I'm sorry to see that my favorite browser for almost four years is becoming a monetization tool rather than a profound and capable browsing tool for the web.

@diripiri said in What If Browsing on Your Phone Could Earn You Rewards?:

@himmelsschlingel: can't it be both? it's my favourite browser too and I'm not really into changing it

To me all this promotional stuff is obstrusive. The main thing I need a browser for is surfing the web. Opera has always been one that's giving me some extra handy features. But with this they are not adding any meaningful to explore the web.

So TBH, I don't want to earn any rewards neither with Edge nor with Brave and certainly not with Opera. Especially with Opera luring me into doing things I wouldn't do for privacy reasons only to earn a handful of money.

@shintoplasm01 I guess, we're in the same boat, aren't we?
What I get is, that they have to make some money anyhow and that all this commercial and promotional stuff is meant to do this. As long as you can opt out of all these stuff, I don't mind. It's the browser, stupid.
Having strong ties to China, collecting a lot of data unless you tame them and these funny little features no serious user actually wants makes it hard to love Opera some times.
But heck, I still like it for the things it offers still. And although I've been trying out all the other candidates I always come back.

@shintoplasm01 said in What If Browsing on Your Phone Could Earn You Rewards?:

@Himmelsschlingel I do wonder - why do you (we?) come back to Opera, and not, say, go over to Vivaldi? I've been very conflicted about Opera for years now...

I used Vivaldi for a whole lot of years actually, before I reverted to Opera. I found the Opera of 2022 the cleaner and more well-rounded browsers, while Vivaldi having a lot of bugs, actually.
But there's hardly anything in Opera that you can't do with Vivaldi nowadays except for the AI, if you're in it, sans all this pomotional stuff that has become so dominating in Opera.
Talking about Android, if you ever try to install Vivaldi or Firefox on it for all its worth, you might find that you don't have to opt out all the bloat that Opera or even Brave shovels around your neck. While I agree that Opera for Android is quite a sophisticated browser it's also full of some questionable stuff like affiliate links or this new rewards thing.
I don't think it isn't the time to give up on Opera completely but maybe to take its seat in the second row if you ask me. Vivaldi and Firefox have improved a lot. Question is if Vivaldi isn't overwhelmingly overblown with features and especially customization, that abhors many people to use it.
I'm not fully convinced by neither Opera, Brave, Vivaldi nor Firefox at this moment.

@shintoplasm01 I guess, we're in the same boat, aren't we?
What I get is, that they have to make some money anyhow and that all this commercial and promotional stuff is meant to do this. As long as you can opt out of all these stuff, I don't mind. It's the browser, stupid.
Having strong ties to China, collecting a lot of data unless you tame them and these funny little features no serious user actually wants makes it hard to love Opera some times.
But heck, I still like it for the things it offers still. And although I've been trying out all the other candidates I always come back.

@diripiri said in What If Browsing on Your Phone Could Earn You Rewards?:

@himmelsschlingel: can't it be both? it's my favourite browser too and I'm not really into changing it

To me all this promotional stuff is obstrusive. The main thing I need a browser for is surfing the web. Opera has always been one that's giving me some extra handy features. But with this they are not adding any meaningful to explore the web.

So TBH, I don't want to earn any rewards neither with Edge nor with Brave and certainly not with Opera. Especially with Opera luring me into doing things I wouldn't do for privacy reasons only to earn a handful of money.

I'm sorry to see that my favorite browser for almost four years is becoming a monetization tool rather than a profound and capable browsing tool for the web.