There's clearly a communications problem going on here.

The first post made by @livingpharaoh was actually in a different Opera sub-forum (Opera for Computers): https://forums.opera.com/post/164596 . In that post, he specifically stated he'd just installed Opera 58, was looking for "Themes" options, and got entangled while searching in Opera's website by a referral to "Tools" for the Themes option. He then asked if that website description was out of date. @Leo responded "yes, it is". Unfortunately, that accurate moderator reply didn't address the OPs' underlying concern of where might Themes be found in Opera 58 (actually, such as it exists, under Settings > Wallpapers and/or Appearance). However, the reply did answer the OP's specific question.

The OP then posted here in the "Forums" sub-forum with a sarcastic-toned complaint towards Opera's support, regarding what he deemed the insufficiency of the reply to his original post in the Opera-for-computers forum. Subsequently (and unfortunately), it seems everyone thereafter has been essentially talking past each other here.

Several observations occur to me:

1. The Opera websites indeed can too easily lead a user (especially one new to chromium-based Opera) down some confusing rabbit holes related to Olde Opera terminology and documentation which don't apply to New Opera. This is not the first instance of this in user posts I've seen.
2. Sometimes the most relevant, underlying nature of a problem post gets missed by a reply. I too am guilty of this at times, occasionally because of misleading language/wording/interpretation and other times by a particular mindset I may bring to my first reading of the problem post.
3. Sometimes, after a single problem post that doesn't get a (to them) 'suitable' reply, posters lose patience (and their tempers) and generate a 'snarky' post. What results thereafter is often a flame war that pulls in other attackers/defenders and alienates all involved.

I believe what's needed is patience on the part of each of us, original posters and responders alike, along with a willingness to calmly ask for and respond with more information and/or clarity when requested.

@rehmanjamshoro said in Spam advertisement:

OK sir who is responsible it. told me

This scam has been going on for several weeks. See: http://www.scam-detector.com/online-auctions-and-tech-scams/iphone-8-and-iphone-x-tester-scam

Scams like this can be difficult to trace beyond the original website you visit, since they are often the result of malicious ads running remotely on that website. Many sites don't sufficiently check out to whom they rent ad space on their sites, and sometimes ads on a site are sub-rented out to still other end advertisers by a middle man company. Such ads generate pop-ups independent of the site itself, and can be very difficult to trace back to the authors.

@rakejake said in OperaVPN is not working:

The whole dilemma can be resolved if Opera can confirm this.

If you are able to visit https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/ , you can gain a view of the scope of censorship worldwide as of January 2020 (particularly if within that page, you set the "Show -- entries" to 100 in the nation-table part way down the site's page). Bangladesh ranks quite high for employing national censorship in that table (among the top 25 nations in the world), on a par with well-known censoring nations like Cuba, Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia but behind China, North Korea, Iran and a scattering of others.

Frankly, there is very little that Opera (or anyone else) can do about national censorship... nations are sovereign and do what they want. Why a nation blocks one site but not another has all to do with their interpretation of what they wish to block from their citizens, the technical mechanisms used in blocking, and the persistence of the personnel in the blocking agencies. If Opera's websites are reachable by ordinary browsing from most other nations in the world but not from within Bangladesh (which is the case), it stands as proof that the Opera sites are being blocked (intentionally or otherwise) within Bangladesh. There is nothing Opera can do about that. That some other VPN services might be able to penetrate the censorship speaks more to the lack of thoroughness of their blocking mechanism by Bangladesh and the ability of those VPNs to jump ahead of the censors by frequently changing their IPs or using other technical means. Bypassing national blocking is a continual (and expensive) electronic war between blockers and VPN providers, and probably goes well beyond the limited purposes Opera has in supplying a VPN option in their browser.

I don't work for Opera, but I don't see how (in practicality) Opera can conclusively determine on its own which nations are locally blocking its websites (including its VPN) since it doesn't reside physically in many of those nations and because the dynamics of who is blocking what change literally daily among nations. Moreover, nations that do block are usually very evasive about which specific sites they block for what reasons.

