Why does Opera GX rarely come up in browser discussions?
I'm curious about people's experiences with Opera GX, particularly because it seems to be largely absent from broader discussions about web browsers despite being probably one of the most advertised online.
I tried it for a while, but I didn't find that it performed noticeably better than other browsers. My main impression was that it felt somewhat clunky, and that many of its more unusual settings and customization options added complexity without improving the actual browsing experience. I can understand the appeal of its visual style and gaming-oriented branding, but in practice, those features mostly felt unnecessary to me.
I've used Firefox for the past couple of years and have been happy with both its performance and general usability. More recently, I've started using DuckDuckGo's app on my phone, and I'm considering trying the desktop version as well.
For people who use Opera GX regularly, what does it offer that keeps you using it? Are there features that become more useful over time, or is its appeal mainly the interface and customization?
I'm also interested in why it rarely appears in browser recommendations or comparisons. Is that because of technical concerns, Opera's reputation, privacy considerations, or simply because it occupies a fairly specific niche?
These days I'm sort of allergic to most things marketed specifically to "gamers" as usually it's just all fluff (and in the case of physical products often overpriced garbage IMHO- like gamer chairs and Razer stuff)
I have tried GX at one point in the past just to see what it's like and it's just another glorified Chromium and doesn't have anything special that I think makes it enticing to use. I stick with Firefox forks at this point (Waterfox in particular).
I think it's just that there are a ton of Chromium-based options out there, and so, I think it's very much in a niche, and it doesn't really offer anything exciting even to people in that niche, so it just feels like this unnecessary product. That's not to say it's particularly bad at anything, it worked fine for me, just felt like a bunch of unnecessary "features". It's sort of the "RGB lighting of browsers" I guess
Edit: privacy was never a concern for me, but I understand many people steer clear because of it being owned by a Chinese company now. (I would honestly rather have a Chinese company harvest my data than a US one like Google anyway...), but this probably does contribute more to it staying niche even amongst Chromium browsers
Had they actually stuck with a non-Chromium engine, I would be slightly more interested or at least supportive (in that I definitely want to support having a variety of engines out there, not just Chromium and Firefox-based stuff).
Why Firefox forks as opposed to just Firefox? Just curious
I don't like Mozilla's behavior currently and historically and also their company's now-heavy focus and jump on AI bandwagon (the opt-out toggle is not enough, I want a browser that is actively avoiding AI-integration as much as possible and sees it as unnecessary at a minimum and preferably as anathema to browser design- especially when it comes to chatbots/large corporate models). Opt-in would have left me with a slightly less sour view of them, but alas
If I'm going to use a supposedly (though questionable) user-respecting browser from this increasingly hype-chasing organization, I want it filtered through a layer of forking first, to strip out / modify said browser in ways that counteract that organization's focuses in a way that aligns with my views more
They are delusional in thinking they can support and invest in some mythical "good" side of generative AI (which doesn't exist, in my view, and is not something I'm open to discussing or debating in this thread, just as a note) to compete with the large corpos, and have invested lots of money and labor in that direction now, and I will absolutely refuse to support that directly
The AI features in Firefox are opt-in, not opt-out. I'm not particularly interested in AI features in my browser–I only rarely use AI summaries in search engines, and only then for extremely low-stakes "I wonder..." kind of queries, or if I have no luck finding something the old fashioned way. The only notice I got that Firefox has optional AI integrations (outside of opinions from random forum users with dubious understanding of the issues) was a single pop-up that I dismissed once and never saw again.
I'm coming to accept that LLMs are somewhat useful for certain tasks (though nowhere near as broadly useful as certain people expect) and will be a fact of life for the foreseeable future. I can't fault any vendor very much for simply trying to add the capabilities, only for how they go about it. Mozilla has settled on the opt-in approach, which is about as much as we can reasonably expect from them.
As for the recent behavior you nebulously referred to, that likely all stems from the extremely difficult position in which they've been placed. They do not have enough market share to stand on their own two feet funding-wise, and I'm not sure their model allows for that no matter how big a slice they have. They've relied on their primary competitors for the funding to continue operating for years upon years now, and while that arrangement hypothetically (and legally) preserves their independence, they have to be realistic about the market and their place in it. Google could decide tomorrow that they're not really in any danger of anti-trust actions, and that it's not worth spending the millions to keep a marginal competitor afloat. Mozilla forgoing integrating features that are in demand simply to save face with a vocal minority of anti-AI purists in their userbase sounds like a recipe for even worse irrelevance to me.
Can I ask what are some of the ways Waterfox is modified?
I’m actually with you on the generative AI thing, though probably overall less disappointed with Mozilla. Mostly just because I’m happy for any reasonably good alternative to chromium given my interest in having as little interaction with google as possible.
