Anti-phishing is nothing but Opera trying to match “the other two” browsers. The people that fall for anti-phishing scams are very very few. Not enough to justify it as a feature.

Unless Opera can magically prevent spyware/ adware / malware from being installed on a user’s system, just leave it alone – because that, by far, is the biggest problem nowadays.

On one hand, I’m glad it’s off by default because of the way it’s implemented: sending a query to a third party for each and every site you visit. That’s a privacy risk, and any features that risk privacy should ideally be opt-in. I’ve turned anti-phishing off in IE7, and I’ve stuck with the local-only check in Firefox 2, and I’d definitely turn it off in Opera 9.1 if Opera sticks with this method.

On the other hand, I think that fraud protection of some sort should be offered by default, for the same reason many people here have brought up: The people who can make the best use of it aren’t going to look for the setting.

Maybe the first time you run Opera 9.1 after upgrade/install, it should ask whether you want it on or not? Kind of like how it used to ask you to choose between single-window and multiple-window modes?

Disabling by default puts the the greatest risk on the most vulnerable users: those who don’t really understand what’s going on.

Just my $0.02…

Very convincing…

Seems to me that you haven’t seen how it really works and that’s why you are so confused (and given the above comment also frustrated).

I’m with David here. How many “average Joe”s dive into Opera advanced preferences. Even though I’m not using it, I would have preferred to be asked the first time I run Opera.

Fraud protection can be controlled from the address field icon (perform a manual check or enable the automatic check), no need to use advanced preferences. It’s pretty obvious that the feature is there and it would be the main selling point of the next release: average joe will know about the feature.

Those who do turn it on manually will get used to it, but it won’t make any difference to them guys if Opera actually does make it default to “on” in Opera X.

Those who don’t turn it on (Joe, for instance) won’t “get used to it”, and will be just as “surprised” by the feature in version 10.

It’s not like the feature is hidden from the user and you can perform manual checks when needed so chances are most average joes would play with the feature (or at least know about it and how it works) even if he doesn’t turn the automatic check on. This is how an average user can get used to a feature (especially when the feature can arise privacy concerns so the user needs to “trust” it before he can use it on a permanent basis) so why exactly isn’t this logical?.

The idea of the average joe having to turn on this feature seems ironic: if he’s savvy enough to turn it on, then he probably doesn’t need it in the first place

I totally agree with Rhonnysparks.
Remember that Opera needs to gain market share and it’s better to immediately show new features to new users, if these features are good.

Which I think is great.

“the idea of the fraud protection is to prevent the average joe from being tricked by a fraud website.”

You hit the nail on the head. This is sort-of what I was trying to get at.

The non-logic of the original argument is here:
“We think they need some time getting used to it, so for now we’ve made it an opt-in feature.”

Those who do turn it on manually will get used to it, but it won’t make any difference to them guys if Opera actually does make it default to “on” in Opera X.

Those who don’t turn it on (Joe, for instance) won’t “get used to it”, and will be just as “surprised” by the feature in version 10.

Just my 2 cents.