Vivaldi – Developer is ex-Opera founder. Love the idea. Performance is sub-par, even tweaked.
Cent – Best as I can tell this is from some random dudes in China. No documentation on this at all. No thanks.
Opera – I want to like it but I cannot get over the China connection. I fired up some network tools and as near as I can tell it isn’t doing anything nefarious. One super annoying thing is that I watched it contact the Opera servers every single time it is launched. A far as I can see this seems to be their update servers. You should take this with a grain of salt because not only am I not a network monitor guru, I am very out of practice with what I do know. As for the VPN. I like it but IMHO it isn’t a VPN, it is a proxy (Google opera vpn). Ironically, VPNs are illegal in China.
The China connection…
Opera is owned by Chinese companies. I’m having a hard time with this. China, while not openly hostile to the U.S. certainly is covertly hostile. I am not very knowledgeable about China but I am under the impression that everything is under some form of control by the government. The “Chicoms” as they used to be called. Anyhow, I just can’t shake my wariness.
Any thoughts?
Maybe I’m just getting old and paranoid, but since I have a deep distrust of Google, that puts me in a similar relationship with Chrome.
I notice this issue regarding browsers is coming up in AskWoody which has some interesting comments:
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/is-firefox-going-into-a-tailspin/