I always had full confidence in Opera - until they started making weird things like this. I am still an Opera user - but I am slowly pushed towards the edge.

My point is not, that those speed dial entries are easily spottable and removable, I have two major concerns: privacy and unwanted ads.

Privacy: Adding entries to my personal Speed Dial is a technical way which is prone to be abused in case of a hack, for example. The only person, who should have access to my personal data is me - nobody and nothing else. If you know

Unwanted Ads: Ads are for some of us simply annoying at best. Let's use a picture: You create an e-mail account with a provider, who is proudly telling you that he will not let any spam through. Nice. Once you have your account, he is sending you "promoted e-mails" every few days. You would probably consider them as spam. Why should it be acceptable, that my browser is behaving the same? And moreover my browser is also cluttering the news feed with "promoted ads"?

The least thing I would expect is a switch to turn all "promoted" bs on and that defaults to "off" upon installation - in all versions (desktop, mobile).

@leocg said in Automatic new Speed Dial entries:

Opera used to be a paid software. I don't know why they changed it to a free program but I guess it could be to reach more people, because few people really are willing to pay for a software.

Many vendors therefore offer a free version with ads or restricted functionality and a "pro version" without all the clutter.

I don't know why everybody thinks, that ads do not harm - they do.

And the unauthorized change of my Speed Dial entries is a direct intrusion into my privacy. period.

Please bring this issue to the attention of whoever it might concern. After being a user for decades I am really about to quit Opera for the above-mentioned behaviour.

@leocg said in Automatic new Speed Dial entries:

Well, promoted speed dial have been there a long time before ad-blocker has been introduced.

"promoted speed dial" is an euphemism for spam.

The next aspect is, that my bookmarks - which I always considered to be private and safe - are obviously modifiable by some means, which in return means, that somebody could hack the mechanism. This does not sound trustworthy.

Aside from "promoted speed dial" you also offer a free spam service called "ads in the news feed", when activated. I deactivated the news feed a long while ago, as it is simply annoying.

Is the enforcement placement of ads really the only way that Opera earns money?

If you are so desperate, why don't you offer a free and a really ad-free paid version? At least your product description in the Google Play Store does not mention that the browser "promotes" something - shouldn't you be clear in the description about this annoying behaviour?

I would love to have nicknames for bookmarks back.

In the good old days I could just hit Shift+F2 and enter the nickname. When the entered text were unique, I did not even have to press enter. It used to be such a time saver!

But "don't fix what ain't broken" is out of fashion in many areas - let's hope, that we will get this feature back in the future.

It should be possible though, as the Speed Dial entries would otherwise be nothing but spam, right?

I am using Opera in order to have ads blocked - it is counterproductive, when Opera blocks ads and instead delivers its own ads disguised as "Speed Dial Suggestions", which I cannot block. Or am I missing a point here aside from the "business model bla bla"?

Opera does automatically add new entries to my Speed Dial.

While I found a switch on Windows to disable this behaviour, I were not able to find a similar option on my Opera for Android.

How can I avoid becoming spammed by my beloved ad-blocking Opera?

I guess you are right. I worship privacy and dislike advertising - and I believe in self-determination as in GDPR, where privacy by design and privacy by default are highly recommended.

Perfect, thank you.

Just one more question: shouldn't this option be off by default?

Speed Dial automatically gets new entries.

It seems that some advertising partners of Opera pay for having them added automatically. I personally find this very annoying and I do not wish that "somebody" adds new entries to my Speed Dial.

Is there any way to suppress this behaviour?

This happens to the desktop and the mobile version.

@igorjmm Thank you, I got the picture. Never heard of pushbullet before, so thank you for the insight. I personally rely on bookmarks a lot, that's why I wondered how a browsing scenario would look like, where you don't miss this functionality. Thanks again for the explanation!