Need Help/Info About Profile Folder
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bbildman last edited by
I see that my Opera 114 Profile folder is within the Opera Stable folder, named Default. But what are all those files in just the parent Opera Stable folder if the profile is in "default?"
When I was using Opera 99, the profile folder was JUST the Opera Stable folder.
Help me understand, please.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
In Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, you have an option to create extra profiles. Because of this, you have a "User Data" folder (named "Opera Stable" for Opera) where in the root of the folder, you have files and folders that apply to all profiles. Then, you have a subfolder for each profile that contains files and folders that are only for that specific profile. By default, Chromium starts with one profile and it puts that profile's files in a folder named "Default". When you create another profile, you'll see a "profile 2" folder or something like that in the "User Data" folder.
Opera doesn't have an option in the UI to create extra profiles, so it historically deviated from the standard Chromium layout and mixed the default profile's files and folders with all of the non-profile-specific user data files. The user data folder and profile folder where the same location.
However, Opera eventually changed things to better match Chromium's layout. See https://reddit.com/r/operabrowser/wiki/opera/new_profile_layout/ for more info. I assume they did this so they didn't have to do as many modifications to Chromium and maybe to even prepare for support for creating extra profiles some day. Also, it makes things easier to manually transfer your Opera user data to another Chromium-based browser's user data as you don't have to manually sort some of Opera's file to a "Default" folder.
Opera still deviates from the Chromium layout on Windows though. Most Chromium-based browsers put the "User Data" folder in the local AppData folder where as Opera puts everything in the roaming AppData folder, except for the "cache" folder where Opera puts that separately in the local appdata folder. This is to support Windows roaming profiles by default where you don't want your huge cache to roam.
Opera GX is still using he old layout. Not sure if it's going to change.
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bbildman last edited by leocg
@burnout426 and leo, Thank you so much for your help here over the years!!
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bbildman last edited by
@burnout426 Not sure if this is pertinent, but I have updates disabled and will leave it that way. As each new update becomes available, what I do is read about it to see if I want to update. Before doing the update, I copy both the Opera launch folder, and the Opera Stable folder into a separate folder not associated with Opera. This way, if I have issue with the new update, I just delete the Opera folder and the Opera Stable folder and copy back the folders from the previous version of Opera, not losing anything.
