<![CDATA[Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told?]]>Hello,
Longtime hardcore Opera user (as most people here I guess), it's my third account at opera.com, looks like these get deleted automatically if not used for a while..?
Anyway.
I noticed something strange in my website logs this week.

So, I have many websites but I'm currently focusing on the one I'm building, https://lestrades.com, and was having problems with race condition on file caching. After analysis, determined that two users (me and another) were, generally every half hour, doing a request on the /feed/ and /feed/?news URLs about 3 milliseconds apart, which would often trigger the race condition.
These requests don't send an auth cookie, so they're done by the browser itself. I asked the other user, and he's using Opera like me. He has only one tab open on lestrades.com, while I have several dozens. Quantity doesn't matter. It's the browser anyway, not some user script.

I'm not exactly sure how this can happen, because I don't have the problem with my other website based on the same software I wrote, wedge.org (although I do spend a lot less time on that site). I fixed the race condition problem, but it doesn't really solve the problem that Opera is still requesting these feeds twice an hour. I tried to disable discoverability of my feeds (by simply disabling them, the software no longer lists them on the web page itself and doesn't link to them in the <head> either, plus it returns an empty page if accessing the feeds directly), but it didn't change anything, Opera is still trying to get them.

In Opera's "Personal News" tab, "My Sources" is empty, as expected. I'm not using RSS feeds at all these days.

How can I stop Opera from wrongfully downloading feeds I never asked it to? Since I have about 3500 tabs opened (most of them in sleep state of course), I'm concerned that not downloading feeds could help with memory and bandwidth usage.

My browser version is 43.0.2442.1144 (PGO), Stable, Windows 7 64-bit, User Agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 OPR/43.0.2442.1144

]]>https://forums.opera.com/topic/20287/is-opera-downloading-feeds-even-if-not-toldRSS for NodeTue, 10 Mar 2026 22:44:01 GMTTue, 18 Apr 2017 11:03:20 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:46:58 GMT]]>But why would my brand-new site be in the default Opera feeds?
The only thing I did was to click on my site's feed link once. I never subscribed to it, nor do I plan to... And it's not showing up in any of the default sources (or 'My Sources'), of course.

Does anyone else have a website with a discoverable feed link? Can you check your Apache logs and tell me if you get regular feed hits from your own browser..?

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119171https://forums.opera.com/post/119171Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:46:58 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:10:44 GMT]]>

I'm asking why Opera keeps downloading feeds in the background even if you never added them to your Sources

Maybe Opera is checking the default ones?

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119107https://forums.opera.com/post/119107Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:10:44 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:07:52 GMT]]>@zalex> to each their own... The main reason for me using Opera for all these years was that it had proper tab support (it even pretty much created the tab concept). I switched to Opera Chromium when I got used to Sidewise. It's a slow extension and has UI problems (due to being forced to sit in an extra window), but it does a great job otherwise and I couldn't live without it. As for why I have 3500 tabs (and growing)... Well, some people use bookmarks a lot, I personally use tabs and leave them to sleep. Then if I need to find something, I can use Sidewise's quick search box to find a tab by page title. Works really well.

@trenchsol> I didn't, until yesterday. I'm assuming it no longer tries to download that feed (because I fixed my race condition, the error no longer shows, so I'd have to add some extra logging to see if my browser keeps trying to load that page, but I doubt it would.) Again, my question isn't about how to stop Opera from downloading all of these feeds, it's about why it's downloading all those feeds I did not ask it to download, and whether it does the same for everyone, in which case it's a huge waste of bandwidth...

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119106https://forums.opera.com/post/119106Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:07:52 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:49:53 GMT]]>It might be that I misunderstood, but have you set [browser]->[personal news] to "never" ?

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119102https://forums.opera.com/post/119102Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:49:53 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 11:04:08 GMT]]>

because restarting Opera with Sidewise and 3500 tabs means ~5 to 20mn waiting time before it gets usable.

There are extensions to create sessions or group by domain + One tab.
Even save as SpeedDial folder (despite it's not enough) but you can work flawlessly without load unnecessary tabs (24h it's not enough to navigate 3500 tabs xD)

At the other side, maybe it's possible to block feeds update URL¿?

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119098https://forums.opera.com/post/119098Wed, 19 Apr 2017 11:04:08 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:30:35 GMT]]>Also, I think it's interesting (not in a good way) that Opera downloads these feeds without sending cookies. The cookie thing is the main good reason a feed reader should be integrated into your main browser. Otherwise, might as well use a web service if you have to provide them with an auth token for your feeds just the same...

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119093https://forums.opera.com/post/119093Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:30:35 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:19:13 GMT]]>@sgunhouse, because restarting Opera with Sidewise and 3500 tabs means ~5 to 20mn waiting time before it gets usable. Not a biggie, I'm used to it, but I'm also not restarting unless it gets too slow. I just restarted, for instance.

@leocg, yes, but it's not what I'm asking about. I'm asking why Opera keeps downloading feeds in the background even if you never added them to your Sources. There's no reason to use bandwidth to download stuff that's never going to be useful. It's not great for the web, similar to preemptive page loading in Chrome, and even that one at least has a point for the end user...

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119092https://forums.opera.com/post/119092Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:19:13 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:30:49 GMT]]>Why still using 43? Just curious ...

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119036https://forums.opera.com/post/119036Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:30:49 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Is Opera downloading feeds even if not told? on Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:16:43 GMT]]>Did you try to change the frequency at which news feeds are checked in settings?

]]>https://forums.opera.com/post/119029https://forums.opera.com/post/119029Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:16:43 GMT