Opera Adds Free VPN-Client With Unlimited Usage To Its Desktop Browser 101
On Thursday, Opera announced that it is adding a free built-in virtual private network (VPN) client to its desktop browser. The feature, which isn't available on other popular Web browsers, will allow users to hide their IP address, unblock firewalls and access region-locked content. It will also help users protect their personal information on public Wi-Fi networks as it offers 256-bit encryption. "Everyone deserves to be private online if they want to be," Krystian Kolondra, SVP at Opera told Slashdot in a statement. "By adding a free, unlimited VPN directly into the browser, no additional download or extensions from an unknown third-party provider are necessary."
The move comes a year after Opera acquired North American VPN company SurfEasy. Unlike Chrome and Firefox, which require you to use an additional third-party tool (such as an extension), Opera's VPN offering is baked in the browser. What's more, it is free and offers unlimited usage. The feature is available on Opera's Mac, Windows, and Linux clients.
The move comes a year after Opera acquired North American VPN company SurfEasy. Unlike Chrome and Firefox, which require you to use an additional third-party tool (such as an extension), Opera's VPN offering is baked in the browser. What's more, it is free and offers unlimited usage. The feature is available on Opera's Mac, Windows, and Linux clients.
Sorry, still nope (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera is still (and will probably always be) that weird guy no one really likes but few have specific complaints about.
Personally I'm strongly debating switching to chromium because firefox has gone to shit and palemoon doesn't look long for this world unfortunately. I never even considered opera, but despite this reminder that they are still around and despite my admission that I don't really have anything specific against them, I'm still not going to.
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Says you. I switched to Opera as my primary browser back in 1997. I loved it and had no complaints about it. Sadly, since they bastardized it by dropping Presto and switching to Chromium I gave up on it and switched to Firefox.
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Seconded. Opera was the browser you used if you were curious about what new features were coming to Firefox in a year or two.
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I switched to Vivaldi recently and after fiddling through the options for a bit I was able to get a pretty good browser out of it. Basically i went through the options and disabled all of the new UX design stuff, like tab stacking, and moved the tabs to the side. Its built on top of Chromium though so you still get the extensions.
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...disabled all of the new UX design stuff, like tab stacking...
That is the single largest reason I'm considering switching browsers! Tab stacking back in Opera 12 or 15 was great, I miss it, and haven't found a solution for Firefox (that still works) or Chrome that I like to date.
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maybe, but I keep a ton of tabs open at a time and in order to keep as many one the screen at the same time as possible I disabled the icon tabs. When I did this the "tabs on the tabs" became so small that they were difficult to navigate, and it was annoying when I tried to move tabs around and they would stack instead of making room for the new tab on the list.
I would imagine that they are incredibly useful if you learn the hotkeys, but I haven't had the time or the desire to do so at the moment.
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I've transitioned to having 8 or 9 Chrome windows open at a time, where I used to have only a single window with 8 or 9 tab groups...
Any tab stacking done today is still not what it was in days gone by...Vivaldi still doesn't do it quite how I like: two rows of tabs, top row is groups, second is tabs in that group. I may be mistaken on saying this came from Opera, but it was a while ago. I definitely had it with Firefox until they stopped updating the extension and it would crash my browser..man, I hate l
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Loved that - and the ability to easily search through tabs, close them. etc.
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The main reason for me is that I really need side tabs. That was the one feature keeping me in fire fox for years because I have anywhere from 20 to 50 tabs open at a time. This is simply not doable in Chrome or Chromium without really hackish addons that create sepperate windows for the tabs. All in all Vivaldi was everything I wanted in a browser. (Chrome - Google) + side tabs
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You mean Opera WAS the best. No one has topped Opera 12, even after 3 years since dropping Presto.
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Agree.
I use both Firefox and Chrome at both home and work, and my phone. I actually prefer firefox on my phone.
