Opera vs Chromium

Opera has managed to stay about as relevant in the browser space as Firefox, which is just a tad bit behind that of Microsoft Edge.

Interestingly enough, unlike most other major browsers on the market, Opera is actually a publicly traded company with about a $1B market cap. This is particularly interesting because it means that they need to focus on growing revenue as they have investors.

In their attempt to stay relevant, they have copied many features from the more modern browsers on the market like Arc Browser (e.g. Spaces and Folders).

You can tell Arc has been influencing the browser market. They expanded the idea of browser profiles into Spaces, and now Opera has copied the concept with Workspaces. The switching animation is slick and you can create as many workspaces as you'd like, but they all share the same cookies and cache, so you cannot fully separate environments like personal and work accounts. That separation is the key difference between Arc's Spaces and Opera's Workspaces.

You can create groups of tabs in the top if you want similar sites to be together for easy expanding/collapsing. If you open up 2 or more of the sam site, it'll automatically create a tab group for that site.

Opera has been called out a bit lately for being owned by a Chinese company, and for making most of its revenue from Ads, meaning they very well are tracking, storing, and selling details about how you're using the browser.

While tempting and seemingly impressive, there's just something in the heavy influencer marketing push and security concerns that make us have a bit of pause in actually using Opera as our daily driver.

Chromium is something you're likely using right now without even realizing it. Are you using Arc Browser, Chrome, Brave, or even Microsoft Edge right now? Okay, then you're using Chromium.

You know those extensions you have in the top-right corner? Yep, those are Chromium extensions (often referred to as "Chrome Extensions"). Little do people know, Google built an open-source foundation to the browser, for which most of the top browsers on the market use as their foundation.

I mean you're not exactly looking at traditional competition here, but Apple does use a competing standard called Webkit. So if you're using Safari on your computer, that's running on Webkit instead of Chromium.

The super interesting part here though is if you're using iOS, any browser you're using is actually built atop Webkit—even Google Chrome. Apple requires Webkit be used on iOS regardless.

Why exactly? Well, Google pays Apple some $20bn per year to be the default search engine in Safari, so holding onto Webkit on iOS and iPad is probably one of their leverage points:

“At-least we still own the foundation of the browser for our products!”
-Apple (probably) 🤷

This genuinely probably doesn't mean much to you, but you're probably using Chromium and you probably don't care.

Just know that it makes for switching between Chromium-based browsers far easier—from transferring bookmarks, to extensions, and everything inbetween.