To some users, any record of the names or content of visited sites left in the browser may prove an "embarassment" when/if other users share the system. In a few locales, certain leftover names or content records in a browser may have fatal potential. Not knowing the poster's reasons for wanting the browser records completely cleaned upon demand, it's hard to be critical. I do share the opinion that a browser function or settings label should accurately reflect reality, and an option to 'clean browser history' should indeed clear all the forms of browing records since each of them constitutes part of its true browsing history. Only clearing some of the data under such a label forms a misleading impression of security; this is even more true if there are not co-located alternate controls for records-removal that might act to reinforce a user understanding of the incompleteness of the original function.

@coffeelover said in Can Opera be fully Trusted:

...
So... each of us has to make up our minds regarding the security of this Opera browser. ...

This. However, it applies to any browser; and it should be pondered continually and not just at browser adoption, if browser 'security' is a conscious factor in one's browser usage (though it's not, frankly, for many users). Part of the basic issue is that a browser user must necessarily entrust part of his personal data and his browsing preferences/habits to the care and competence of software designers and parent corporations which the user has never met nor really knows little about, regardless of the user's level of inquiry. Moreover, the kinds of 'insecurities' that may be knowingly ignored by one user may be considered 'catastrophic' by another, depending on how he defines "security". Truly, YMMV.

Obviously, you mentioned some past indications of questionable behavior on the part of subsidiaries of one partner in Opera's new parent ownership consortium. Whether or how those kinds of behavior might somehow ripple down or transfer into the actual design and 'security' of an Opera browser version is difficult to determine with any certainty. There is some measure of protection under Norwegian privacy laws, under which the Opera organization continues to operate. There is a greater measure of protection present in the inherent integrity and competency of Opera's software designers, since at the end of all factors, it's the designers who actually commit code to end product.

The real proof-of-the-pudding lies in the code itself. However, few modern browsers are fully open-source in every code fragment they contain... otherwise the makers risk giving away the store to competitors in how they solve technical problems and provide key features. So every browser containing closed-code presents a level of uncertainty regarding what is truly going on internally. It's part of the air which ordinary users must breathe in today's software world. In such cases, a security conscious user must remain ever alert for relevant fresh reports of insecurities within a given browser or its design operations.

Personally, I'm not unduly troubled by the revelations you list, since I believe those occurred historically in products created by entities distantly apart from the current Opera design group. In reality, the opacity of future corporate-owner influences on browser design within Opera is not much different from that characterizing Microsoft or Mozilla or most other browser makers - publicly or privately held. There are a few browser makers which seem more open in what they do (though it would be rude to discuss them in an Opera-sponsored forum), but there are no guarantees even then.

If a corporate System Engineer blocks processes from executable programs on the company-owned computer or network because of 'security problems', you may want to rethink trying to bypass his efforts. If his action reflects corporate IT security policy or efforts, bypassing or otherwise interfering with such blocking could be termed as a "career-ending move" in most organizations.

@leocg said in Why Use Opera?:

... So different situations, different needs.

This!!!

For many years I used Olde Opera precisely because it fit nearly all my browsing needs, just as my needs had evolved around the many features of that browser. When Opera elected to follow the Blink pathway, I was a rather ardent Opera defender for a time in Opera's old forums amidst the truly massive outcry against that change. My key point then was for users to be patient and give Opera's developers time to integrate various key features (whose losses were being loudly decried) into the new browser. As time went by, some of the key 'dropped' features needed for my work flow were indeed restored to the evolving design (bookmarking, in particular). But others were not, and even the bookmarks feature itself lacked certain sub-features that were very significant to me (eg: the ability to set bookmarks bar titles to text only, since I need 50-70 bookmarks on a given single-line toolbar and abbreviate their titles severely). During that time, I often found myself increasingly agreeing with @ayespy's postings in the old Opera forums trying to persuade the developers and posters of the need for what we viewed as better control, features, and customization capability in New Opera, but to diminishing avail. Opera's focus had shifted.

What was actually occurring was both a change in the way the Opera browser was targeted and a change in (or more accurately, my recognition of) the importance of various detail requirements of my work flow using browsers. Opera was now developing a browser for 'the marketplace', whereas I had evolved solid work patterns dependent on my having detailed control/customization of browser settings, functions, and features. Thus, for a long time, I persisted in using Olde Opera (12.18) for much of my work-related browsing and both New Opera and Firefox for my casual browsing. Fortunately, as Olde Opera became unacceptably obsolete in terms of website compatibility, Vivaldi came upon the scene. It allowed me the detailed customization and features in areas that my work flow had come to demand. It's design mantra was that it was "a browser for our friends", meaning those users who require detail browser functionality and control. Hence, it's a browser that is actually a configurable tool.