There are a lot of extra customization options for tabs/UI built-in, there are additional DNS/relay privacy options, there's zero LLM/genAI built-in (the only "AI" being ML on-device translation). Since it's not under Mozilla's control they don't do any weird promotional "remote experiment" BS like Mozilla has previously done with Firefox. It has ad-blocking built in (if one values that- i still use standalone uBO). More sane default config and UI choices. Zero telemetry. No new tab "personalized" BS.
Their "all features" page gives a pretty good overview IMO:
https://www.waterfox.com/features/#features-privacy
I also value LibreWolf as another fork, but find it so strict that I have to undo a lot of its privacy settings to unbreak a lot of sites/etc, so I decided to go with Waterfox as my main browser at this time. I do keep LibreWolf around though.
If I may chime in, I personally like some Firefox forks (mainly Zen) over Firefox primarily because I've been unenthused with Mozilla's UI/UX choices for a long time… since whenever it was they started aping Chrome with their UI design and threw in the towel on platform-tailored themes.
So my experience with it isn't rare. The only thing I miss is the calendar with upcoming games or game related events that it had in the main screen, honestly.
If you're interested, a podcaster I follow made a gaming news aggregator, Overworld.vg, with one of the highlighted features being a calendar showing upcoming game releases, as well as upcoming showcases. The site is minimally designed with no ads besides an unobtrusive single paid sponsorship spot on the side bar, so its a rather pleasant experience imo.
As someone who remembers OG Opera, once it went to Chromium (along with Chrome dethroning IE), it kinda seemed pointless versus just having Chrome. I seem to also remember that some popular features went away? Maybe someone can jog my memory or correct me.
If OG Opera features and customisability is what you're looking for, I can definitely recommend you to check Vivaldi. As a bonus, it's made by a Norwegian company and one of it's founders is also co-founder of Opera. So they're sharing similarities with the original in terms of some design choices.
However, it's still chrome based. If it wasn't for that, it'd be a perfect fit.
OG Opera was great but I don’t remember it being any better than Firefox (I never switched either). And then Chrome showed up and ruined everything. Damn you Chrome, damn you!
What did you like about OG Opera that you couldn’t get from Firefox?
Edit: Did it have a turbo mode or something? I feel like speed was part of its spiel?
There was a period around Opera 8/9 where it was noticeably faster than Firefox and Chrome wasn’t out yet. The UI was also just more polished than competitors at the time. Speed Dial was part of that before other browsers copied it. I seem to recall they were also first to being able to turn arbitrary search fields into custom search engines.
The built in email client and IRC client were also pretty good.
Also as a web developer they were usually pretty on the ball with supporting new CSS features (which resulted in being the first to pass acid2 on non-Mac platforms by a couple of years), which made a lot of web devs want to support them. At the same time, I think they were also first to come up with browser fixes as a concept so they were more compatible with sites designed only for IE too.
My personal browser history is IE -> Firefox -> Opera -> Chrome -> Firefox.
Speed Dial and keyword search were killer features. As were tab stacking and mouse gestures. I also liked the fast forward and fast backwards buttons at the time, but like mouse gestures, they became largely useless as web sites started relying more on Javascript and such for navigation.
It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox UI at the time looked absolutely hideous on Windows. That was important to some of us.
IIRC Opera was the first browser with tabs as well. Possibly with sync between PCs/ devices?
They definitely got a bit bloated and the transition to chromium was absolutely botched. (For a while your "bookmarks" was a static html page that just listed them all alphabetically.)
Vivaldi is doing a pretty good job of carrying on the original spirit and you can disable features you're not interested in.
OG Opera had its own rendering engine (or a big fork of an existing one?) and its thing was that it was SUPER FAST at rendering pages on slower connections.
Basically it could render the page while it was still loading or something.
I didn’t actually have Opera. I just knew some folks who did, and that Chrome coming onto the scene was a major blow to both the non-IE and IE browsers.
Privacy concerns for Opera are a leading cause since they were bought by a Chinese company. There is no clear indication whether or not they do harvest your data, but people often find Chinese owned applications enough reason to steer clear.
Others mentioned it's Chromium based, which is enough reason for me to stay away. I'll stick with Firefox or similar.
Their privacy policy says the following, emphasis mine:
Which sounds great, except they also say this:
Hahaha I guess this work because it's technically not them selling the data but instead the other members or whatever, but seems quite typical, who reads the privacy policy (beyond the first few lines) anyway
From the few ads I've seen for Opera during YouTube videos, it looked like many of the "features" it was adding to Chromium were superfluous things like animated backgrounds and RGB lighting sync. It's kind of crazy to me that they pivoted from making a browsing engine that was lauded for being especially quick and lightweight (iirc they had decent market share on lower end machines, especially Opera Mini on low end smartphones and feature phones) to essentially what appears to be hanging a bunch of bloatware on top of an existing browser platform.
