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Comment by interestica | Hacker News Reader

I don't know HN's view of Opera, but I've been using it for more than a year and really like it. It's chromium based and can use any plugin from the chrome store. It also has a lot of useful features (PIP video window, sidebar messengers, dev tools, dark mode, workspaces)

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Opera was bought out by a Chinese company a few years back. It's now, as I understand, more-or-less a Chromium clone.

If you like(d the old) Opera, 12.16 IIRC, though, I would suggest a more-or-less Chromium clone: Vivaldi. It feels like it has the same truly-a-user-agent feeling as Opera gave me so long ago. I believe it's staffed by ex-Opera devs, too.

EDIT: Okay, I just realized you acknowledged it was a Chromium fork...I wish I knew how to read. My recommendation on Vivaldi still stands however.

Yeah, I get that it was bought by a Chinese company and that seems to be the primary criticism from people (and I'm not sure it's justified.)

I wouldn't call it a Chromium clone - the codebase and most functions/abilities are the same but the UX and UI thinking is very different.

I will still check out Vivaldi!

PIP and dark mode sound like standard chromium features. Curious what's better in the dev tools though.

dev tools: I don't think they're particularly better per se. They're pretty much identical. But overall, the design of Opera is a bit more useful to me. The sidebar alone just makes it more usable.

PIP: I looked it up. There's a pop-out video option for Chrome available with plugin. The UX for it is better in Opera.

You don't need the extension for PIP anymore.

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