Today, I have different needs than most of the users now targeted by Opera. So I use Vivaldi for my primary browsing and New Opera for some casual browsing. And I experiment a bit with Otter. They're all good browsers given the roles they're intended to play... but they're each aimed at different user needs and priorities. Frankly, I'm glad they all exist. And they're free...

@vegelund said in GPU process consuming lots of RAM:

That's like saying; no point caring about your car's gas mileage, as long as you have a big enough fuel tank. Not a very efficient mindset in regard to system resources.

As with many auto analogies, that one falls short. It's not about efficiency, it's about capacity. Fuel is a significant cost factor in operating a vehicle; RAM usage is not a comparable factor in operating a computer. RAM usage by a program has to do with reducing RAM capacity left to do other things.

A better auto analogy would be that high RAM usage by a program is akin to having some of your vehicle's seats occupied by something/someone so that you couldn't haul as many other passengers. The difference in analogies is highly significant, since if you usually drive alone, what's in the other seats rarely matters... likewise for the computer user who usually only uses it to browse. On the other hand, if you normally also carry multiple passengers, having one of them take up 2 or 3 seats would cause a problem, and a RAM-heavy program presents a problem to those running multiple other RAM-demanding programs.

@yanta said in Microsoft switches to Chromium:

This quasi-monoculture might threaten security and diversity.

The whole culture/system is cost-driven. Websites (of which there are now enormous numbers) operate by writing website code which interfaces with web browsers and their underlying rendering engines. Since there are different ways of doing the same things, there may be different forms of browser code that render the same website code into a screen display, but show it somewhat differently - which causes what's seen on-screen by the user to be different from what was intended by the site-code writer. Likewise, for certain other forms of embedded functionality (embedded video, pop-up buttons, page swapping, etc).

Consequently, to ensure their site-code looks and operates the same on different browser/engine designs, the site would have to test each browser design for compliance... continually retesting, since both website code and browser/engine code are changed constantly. That costs money, so many sites simply test against a few browsers and publicly declare the other ones "unsupported". The few browsers tested are simply the ones with most market share, hence the smaller market-share browsers are frequently ignored or rejected. Some sites go so far as to put in a few lines of site code that actively test (or "sniff") for the brand of visiting browser and actively block it from access. Their reasoning seems to be that it's cheaper to simply reject a small-marketshare browser than deal with the cost of support complaints over potential compatibility problems. Other websites don't even publish a list of supported browsers, but instead simply code for the big one or two browsers and ignore everything else.

Frankly, this channelization looks to only worsen in the current "free" universe of browsers and websites. Cost recovery is very difficult when the end product is being 'given away' and other income sources (ads, favored placements, paid-product tie-ins, etc) must underwrite the income. Diversity is indeed being threatened, as it always is in a monoculture - and that means innovation is being quenched. Insofar as innovation is being threatened, that implies security innovation is also being reduced, at least in the grand scheme of things.

@burnout426 said in Opera won't launch on Windows 10 Enterprise - HELP!:

Same thing happen with Chrome and Vivaldi? If so, what about Firefox?

@fjuk: Given that it's Windows Enterprise, who actually supplied the OS in your 'work computer', you or your company? If your company installed it (or caused it to be installed), it's very likely they put in place some group policy kind of restrictions on what browsers can be successfully installed and which require their IT department's administrative credentials to bypass. Usually this is done to prevent user installation of Internet-facing software that would present a portal into the company network that might expose it to online hacking.

If this is the case, it's unlikely that you will find a legitimate workaround. Moreover, if that is their policy, bypassing their restrictions is probably prohibited by their employee agreements and would be considered a 'career-ending move'.

@lyderisit There are 2 possibilities. First, the reported listing/analysis for IP geo-location may be in error. Second, the VPN may be using an IP that is not aligned with what you requested.

Websites that determine your geo-location from an IP rely on various listings that cross-match a given IP to a service provider and his published geo-location. Sometimes that listed location does not accurately represent the physical IP exit-portal geo-location.