It’s a closed source chromium fork by a company whose current owners have engaged in morally questionable business practices. That’s pretty dead on arrival. Most of the gaming features are bloat, as well. If closed source Chromium forks doesn’t bother you and you want the Opera design vision, then there’s Vivaldi, which has a lot of the team behind the original Opera.
I've always interpreted it as "it exists, I guess". It doesn't offer anything that makes it different or better compared to other options. If anything, it's worse since it's not open source.
It may be a simplistic view but to me the current rule of thumb is:
You want a vanilla chromium experience: Chrome or Chromium itself
You want a browser with sane privacy settings OOTB: Brave
You want a browser with a lot of customisation: Vivaldi (no contest)
You want a browser that lets you use side web panels: Vivaldi or Edge
You want an alternative to Chromium: Firefox
I'm checking their (Opera GX) list of features and almost all of them exist in some form in the browsers I mentioned above.
The only thing that stands out is "GX Control", which is basically a feature to limit RAM and CPU usage. But I'm thinking to myself, when and in what situations would I use this? The OS and the browser manage these just fine by themselves, realistically you don't need to use it. Or if the idea is to free up resources while I'm gaming, then... I would just close the browser.
Idk, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't see the point of this feature.
Zen is probably a better recommendation for privacy than Brave in 2026, and it gets bonus points for also not being Chromium-based or run by someone who hates gay people.
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927#issuecomment-2310910379
I haven't cared to follow the project since I saw this from the main dev. It's basically Firefox with extra crap and random about:config settings toggled that doesn't have as many eyes on it. I wish we had 20 competing browsers instead of 2-3 but in my opinion third-party browsers just aren't worth the hassle or risk right now. Librewolf is cool but also breaks just about anything worth using a browser for so you end up reverting most of the defaults. What's the point? uBlock or noscript will likely protect from 99% of untargeted attacks, but if you're being targeted you're screwed anyways. Everyone has their own risk assessment of course but I've wasted a lot of time trying to go down the privacy rabbithole. I'd rather spend my time and money fighting for digital sovereignty on a legislative level to benefit everyone long-term.
Can't comment on it, I never tried it since it's still in beta. But now that vertical tabs are becoming a thing in most browsers, it's Arc inspirations aren't as interesting as otherwise they would be - for me at least, to be clear. No shade meant.
How does it compare to waterfox in terms of privacy?
It's similar to Waterfox on privacy. Outside privacy, Zen's main differentiator with Firefox is the much more aesthetically pleasing UX out of the box. Their implementation of veritcal tabs is also more comprehensive and feature rich than Mozilla's implementation.
It's spyware and doesn't bring any new value compare to other browsers
on several occasions while using some of the less scrupulous streaming sites i'll randomly get an ad that makes it through my ublock origin and literally starts an operagx installer.exe download. they must have a very attractive and/or lax refferal program or something? i know piracy isnt always clean but that one really spooks me despite how "benign" a browser is
I never seeing ads successfully broke through while using ublock origin
For starters. I have no clue who is actually behind it these days after several IPOs and some Chinese involvement. That whole saga was an early example of enshittification. These days I see them heavily advertising features which could really just have been extensions and more often than not just seem like they are advertising preinstalled PWAs from third party services.
If you really want to stick with a Chromium browser I still recommend Vivaldi. Which actually relates to Opera in away. Vivaldi was founded by one of the founders of the original Opera.
From wikipedia:
I wanted to like Vivaldi, but I found their built in adblocker to not be up to the task much of the time. I wound up switching to Zen, a Firefox fork, instead. I've enjoyed that pretty well so far, and it's nice to have support for UBO which I barely ever see letting an ad through, including on YouTube.
Yeah a lot of browser preference is very subjective for sure. I don't generally want to sync between devices so that's not been much of a priority for me. I think firefox has tab sync now so that has probably flowed downstream to Zen as well.
Because modern Opera is kind of a scummy company and both their browsers are just reskinned Chromium that don't offer anything all that unique apart from sponsoring lots of YouTubers.
I can't really take closed source options seriously. The browser handles a lot of very private information that's too important to me to leave to random proprietary freeware.
It seems like a better model to me that the browser vendor publicly distributes the source code, making both it and the work on it open to public scrutiny and analysis, while the OS vendor builds it and distributes the binary package.
I can't see it mentioned on their web site, but if I recall correctly they used to advertise the ability to limit how much CPU/memory/bandwith the browser consumes, freeing up resources for gaming. This would if anything make the browser perform worse, but might be worth it for gamers on low-end hardware.
Opera is my iPhone browser of choice, but GX has a bunch of unwelcome gamer-focused junk that pulls my focus for the browser’s true function: Wikipedia machine.
On desktop I still main Firefox for various reasons (Zen was a daily driver for awhile but there were a few things it did that Firefox didn’t, but then Firefox did and I went back to Ol’ Reliable…) but when I need chromium I use Vivaldi, because it’s based on an earlier version of Opera and does it better.