As someone who uses and likes both browsers I believe firefox is as good, if not slightly better, than Chrome. I prefer it's UI for addons, it has fireFTP, and to be honest it seems, on my systems at least, that firefox is slightly faster to launch and load my initial pages.
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I use Gmail and Google calendar in Firefox and it works just fine. Google Maps is really slow these days though; I'll have to try that in Chromium to see if it's different.
Anyway, my understanding is that Chromium's every-tab-is-a-separate-process is less memory-efficient than Firefox's single-process model, so if you have a lot of tabs open and/or value memory efficiency, Firefox is the way to go.
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I test drove Firefox for a few days recently, taking it through some fairly heavy testing and it seemed to do just fine, moderate memory requirements, good performance, etc. I don't use it as my daily driver but I think saying it has "gone to shit" is a brutal and unfair exaggeration.
As for Opera; given their new owners I'm not going to trust it with my data. Vivaldi may not be super pretty but it's very configurable and uses Chrome extensions, so that has replaced Chrome for me.
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I haven't tried it out in quite a while, they may have recovered from their mistakes by now.
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No, Thank You (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Opera is going to be owned by the Chinese, they cannot offer anything compelling. No, thank you. No one in their right mind will ever trust the Chinese. Opera is not open source, and because the Chinese company that is buying Opera has close ties to the Chinese government, you cannot expect any privacy whatsoever. Simply put, Opera is, IMHO, no longer a real option to those concerned with privacy.
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i almost forgot about the chinese buyout.... this vpn implementation will have more holes in it than a golf course and the chinese gov will be the only ones with a tee time
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Yes, but think about it for a second. With the built-in VPN they won't be able to spy on you!
Re:No, Thank You (Score:5, Insightful)
> Chinese company that is buying Opera has close ties to the Chinese government,
That's just FUD. If you read anything about the companies that make up the consortium (it wasn't just one China based company) that bought the Opera properties, you see they are just capitalistic as any other multinational corporations. Mergers, acquisitions, venture capital groups, monopoly lawsuits, investors, high finance, etc. are all part of the Asian megacorps that are emerging from China. Besides, I can't believe after the surveillance state rant bait that's posted daily here on slashdot, that anyone would trust US companies (or European or Israeli ones) to not spy on their users. Just because Apple and Microsoft now have decided to go for the positive PR by making a show of fighting the Feds after decades of gleefully cooperating with them at the expense of their customers privacy, suddenly that makes them all more trustworthy? Pshaw.
Not to be trusted (Score:1)
You are wholly uninformed. Huawei and other Chinese concerns who are certainly capitalistic as you say, have been found to have included "spyware" ROMS in their networking gear. Google it. It happened and happens. Why do you think their gear is not allowed on federal networks or contractor networks. Ditto Check Point firewalls and network appliances. How do I know this. Firewall engineer for one of the largest ISPs in the nation who deal with the federal government daily.
The Chinese are not to be trusted de
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Why do you think their gear is not allowed on federal networks or contractor networks. Ditto Check Point firewalls and network appliances.
Because then our agencies couldn't get our "spyware" on our networks... ;-)
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Oh please. Chinese companies like Huawei have been found to spy on customers for the benefit of the Chinese government.
Moreover, Opera is a closed-source browser, so there's no telling what's in there. At least with Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome), they're open source so the likelihood that they're spying on you is much lower: it'd be too easy for someone to just browse the code and see it (and at least on Linux versions, it's built from source by the distro, not by Mozilla/Google).
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It doesn't matter if the company is capitalistic if they just turn over any requested info to the Chinese Government. And yes it's true the American companies aren't really more trustworthy.
Really you should not trust any VPN that you don't have complete control or trust of the encryption and decryption points.
Netflix? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that Netflix is actively blocking VPN users [www.cbc.ca], I wonder how this will play out?
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Fine let us get one based in China, or Russia, perhaps Iran, or Saudi Arabia.
