I'm not intending to rub salt into the wound, but this illustrates the ever-present dangers of relying on Sync as a substitute for genuine backups. There simply are too many accidental ways for messing up or deleting sync data, not to mention the possibility of the sync server losing the data in some server/portal crash or 'incident'. The safest backup approach has always been, and remains, to make occasional genuine data backups of critical personal-data browser files (like preferences, bookmarks, sessions, etc) - preferably onto external media. While such backups may at times not be exactly current, with a little effort they can be maintained reasonably close to a current state... and having them available, even if a bit out-of-date, can be a literal life saver when (not if) an "oops" or hardware crash occurs.
Best posts made by blackbird71
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RE: Recovering synced dataOpera for Windows
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RE: If this is all the help there is, I'm outForum feedback
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 He then asked if that website description was out of date.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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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RE: Spam advertisementLounge
@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.
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RE: Major Privacy ProblemOpera for Windows
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.
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RE: OperaVPN is not workingOpera for computers
@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.
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RE: Can Opera be fully TrustedLounge
@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.
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RE: how can i rename "opera.exe" to be executable?Opera for Windows
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.
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RE: Can Opera be fully TrustedLounge
@coffeelover said in Can Opera be fully Trusted:
... I "think" (not sure so it's a total guess on my part) that most people believe coding can be more easily hidden in software than hardware so they're more willing to trust their devices than the programs they load onto them. Does it make sense? Probably not but my gut feeling is that this is how most people think.
You're right that it's how most people think (at least most people who even think about security - the vast bulk of users rarely even consider it in any depth). But since most "hardware" contains "firmware" (which is code embedded into PROMS or flash memory), there is far less difference than many folks might imagine. Discovery of backdoor code (intentionally malicious or simply heedlessly left over from factory testing access) has popped up in the news continually in everything from chips to full-blown PC boards for years.
Having worked in the digital and national security realms for 40+ years, I find no more security against spyware/malware in general code-capable parts/devices than I do in downloadable software programs, unless those parts/devices have been procured and tested against a published DoD/military QPL (qualified parts list). In reality, assuming one practices "safe hex", the key issues have more to do with who you are (your profession) and what you have to lose (in terms of secrets) than what an adversary may or may not do. In other words, if you have secrets that make you a worthwhile target or link you to a prime critical/infrastructure target, then you have reason to be super-cautious about national-origin of equipment or software. Otherwise, not nearly so much...
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RE: How to change your browser ID within OperaOpera for Windows
@browzer1 said in How to change your browser ID within Opera:
@rif ... Does this not change the Opera "statistics" on web browsing? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Yes, it does affect the usage stats. If a user can access a site by changing the browser ID, it's a good thing for him in gaining access to the site... but it's not a good thing for Opera's market share stats. The ideal would be for websites to respect and operate properly with Opera's genuine user-agent string or respond to user complaints if they don't. But all too often, that's not how the online world seems to operate...
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RE: Why Use Opera?Lounge
@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...
Latest posts made by blackbird71
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RE: I want to restart Windows but I'm afraid to lose all my bookmarks in Opera....what should I do?Opera for Windows
@stancall said in I want to restart Windows but I'm afraid to lose all my bookmarks in Opera....what should I do?:
... l want to restart
There are still several possible ideas of which you're trying to convey just one: 'restart' the computer (and Windows); do a repair reinstall of Windows, followed by a restart; do a complete reinstall of windows, followed by a restart; or upgrade to a later version of Windows, followed by a restart. Which do you mean?
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RE: service worker killing my pcOpera for Windows
It makes one wonder whether the extension is doing some crypto-currency mining... the behavior shows such symptoms.
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RE: VPN set to Europe but BBC iplayer still knows I'm not in EuropeOpera for Windows
@gertrude29 A VPN can only substitute its IP address for yours, but there are other methods besides geolocating that IP address which websites can use to try to sniff out whether a visitor is where the visiting IP address 'claims' they are. Various settings in your operating system, browser extensions, certain browser settings, and so forth can "leak" your actual location to a website... or at least might indicate you're not where the VPN is claiming that you are.
A website that's determined to exclude visitors from outside a certain locale can employ a variety of tests in their site code to sniff for various kinds of leaked data, independent of the visiting IP address. In those cases, the user must make sure none of those possible leakage paths provide information that betrays the user as not being in the locale to which the site is seeking to restrict their service. Some websites (and national censors) are much more rigorous in their blocking efforts than others.
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RE: It.s like youtbe is firewalled out of operaOpera for Windows
- Has the error-message problem always been present with Opera when visiting Youtube, or did it just begin recently?
- Do you always use Opera via its VPN service?
- Can your Opera installation access YouTube without using its VPN?
As a background observation, Youtube has been increasingly fighting ad-blocking lately and has been rotating its anti-user-blocking mechanisms as a countermeasure over recent weeks. As a result, anything that interferes with those analytic mechanisms for detecting and refusing user ad-blocking will cause Youtube problems. However, those kinds of responses normally result in a message that Youtube requires users not to employ ad-blocking at their site. What you're seeing more likely involves something else as a cause.
