Ask Paul: January 30 ⭐

Happy Friday! It's been another crazy week, in my case complicated by a wonderful bout of food poisoning I can't quite shake. But that's as good an excuse as any to start this weekend a bit early. And as always, I like to do that with some great reader questions. I will do my best.
?‍? You can't switch until the fat lady sings
wright_is asks:

With the new Vivaldi release this week, it got me thinking again, Opera has been pushing its browsers heavily through influencers recently.

In my experience, Opera PR has always been wonderful, but I'm not aware of the influencer push. I suppose a grass roots effort is a reasonable idea given how many small browser makers there are now and how difficult it is to differentiate.

My only real issue with Opera, and it's a small one, is that they have too many browser versions. I understand that everyone is different, but I feel like you add things to a browser, typically via extensions, to make it your own and that the base product should be minimalist. This may be why Opera Air is my favorite Opera web browser.

Now that is a majority owned subsidiary of a Chinese investment firm, and therefore essentially an extension of the Chinese government, what are your feelings about Opera and whether it can be trusted?

I guess I never really thought about this. Opera is so European, it's all over their website and communications. And while its parent company is owned by a Chinese company, it's still based in Europe and I suspect it's just about 100 percent run by Europeans. I'm likewise not sure as a blanket statement that every Chinese company is essentially an extension of the Chinese government. But China is, well, China, and as an authoritarian state, and there is always the reasonable fear that it will require whatever company to open up whatever data it controls.

But what data does Opera have? There's an Opera account and, unlike with Brave, that data is centrally stored and synced between your devices as needed. Opera says that it doesn't log your entire browsing history, though it uses generalized data for ads. And you could just sign in with a Google or other third-party account. But web browsers are unique, of course.

So, I don't know. I understand the distrust of the Chinese government, though it's unclear how this is any worse than Big Tech and the current U.S. government, honestly. I also see that Opera doesn't exactly play up its owners. I deal with a handful of people from the company and can see how it presents its products to the world, and I don't see anything troubling there. But I guess this is up to the individual. I've made my case for Brave, for example.
? What's next for Windows?
uk user asks:

Ok, so what is the future with Windows? Yes A.I. and all that but all the different segments, especially one of my favorite, OneNote, are, to me, a mess. Incomprehensible I would say with so many ‘features that I don’t need, or want, getting in the way of what was once a...