing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html?guccounter=1

I stopped using Opera the second it wasn't Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the "clean" browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use

The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn't mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.

I've been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn't any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.

While the concern remains valid, I'm also asking myself whether it's that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I'm neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.

So in the end it's on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.

People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).

They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there's that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they'd have to maintain independently.

Exactly. I used Opera until they dropped Presto and went back to Firefox.

Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.

originally? a paid product. now? crypto!

Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.

If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.