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RE: Automatic switch offOpera for Windows
@jacbuj Assuming you use Windows, you can set the operating system to automatically sleep, hibernate (an advanced setting), or shut down after whatever time of inactivity that you select - but this, of course, affects the whole system. After your earlier post, I found multiple timer extensions for a browser that will act that same way (to shut down the system after inactivity) or to alert users after a certain amount of browser usage time, but I was unable to find an extension that only shuts off the browser after inactivity. For my system, I simply rely on the system "sleep" feature in Windows (in Windows Search, seek: Power and Sleep Settings > set both the "Screen" and "Sleep" boxes to whatever inactivity trigger time you want); to restart my system after that, I simply move the mouse or tap a keboard key and it wakes up exactly where it was before.
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RE: 403 forbidden accessOpera for Windows
@maddim Some websites actively block certain web browser brands or versions they don't choose to accept. This may be because of their uncertainty that a given type of browser will correctly run all of the site code based on testing or simply because they are too lazy to test all brands, so they simply block all but a few "acceptable" ones. Likewise, there may actually be something in a browser or its extension(s) that isn't correctly 'handshaking' the initial connection protocols required to deliver access to the problematic site (web addresses employing https rather than http are especially susceptible to this).
If the problem exists for all websites, then something is wrong with how the browser communicates with the operating system and its networking modules.
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RE: Streaming Sites will not play anything?Opera for Windows
@hirwaunman Suggestions at the Paramount+ site (https://help.paramountplus.com/s/article/PD-Why-do-I-see-error-messages-when-I-try-to-playback-video-on-Paramount) for error code 3304 are to try: 1-Turn off browser ad blocker if enabled. 2-If using a Chrome-type browser, disable hardware acceleration. 3-Try restarting the computer and relaunch the browser.
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RE: Why are people so emotional about browsers?Lounge
Given that browsers are essentially just "tools" used to accomplish a goal - browsing on the web - it follows that some (but not all) users will place unique and great emphasis on how that 'tool' feels and works for them. Over time, those tool users develop certain workflows that a particular tool seems to match best, so brand-loyalty arises. When that product's updates come, especially those impacting a particular area of the tool's operation, users whose workflow has long integrated that area's functionality will often react either quite positively or negatively... hence the controversy that so often intrudes into the forums.
Users that don't care about particular functionality issues normally just use the tool provided as built-in on their computer or download whatever their friends tend to use, as long as it's easy and "just works" (ie: Explorer/Edge, Chrome and their vast usage numbers over the years).
In any case, users should employ whatever browser best suits their wants/needs and not be afraid to try other brands - especially to find out if there's better ways the user's particular browsing style and demands can be implemented. Personally, being of a technical nature, I want certain adjustability controls and have certain levels of privacy that I demand, so I tend to favor a particular brand of browser - but I have 6 others currently installed which I use from time to time, if only to stay abreast of unique developments.
All that said, you'll nevertheless find some users who, just like football fans, are rabid in their likes and dislikes of particular ones... which usually defies all logic to an outside observer.
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RE: Java pegs processorOpera for Windows
@mherron2213 said in Java pegs processor:
@blackbird71 -- Not being a smartA$$, but I am looking for a solution not definitions. Thanks
Indeed, but the reason I brought it up is that you've repeatedly misused the terminology in this thread, including your initial post. Because Java does exist as a viable program and very old Opera versions may still access it via a plug-in, it can lead to troubleshooting confusion until the actual terminology becomes apparent via details mentioned in subsequent postings. When asking about software problems, it always pays to describe problems accurately, as well as completely.
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RE: Java pegs processorOpera for Windows
@mherron2213 said in Java pegs processor:
... I deduce that my main machine has some type of a problem with Java/Javascripts. ...
Going forward, keep in mind that Java and Javascript are two different things. What you're dealing with is most likely Javascript, not Java.
Java is a programming language whose application programs can be run on any kind of computer that has had a Java interpreter code module installed on it at the system level. An application program written in Java can be executed on any type of computer operating system having the Java code module installed and, because they are true "programs" that run directly on the system, can be quite powerful in what they can do. But that also makes such systems vulnerable to Java-based malware exploits when/if the Java application program is being provided by a website. The presence of web-delivered Java programs has significantly declined in recent years because of its demonstrated potential for abuse, and most web browsers no longer support the Java plug-ins that enable Java programs to be executed from a website using a browser as the portal.
Javascript is a different programming language (in spite of its name-similarity to Java) which is designed to merely execute scripts which appear in website code. Most web browsers include a built-in Javascript interpreter which enable a website to provide a greater variety of content formats and effects on its webpages. Javascript is much less powerful than Java in terms of access to system resources and what it can do therein, hence the system is also less vulnerable to abuse. Blocking Javascript execution in a browser is a method to somewhat increase browsing security and reduce displayed ads in several ways, but it also has a tendency to "break" proper viewing at many websites that rely on their Javascript code for correct site operation and display.