I have been very happy with DuckDuckGo, and it has helped me break free of routines that I did not feel safe with. Especially the small flame icon that would clear all history, cookies and cache from websites that are not "fireproofed" was great!
But today I had to do a quick example on Tinkercad (3D browser design tool) and it was so slow! I thought that my PC maybe was busy doing something (yeah its an older PC but not THAT old), but when I open the same page on my now parked Opera browser, everything went smoothly.
I am ok with using Opera, or any other browser for 3D work, as I don't really do all that much of it, but I just feel gutted to find out that my now favorite browser sucks so bad at something, not to mention the Microsoft Edge processes when that is the last of any browser that I would choose to use
EDIT: I found out that this was due to hardware acceleration was off, on my DuckDuckGo browser. I had turned it off, because the fonts on websites looked blurry when it was on. The solution was to turn off antialising on the Nvidia control panel, and restart the PC. It is now working well!
Opera in particular is a dangerous browser to run these days, it’s owned by confirmed scammers and investment-scheme operators.
If you want something with the same ideological history as Opera, run Vivaldi, which was created by ex-Opera engineers.
But yes, for true openness, Librewolf, Waterfox, or Firefox is the way to go.
5% of non Chromium source code corresponding to the unique UI, 100% auditable and even moddeable by the users. rest of the code degoogled, basic APIs like Google save browsing, Chrome Store, etc. as userchoice in the settings. No red flags, EU browser (overcomming GDPR), don't spread nonsense