About a month ago, I switched to Opera after many years of using Chrome as my main web browser. here I want to share with you why I am still happy about that and why I recommend you to switch to Opera too.
History of Opera
Opera is one of the oldest web browser in the Internet history. It never had a big market share, but Opera was always there since 1995. Yes, 1995 means 26 years ago(not only 5 years ago!). I am not certain, but I guess it was one best first modern mobile web browser too, Opera Mini. I want to avoid talking about history of web browsers here. Let’s see why I recommend Opera.
Compatibility
Foremost, Opera is a chromium base web browser. So, you have the same experience of Chrome + extension compatibility.
The only problem is that if you saved all your password on your Google account synced with the Chrome, you can import them automatically. But you can export all your saved password from Google account and import them manually to your opera account. You just need to enable a flag.
Type Opera:flag in address bar and look for password import flag. Enable it and restart the Opera. Then you import your password file through import bookmark in the setting section.
Features which I appreciate it
I feel it would be better not to talk about all the features such as Internal VPN and Tracking blocking &… here I want to mention the cool ones.
Sidebar
Honestly, since many years ago, all the major web browser never had any big improvement for the end-user experiences. This sidebar in opera is really useful and help you to save lots of time during your web browsing.
Workspaces
Instead of having many windows open and inside them full of tabs. You can create different workspace in the sidebar and easily switch to them. You can also move the tabs between them.
Sidebar Messenger
You can have access to your favourite instant messengers directly from sidebar without changing tab or windows. By the way, you can always switch the notification off if you need the focus.
More over, you can have instagram and Twitter feed directly in the sidebar. There is a flag which you can enable to have custom sidebar too.
Music player integrated to sidebar
It does not matter what we do, Working, Blogging, Designing or Playing… the music players are always being there with playing music or podcasts for us.
You can integrate Music services such Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube music, SoundCloud, Deezer, and Tidal directly to your browser sidebar and easily change what you’re listening before even quit your open tab.
There are a bunch of more features and even different versions of Opera which you can discover them by your own at Opera website.
Are all those are free?
Yes, Opera is a Freeware which you can download it for free, and it is working on all the major OS.
But how opera makes money?
Yes, that was my question too. They are not Google, which we all know why they provide us free services. But why a company in size of Opera should spend money to develop a browser for us for free? The main answer is again google and all the other big companies. They always pay them more to keep them as main search engine or suggest their website somehow in the browser. So if they have more users, they have more financial support from big companies.