Or do you think your European countries are so much more noble that they wouldn't do such a thing? Perhaps they are just better at hiding it. You know without constitutional levels of freedom of the press for many members.
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Even if it is based in NA, a VPN is always better than nothing:
1: On an untrusted Wi-Fi network, it blocks snooping, FireSheep attacks, and other monkey business.
2: Some ISPs actively MITM http connections. I've had one ISP that actually would inject pop-unders for surveys. Another ISP would add identifying headers to every HTTP transaction. A VPN ensures that those shenanigans don't happen, or are at least moved to the VPN provider.
3: It raised the bar for geolocation. Yes, it can be done by sophist
Like HolaVPN and Zenmate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Like HolaVPN and Zenmate? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people don't care (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wrong thread, buddy.
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I'm not your pal, guy.
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http://www.urbandictionary.com... [urbandictionary.com]
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I've found the Tor Browser [torproject.org] and Tor [torproject.org] to be excellent free VPN services for browsing and general networking, respectively.
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Since you're so against commercial VPNs, how exactly do you get on the internet without a commercial ISP?
And if you're in favor of free VPNs, how do you think they finance themselves without your money?
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Not to mention - wasn't SurfEasy one of those where yes, they were free, but they did it by using their user's connection? So in effect, yes, you were getting "VPN for free", but you were also providing VPN services for them as well as payment.
No, Thank you (Score:1)
Opera is being bought by a Chinese tech company with strong ties to the Chinese government. Opera is, IMHO, no longer to be trusted. Sad.
Opera (Score:3)
I wish home ISPs would offer VPNs for travelers (Score:1)
It will also help users protect their personal information on public Wi-Fi networks as it offers 256-bit encryption.
This is why I avoid non-encrypted public Wi-Fi whenever possible - too big a chance of a passive eavesdropper (the risk of an evil-twin/man-in-the-middle exists even with encrypted WiFi if the passphrase is well-known, so that by itself not a reason to prefer encrypted WiFi over unencrypted WiFi).
If the home-internet providers would offer "VPN service to make it look like you are in your home city" that would make "not cutting the cord" that much more attractive.
Heck, if they could work out a joint deal wit
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It's trivial to set this up yourself, just get some kind of dyndns type service so you can find your machine and either run a vpn server or just tunnel through SSH (lots of guides on how to do this, just google it).
trivial for geeks (Score:1)
For the average Joe, not so much.
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For the average Joe, not so much.
Well, one might argue that concern about the privacy of one's data requires a certain level of understanding regarding what's going on. Furthermore, one might argue that VPNing to your home connection will keep the bloke at Starbucks running Wireshark from attaining anything useful, but data going out your network's front door won't help keep Uncle Sam from getting what he wants.
That being said, Asus routers are very simple to set up for PPTP VPNs...no, not the most secure thing ever, but functional enough
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Sure, but the average Joe doesn't tend to care either.
I have to imagine it's a pretty small market of people who are tech savvy enough to get the risks of public wifi but not be able to do something about it themselves.
Opera, just run some Tor nodes (Score:1)
I don't care nor want anything proprietary.
Should be called the Honeypot Browser (Score:2)
SOCKS (Score:3)
Both Firefox and Chrome support SOCKS, which is just as good as VPN for web browsing and a lot easier to set up (most hosting accounts effectively include it as part of SSH service).
"5.4 MB That's a lot of data!" (Score:4, Informative)
Ars Technica is a little more cautious about what is being offered here --- which is an alpha release for the desktop only.
I am a little wary myself when someone promises "no fees, no limits" on services which tend to get expensive as you scale up. Opera bundles free, unlimited VPN client into its browser [arstechnica.com]
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My guess is that they use the same definition of unlimited some cell phones company use. You can use all that you want, as long as you want, as long as you don't mind dialup-like speeds.
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"At this point we're not planning to charge for it," vows Opera.
That's quite a vow!