Why my next vacation should go to northern Europe

It’s probably Jolla’s fault, because following my purchase of this beautiful phone from Finland I started to using more software created in Europe.

I have recently moved my online storage from Dropbox to Younited which is a service provided by F-Secure, a Finnish company known for data security software and services (the first ever anti-virus software I used on a DOS-powered computer was f-prot…). Younited is pretty straightforward and works much like other services you might use. There are clients available for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. There’s even a client for Linux, so I can sync folders from my Archlinux-powered Laptop at home! Younited offers just 5GB of online storage for free, but purchasing more space is cheap compared to Dropbox or box.com - 200GB are ~75 Euros per year.

Another piece of software I use a lot every day is a web browser. Most of the time since I owned and used a computer connected to the internet, I am using Netscape/Mozilla browsers. There is nothing wrong with that, I think. The Mozilla browsers are great, free and open source. They comply to standards, are secure most of the time and have steadily evolved over time. Time after time I played with other browsers - Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera and Google Chrome are the ones I regularly tried to switch to as my main browser. Only Chrome succeeded and became my main browser for some time and and secondary browser most of the time. But I did not want to rely on Google products and service too heavily (same goes for Apple products and services), so I kept looking for an alternative.

I like Opera as it always has been unique - a company developing their own browser as a real alternative to the ones that were offered for free by much bigger companies. But I just could not use it as a main browser - it felt too heavy for me, loaded with functionality like a complete email client that I just did not need. On the downside Presto could not render some pages the way I was used to from other browsers. Then some time ago, they switched to use and contribute to Webkit, so the rendering issues disappeared and the browser was lightweight (though lacking some features I liked about previous versions of Opera), so it could be a perfect match for me replacing Chrome (and it has been since the day I tried it again).

I switched on my Windows Laptop (work) and made my wife use Opera on her MacBook. On my privately used Linux laptop, there was no current Opera version for a long time, so I stuck with Firefox and Chrome. But finally, I read this and now I can use Opera as my main browser everywhere - Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android (and I still got hope for a version running natively on my Jolla)!

Now I really feel I should visit Norway or Finland to see where all this great software is created…