It’s more than just advertising: if I understand correctly, it’s actually the Opera browser injecting those ads. Or at least, that’s the accusation.

If that’s true, I’m eagerly awaiting Opera’s response on the matter.

Reminds me of the Firefox / Mozilla ad campaign roughly a decade ago.

> eagerly awaiting Opera’s response

I'm guessing it will go something like, if you're not satisfied with our free browser, please file for a refund and we'll be sure to send it right out to you.

In the Twitter thread it seems like this is an in-browser ad, e.g. not an ad that is injected into the web page but one that is part of the browser chrome.

I don't like this for many reasons and I wonder what makes Opera browser so great that as a user I should put up with that?

Opera has Chinese interests and that’s enough for me not to use it.

From Wikipedia:

> Opera is a Chinese-Norwegian multinational technology company[9] that specializes in web browser development, fintech, as well as services such as Opera News and YoYo Games.

Even if it's part of the browser chrome, it's completely inside the webpage, rendering that distinction pointless.

You can easily block elements inside a web page or you can inspect them and see (with browser tools!) what network requests they perform. If the elements are part of the browser chrome, you need quite a lot more efford.

I would guess one key distinction is that an adblocker could block the ad injected to the page, but not one that's in the browser chrome.

How is it inside the webpage? Opera's ads have been in their toolbar for over a decade, themed the way the browser is and obviously distinct from the WebView. This isn't news

I didn't like it, so I don't use it. Most people don't like it, most people don't use it

Have you seen the screenshot?

I'm curious if this is actually working for them, ie are Opera users that sticky? Ad blockers are probably the most common type of browser extensions and broswers are pretty easy to switch - in-browser ads would be an immediate nope for many

Since Opera became increasingly bad in the last 8 years or so (I didn't use it before), I assume that the people which are still using Opera actually are pretty sticky.

I can't imagine how this could possibly work for them. Maybe there are sticky users who've been on Opera for decades, but it's gotta be niche as hell. I remember Opera being great 15-20 years ago -- it was my browser of choice. As far as I know nothing differentiates it these days from other Chromium browsers.

In my circles, Opera was dead when Presto was killed. I don't know anyone who uses Opera today, except an apprentice we had for three months last year.

In theory, it should just have been a change under the hood - use a different browser engine. But it seems that part is way more interlocked with the overall UX of the whole browser. 90% of features were missing after the switch, and while many were reimplemented later, whenever I checked it out again it was just different. I stuck with Opera 12 for so long it wasn't even funny anymore, more and more pages broke every day, but eventually, slowly I got used to Firefox. Which really took a loooooong time, since I tried a lot of extensions and tweaks to make it feel right. Weird how strongly you can get attached to a browser and its UX. I think even switching from Windows to Linux wasn't that tough.

I think a lot of the remaining Opera use is Opera Mini, possibly for its page size reducing proxy setup. On a site I do moderation for a noticeable amount of our most blatant trolling comes from that.

Interesting