A VPN generally attempts to use an exit portal for a named region that is physically located within/near that actual region. However, if there is a malfunction or a traffic overload, a VPN might default to a different exit-portal IP from that selected by the user.

In the short term, it can be hard to discern the real cause for an incorrectly identified IP geo-location, though using the 'traceroute' command can provide routing clues regarding routers along the communication path for an experienced user. Trying a number of alternate IP lookup tools can sometimes show up listing errors that aren't uniform across various lists.

Over the long term, persistent IP geo-location errors that cause user access problems should be referred to the VPN operator for analysis.

@ljfried said in Computer Re-Set - Getting Bookmarks Back:

... You are very kind. I did what you said - there are no bookmarks, no speed dial. I don't know what Profile folder is. Very sorry.

Don't let the terminology bewilder you. Computers organize their stored data or software/programs along the lines of a physical filing cabinet. There are stored 'files', each of which is specific to some kind of data or program instructions (much like different business letters that are saved in a filing cabinet). Then there are 'folders' (also called 'directories') that group various files together for logical ease of retrieval (much like filing cabinet folders within drawers that are labeled by some topic name). A computer folder can contain either files and/or other sub-folders with their own files, etc.

The net result of such an organization is to create a logical path or "tree" for the computer and its software to be able to locate and access a specific file upon demand, as well as to make it easier for humans to track their way intelligently through the very massive data storage structure (as your 319,000 Carbonite files demonstrates).

@ljfried What do you see for the path to the Profile folder? If you open Windows file explorer, can you navigate to that folder and see if there is a Bookmarks file present, and if so, what is its listed size? (edited to add:) Also, post here the full path terminology to the profile folder.

@ljfried IOW is a common abbreviation for 'in other words'.

If you click on Bookmarks, it will show you what bookmarks are in the bookmarks file Opera is currently looking at. If you go to O(Menu) > Help > About Opera, it will give you the path to the Profile folder where Opera is currently looking for the bookmarks file. That is to where you would need to restore the Carbonite bookmarks file (be sure Opera is turned off while doing that restoration or it may lock the file, preventing restoration).

@ljfried If you "re-installed all the Carbonite files but do not see Opera", how did you get the Opera installation that you currently have? IOW, there's some unclarity in your description of what you had backed up onto Carbonite and exactly what was involved in "resetting" your computer, as well as at what folder level you copied back the Opera files. Did the "resetting" of your computer involve a full image-restoration from Carbonite that included restoration of Windows itself, or did you first reinstall Windows from disks (or other media) and then pull down the Carbonite files?

@tomkrin Try disabling all the extensions and see if the problem clears when you restart Opera. If so, re-enable them one at a time, restart Opera each time, and see which extension causes the problem to repeat. Then disable just that one extension and re-enable all the others to confirm that the extension is, in fact, the only cause. At that point, you can try to track down why the extension is causing the problem in the first place (assuming that it is the cause).

@deego

1. What OS is on the 'older' system (if Win10, what are the versions/builds of both the old and 'new' systems' Win10)?
2. What is the source for the video you're attempting to play (a sample URL)?
3. Do the videos involve DRM (digital rights management)?
4. Do the videos on the new system play successfully in Edge?

@khyrau Assuming that your system, browser, and extensions are themselves clean of malware, it's possible that there was malware on one of the sites open in Opera that was either trying to abuse JavaScript to ping your system or that resided in a rotating ad server linked by one of the sites. Did AVG happen to identify exactly where (ie: in which folder) it found the URLs or is AVG running in a mode where it tracks where the URLs the browser attempts to visit (even in the 'background')?

@khyrau What is the context or scenario when detection occurs? That is, are you visiting certain websites when the detection appears, is it after an Opera update, is it just after starting up Opera, are you attempting a search with a built-in search engine, are you attempting to visit some URL in the address bar, etc? Also, for reference, what antivirus are you running?

@theiconn said in End of Adobe Flash:

I meant Opera 27.

Opera 27 was released on January 27, 2015 and was based on Chromium 40. The current underlying Chromium version used in Opera is now in the upper 80's. If you're still using (or considering using) a 6-year-old browser like Opera 27, the number of contained security flaws is significant - not even considering the ongoing risks of using Flash. In that case, keep your system fully and frequently backed up to off-computer media unless the computer contains nothing of any value to you or someone malicious.