Quite predictably, the introduction of Chat GPT, has led to even more browser bloat. 🎉
Also since I’m already bringing up opera - I have genuinely no idea, what their dev team is smoking, as all their additions this year, have been this desperate:
From some cashback scam and TikTok integration…
…all the way to some “lonely men bait” and adding NFTs - a full year, after everyone stopped caring.
@thecanine@twtxt.net So browsers consider having built in HTTP clients to externally hosted SaaS services a feature now?! 🤦‍♂️
@thecanine@twtxt.net wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they’re like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they’re scamming old ladies out of their pension money.
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Hard to say when exactly the downfall started, but there were many strange moments, in the last few years. There was the new ownership, some developers jumping ship and starting Vivaldi Browser, the whole company getting caught, for offering predatory loans, to Android users in poorer countries, in 2020 (https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html),...
But at last, they found some success, with their gimmicky Opera GX “gaming browser”, they still pay youtubers to promote and I guess the promoted content within.
They also came up with a free VPN integration, that they later monetized and started taking pretty much every partner, willing to pay them, to get integrated into their main browser - an offer most appealing to small crypto/web 3.0 projects, trying to appear more promising, by having a browser company on board.
@thecanine@twtxt.net That “lonely men bait” is quite possibly the most absurdist-seeming thing on this list.