[Etheryte]

I wouldn't say it's a toolbox, it's just another browser with some more sugar strapped to it out of the box. Coming back to your smartphone analogy, it's just another smartphone with more stock apps that many users don't want at all.

[Aoyagi]

You mean like pre-built toolboxes have some tools many people don't really want? Good thing people can choose the toolboxes they find the most ideal, even if it contains only a hammer and a duct type and a lot of empty space, isn't it? :)

When Opera switched from Presto to Chromium, it was about as fast, but it was much lighter. Yet, almost every Opera fan/"customer" at the time was pretty mad. It was not because they were attached to Presto, but because of the huge feature depreciation. It's the features what made people use Opera until its 12th iteration, and some even use it today despite it having huge issues chewing through the bloat of JS on some sites.

[V-2]

If I recall correctly, Opera dropped even bookmarks at that point.

[Aoyagi]

Yep! They brought that revolutionary feature back in about a year.

[V-2]

Yeah, they really stripped it down... at least it put an end to all the fanboy gangs who used to jump into any browser-related discussion, trying to convince everyone how Opera invented everything including tabs (it didn't invent tabs), and how other browsers are nothing but knock-offs that don't even have a torrent client built-in ; )

(No offense to Opera supporters - I used it on PC for a while and it worked very well esp. on slower machines, and I use it on Android to this day - but this was annoying like hell)

[Aoyagi]

Well they were the first ones to implement it natively, by default and made it an integral part of their browser, and were successful with it. Of course they didn't invent it though. They didn't "invent" things like Dragonfly, Unite features, Turbo, etc., but I strongly believe the implementation is bloody good :P

But I don't count among those who call other browsers rubbish because they don't have some features. Personal preference and all that. However, I hate Opera Mini. It has little to no control. Not Mobile though! (if it still exists)

[V-2]

They were early adopters of tabbed browsing, I do give them that, but the first browser to have it was NetCaptor.

The whole idea of a browser as a swiss-knife internet suite (with an email client, torrent client, web server etc. all built-in) which was hailed as Opera's main strength back in the day, proved to be an evolutionary dead end - noone really followed that path, Mozilla had an enormous following, especially among geeks/superusers, and yet its SeaMonkey never gained traction, that does tell you something

I feel Opera hurted themselves by believing that this was what made their browser attractive. Probably overestimated that factor. As a user, I cared much more about whether eg. "Look into" on Amazon worked correctly (Opera - a few years ago when I used it - was the only major browser where it didn't).

Yes internet browsing still owes Opera much credit, they popularized a great many useful solutions such as mouse gestures, the product was very solid and ergonomical, I'm not questioning that. Plus it performed well on older PCs and slower bandwidths, which probably explains why it enjoyed tremendous popularity in Central and Eastern Europe (where I'm from)