I haven’t used Opera since they switched from their own engine to chrome. They are now owned by a Chinese company, so it probably has at least as much tracking built into it as Google Chrome now.
Have a look at Otter browser It aims to replicate the old interface. It is using QtWebEngine as Presto was closed source. It is in development since 10 years now. And it is open source.
Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing all of Chrome/Chromium:
Binary files are stripped out
Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out,
Source
While that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to use chromium, it’s not actually the main reason, if so I’d just use Ungoogled Chromium. I just want more web engines, and I dont want google to monopolise the internet.
It is super hard to create a new web engine, especially when one company is influencing the web standards and most web developers are only testing against that because of market share. This is why we ended up with four active web engines. In alphabetical order: Blink, Gecko, Goanna, WebKit. Obviously some are related: WebKit started out as the fork of KDE’s KHTML and Blink is the fork of WebKit. Goanna is the fork of the Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla’s Gecko.
I used Fifth a bit, which is something aesthetically similar to old Opera made with fltk and a webkit port to fltk. But it’s abandoned now.
It’s so sad really, when I was a Windows user, it was Opera, when I moved to Linux, it was again Opera, then I also started using Conkeror (based on XULRunner).
Then Opera died. Then XULRunner died. No usable web browser anymore.
I haven’t used Opera since they switched from their own engine to chrome. They are now owned by a Chinese company, so it probably has at least as much tracking built into it as Google Chrome now.
I miss old opera before the buyout
That’s essentially Vivaldi now.
Apart from it being chromium based 😕
Have a look at Otter browser It aims to replicate the old interface. It is using QtWebEngine as Presto was closed source. It is in development since 10 years now. And it is open source.
QtWebEngine is Chromium :(
It’s Chromium all the way down.
Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing all of Chrome/Chromium: Binary files are stripped out Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out, Source
While that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to use chromium, it’s not actually the main reason, if so I’d just use Ungoogled Chromium. I just want more web engines, and I dont want google to monopolise the internet.
It is super hard to create a new web engine, especially when one company is influencing the web standards and most web developers are only testing against that because of market share. This is why we ended up with four active web engines. In alphabetical order: Blink, Gecko, Goanna, WebKit. Obviously some are related: WebKit started out as the fork of KDE’s KHTML and Blink is the fork of WebKit. Goanna is the fork of the Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla’s Gecko.
Thanks, didn’t know about this
Vivaldi is made by many of the same people with similar features and vibe. It’s also chromium-based, though.
I used Fifth a bit, which is something aesthetically similar to old Opera made with fltk and a webkit port to fltk. But it’s abandoned now.
It’s so sad really, when I was a Windows user, it was Opera, when I moved to Linux, it was again Opera, then I also started using Conkeror (based on XULRunner).
Then Opera died. Then XULRunner died. No usable web browser anymore.
Don’t you like Firefox? It’s on both win and Linux.
I said “usable” ; it was usable when XULRunner was a thing (and you could use Firefox instead of just XULRunner).