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Ars takes the new Opera R2020 browser for a spin, Ars Technica

Ars takes the new Opera R2020 browser for a spin, Ars Technica
    

      slide into your own dms –

             

Opera bundles in some killer UI features that Firefox and Chrome don’t.

      

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The “detach”. video “option Opera provides for YouTube and similar videos is really nice — aside from detaching the video from the browser, it strips off the useless control / info elements that tend to not-so-accidentally ugly up your video when you pause it. (Jim Salter ) when the topic of Web browsers comes up , most people only think of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and whatever Microsoft’s doing this week. (Just kidding, Microsoft – the new Edge is unironically great!) But today, we’re going to look at perennial bridesmaid Opera, which released a new version codenamed (R) () This Tuesday. Operating system support

Opera R 1656201 is available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux — meanwhile, Opera Touch, for mobile devices, is available on Android and iOS. We tested Opera on both Linux and Windows, and we also tested Opera Touch on Android. MacOS and iOS ports were not tested. Linux

Enlarge / Take note, everybody: this is the correct way to package and distribute third-party software from your own repository to Debian-derived distros.

Jim Salter me @ banshee: ~ $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opera-stable.list

  # This file makes sure that Opera Browser is kept up-to-date  # as part of regular system upgrades    deb https://deb.opera.com/opera-stable/ stable non-free #Opera Browser (final releases)   We were absolutely delighted to see a Google Chrome style offering of a .deb file when we visited the Opera  download  page from an Ubuntu  
workstation. Aside from initial native packaging, installing Opera from the provided .deb file also offered a choice to automatically add Opera's repository to Ubuntu's system repository list, making further security and feature upgrades automatic. (Native RPMs are similarly offered to Fedora and OpenSUSE users.)       
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                      None of the paid video streaming sites worked in Opera under Ubuntu. Kudos to Amazon Prime for being one of the very few to bother trapping for errors and giving helpful messages!                                                         
                                              Jim Salter                                   
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                          Netflix also trapped for DRM errors, but its message was considerably less helpful than Amazon Prime's. You came
    so close
  • , Netflix ...                                                                                                        Jim Salter                                   
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                          Disney did not work properly and did not trap errors, leaving us with a never-ending splash screen.                                                                                                        Jim Salter                                   
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                          Hulu did not work properly and did not trap errors, leaving us with a never-ending splash screen.                                                                                                        Jim Salter                                   
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                          CBS All Access did not work properly and did not trap errors, leaving us with a never-ending splash screen.                                                         
                                                  Jim Salter                                   
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    For the most part, everything was perfect — except, unfortunately, for commercial streaming video sites. Although playback on YouTube was perfect — in fact, Opera brings some really neat new features there and in other sites with embedded video — Widevine DRM support was broken, and therefore none of the paid services we tested were functional.

    We found (and tried) some suggestions involving monkey-patching with copies of the Widevine library from an installed copy of Google Chrome , but none of those worked either.

    Everything else we tested in Opera worked very well indeed under Ubuntu 90. - in fact, the majority of our testing was done on that platform — but the complete lack of working DRM support will make Opera a no -go for many Linux users unless and until it's corrected. Windows       

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                          Netflix works fine on Opera under Windows.                                                                                                        Jim Salter                                   
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                          Amazon Prime Video works fine on Opera under Windows.                                                                                            
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                          Hulu works fine on Opera under Windows.                                                                                            
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                          Disney works fine on Opera under Windows.                                                                                            
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    There's not much to say about Windows support — or, there wouldn't have been, had Opera not had video playback issues under Linux. Happily, under Windows the DRM plugin worked fine and without any fiddling, and all streaming sites we tested Just Worked.
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