

Opera 12 started to do this. China owns it now and it is based on Chromium. A couple of Open Source browsers did it for the same reason later and lost users like their was orbital bombardment hitting their project. Grab a brain… it is not the design language that makes Chrome so successful and if you look and act like them, well users are just going to use them.

OK, I was tired and over-simplified. I shop with Chinese Companies and I usually defend them when they are receiving Anti Sino hate and call them to task when they pull BS, so that was beneath me and not what I was saying. As a Opera user at the time I know it is a multinational group that is only mostly Chinese Investors. I also know some Chinese based business tactics that they tried to pull on users early on and got enough blowback that they stopped doing it.
The Company went to hell as soon as Jon Von Techner left the CEO roll and they brought in that “Adult” CEO and he started the Chromium rewrite, attacking community members like me, shutting out Jon until he had to leave, openly bragged about making the company more like Google Chrome so that Google would buy out Opera ASA for the patents and he would get his golden parachute(I know that that is when CEO’s are fired or the company fails, but that is how he worded it). Then when Google turned their nose up their secondary job was to find ANYBODY to buy the browser and patents. That is when they sold to the mostly Chinese Company who I could not be arsed to look up because I was off of Opera and on to Vivaldi by then not knowing initially that that was Jon’s Company, IIRC. The also killed OperaMail which I used for years after even though it was left on the vine to rot and was the inspiration for the modern Thunderbird UI design.