[Solved]Back to Firefox due to Opera's sluggishness

A Former User

I have gone back to using Firefox64 as my default browser because Opera has been running like a grandma at church bingo since the December 2018 Windows 10 update. I have tried reinstalling Opera after completely cleaning out anything Opera related including from the registry. I have disabled Internet Explorer. I have tried running with no bookmarks or extensions. I have disabled QoS Packet Scheduler. I have disabled hardware acceleration. I have tried with and without VPN. My Internet access speed is consistently 100+mb/s down and 35+mb/s up with a ping of less than 20ms. Still, since the beginning of the month, some web sites either slow to a crawl and end up in bits and pieces or never arrive at all in Opera. For example, PrePal pops right up while Newegg barely makes it. I am entering this post from Firefox because Opera cannot open up the Opera web site at all (isn't it ironic?) I have tried dozens of times. I will continue looking into the problem but until some lasting solution appears I am going to be using Firefox.

quicksite

quicksite

Same here on Opera desktop for Mac. Same exact sudden performance sluggishness that slows your usability and workflow down to a crawl. I sure wish Opera would hire devs to read these forums and address this quickly. They have created one of the best browsers in the land— and now they are letting the fundamentals slip and slide. Oh the inevitable "works PERFECTLY for me! Must be you and other software conflicts" chatter will appear, as though their use cases instantly represents the majority. "We haven't seen many if any complaints, so it can't be a thing" — that thinking. When the fact is we never know, because most people do not have the personal constitution to take the time to express dealbreaker problems like this— they just bolt instead. Like you are about to do.

Wake up OPERA engineers! Break it apart and fix it.

A Former User @quicksite

@quicksite For a few years Opera was a completely new and independent paradigm. They were designing and upgrading their own brand new type of browser from scratch. All was well and impressive and I loved it, until something happened. I don't know exactly what, maybe the 2008 economy or or the conservatives tossing out the socialists (again) but the original beautiful and new and unique browser was replaced by yet another Chromium mod. I got mad and quit for a bit but none of the others could quite do what Opera (even then) could do so I went back and was happy once I got used to it. It's better than Chromium in many ways and way better than Chrome. And, of course, anything is better than Edge. But I think MS has been futzing around with the allowables and detrimentals and making it difficult for anybody who doesn't have a company address at 1 Microsoft Way. Google have been doing the same thing to MS. You know, it just occurs to me, all these corporations throwing temper tantrums at each other with us people like little pavement ants at their feet, doesn't it seem as if Attack On Titan! is really a metaphor for living in the modern corporate world? Anyway, Opera is Chromium, Chrome Does Evil, Edge is IE in a Big Brother sort of way, and Safari is connected with those people. Firefox might be the only truly independent browser left out there. Maybe Konqueror in BSD. Unless you want to fire up a DOS machine and use Lynx. I think that could still work.

sgunhouse

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer @quicksite

@quicksite You do realize, most of the people you see here are just Opera users like yourself. Well. actually most of them (including myself and the OP in this thread) are Windows users. In your case as a Mac user, someone on Windows saying "Works for me" is worse than useless since they are not on a comparable system. But then again, you did reply in the Windows forum this time and hence asked for it.

blackbird71

blackbird71 @quicksite

@quicksite The "works for me" comments that you've maligned are actually intended to serve a useful purpose. When a problem occurs with doing something on a computer, there are multiple potential causes or contributors: the computer hardware, the operating system, the communications linkages, ancillary software in use, and the application itself. One of the first steps of troubleshooting is to determine if the problem occurs with any other identical or nearly-identical installations. (This is why it's so important to specify as much relevant information as possible in the initial report. It's also equally important for responders to pay attention to having full similarity in their own system before responding with a 'works for me' comment.) If a given problem is not being reported by many users, it's usually a clue that its cause is either deeply peculiar to the app software or something (or several 'somethings') unique to the local system.

Another key step of troubleshooting is to try to determine and communicate a repeatability mechanism so that others can duplicate and verify (or not) the problem and zero in on a solution. This is where a forum's troubleshooting can often fall apart, since there are so many detail factors, settings, conditions, etc that can bear on a problem cause and make it difficult for others to reproduce it. If the problem can't be reproduced on another's system, it becomes an exercise in educated guessing for others to suggest the cause, and the trial-and-error dialogues that follow can often frustrate all involved.

Put another way, "works for me" (if properly tried on a similar system) is another way of saying the problem is not being reproduced on another system, based on the original information given.

blackbird71

blackbird71 @Guest

@gridsleep345 You haven't stated explicitly whether IE and Edge exhibit any slowdown/stall symptoms. Assuming that they don't, have you tried another chromium-based browser on the system (Chrome, Vivaldi, etc) to compare their behavior to Opera? There have been complaints on Internet forums of browser slowdowns for certain users of Windows 10 since their v1809 update, with some anecdotal claims involving only chromium-based browsers.

Also, have you tried opening Edge or IE to the same webpage while Opera is 'stuck/frozen' to see if that unsticks/unfreezes Opera for that site?

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer @Guest

@gridsleep345 said in Back to Firefox due to Opera's sluggishness:

Opera has been running like a grandma at church bingo since the December 2018 Windows 10 update.

This happens for some users after a Windows 10 update or reinstall. Nothing seems to fix it when it happens. Sometimes users have to reinstall Windows multiple times to get things to work. Sometimes that doesn't work and they have to revert to an older build of Windows. Sometimes when this happens, it affects all Chromium browsers. Other times, Opera will mess up while Chrome will work fine. Other times, you have to have Chrome open for Opera to work fine. It's really weird and no one seems to be able to figure out what the issue is with Windows that causes it. And, it's difficult for anyone to help as it's not reproducible unless you have the issue.

On a side, Bitdefender, Adguard and Sandboxie are known to mess with Opera sometimes. If you have any of those, try disabling them to test if the issue goes away.

You can try searching Google for https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+can't+connect+to+internet+after+windows+10+upgrade and try some of things that sometimes work for Chrome. But... the only thing that always solves it is reverting to the build of Windows you had before the problem started.

kgrundseth

kgrundseth

This problem affects chrome and opera browsers the same. Cryptsrvc is the culprit after the windows 1803 update. I did a lot of searching and found this. It worked for me. opera is now working as it should.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/s5S1uPI0kMc/PVBgVbx6DAAJ

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer @kgrundseth

@kgrundseth Sounds really promising.

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

The thread links to a Chromium bug reports where they're trying to figure out whats up. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=838707

blackbird71

blackbird71

In the Chromium bug reports ( https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=838707 ) cited by @burnout426, there are these comments:

Nov 13, comment #164: "Using an alternate Windows account is a known workaround ... The problem is linked to the windows account used to install windows and is noted often after a fresh reinstall and update cycle. ... The problem stems from bad CryptSvc registry permissions for the user - another type of config data. Wiping/restoring the Chrome profile config data has no effect, it's inside the registry, tied to CryptSvc. The fix-it script described here
https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/chrome/SYBB6iGbnfQ/otXlCLgxBgAJ is focused on this specific registry problem and is the most direct approach."

Nov 21, comment #173: "This old workaround is still surfacing:
Go Settings> Advanced> System> Proxy settings> LAN> disable auto detect"

Overall, it appears that both Microsoft and Google are pointing responsibility at each other for whatever is fouling up the CryptSvc behavior. Apparently, there is some kind of endless looping that gets started when certs are re-verified by simply starting a chromium browser on a system where permissions aren't "just so". Starting/refreshing IE or Edge causes the certs to be instead updated by those browsers and the looping by a chromium browser then doesn't occur. The issue was first reported with the Windows 10 '1803' version, and hasn't been resolved in the '1809' version (comment #154). Certainly, not all users see the problem, and it appears to have to do with what user account is used to update Windows, which account contains the chromium browser, what the permissions are for those accounts, and whether or not the chromium browser is set up for a roaming profile. At the end of the day, there may end up being a chromium bug-fix forthcoming that ends up in Opera, but I wouldn't hold my breath about timing.

A Former User

My system just installed the January 2019 Windows 1809 update and the problem affecting Opera seems to have gone away. Thanks, Bill Gates. I think I'll stick with Firefox for a while. Maybe permanently, with all the new bookmarks I've made. And the program handling. Entering this with Opera, by the by.