[thallavajhula]

Opera was the most innovative web browser ever. They brought so many new things to the world of web browsing. Tabbed-browsing, mouse gestures, colored tabs, browser themes, in-built security integration with anti-virus software, an extensible browser - so many wonderful innovative features. It was a paid software initially, but then they made it free for everyone. I used to use it as my default browser, maybe 13-15 years ago.

[oliwary]

Something I really miss from Opera is that the content of every page you visited was saved and stored for search! This helped me so often to find pages that I had visited, and remembered a few words from, but didn't bookmark or save otherwise. No idea why browsers today did not copy this feature.

[copperx]

Web browsers are strange. They are sophisticated pieces of engineering, but they refuse to implement the lowest hanging fruit features UX wise.

[llanowarelves]

A cynical take is that they purposely hold back bookmarks/offline-search so that you use their web search engine instead.

[oconnore]

They are built by people who are excited about the web, so it sort of makes sense that anything off the critical path of: “make websites and web applications great” would be deemed less important. Why make local search when there is a web application called Google?

Ferraris probably aren’t know for having sufficient cup holders.

[BMorearty]

What an amazing idea! I would love to have that feature.

[renke1]

Spatial navigation is a feature I really do miss. I don't think any other browser supports this. It made keyboard-based browsing possible without resorting to stuff like hit-a-hint. You could just hit Shift+Arrow Key (which I mapped to the home row) and select a the nearest link (or anything interactive) in that direction. I think it worked in a visual fashion so order in the DOM didn't matter at all. It behaves exactly like one would expect.

[stavros]

The Opera CTO is now building Vivaldi, which is basically Opera. It has all the features I remember (spatial navigation, mail/RSS client, gestures, split tabs, etc) and is very good.

[r00fus]

Are you sure tabbed browsing was Opera? I mean, Mozilla browser (predating Firefox) had it in 1998.

[ricardobeat]

Wikipedia lists Opera v4 having tabs in 2000, while they were added to Mozilla 0.9.5 in 2001: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

[vikingerik]

Mozilla had multiple documents first, by just following Windows' MDI standard.

Then Netscape and IE got into a war for mindshare, and part of that was to ignore MDI and splash their browser windows all over the taskbar instead, to be more visible and grab more user attention.

Tabbed browsing was never a new invention, it was just a re-implementation of what we already had by way of MDI.

[nidnogg]

IIRC it was InternetWorks by BookLink Technologies

According to: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/which-browser-invented-tabs-3-...

[rch]

Opera also had tab groups, MRU tab switching, and saved sessions. Those exist in some form or fashion now, but the implementations are not as smooth.

[Kerbonut]

Text reflow on mobile browsers. I still miss that feature and much prefer that with desktop mode vs crappy mobile mode sites.

[rjh29]

"Reading mode" is still very much a feature of mobile Chrome and Firefox, and almost a neccessity.

[abfan1127]

its my default browser now. It still great!

[capableweb]

Well, I used to love Opera as well, it was my first "serious" browser as I became a netizen. But now I wouldn't even dare to try it as it's owned by a consortium of Chinese investors, rather than a Norwegian company.

[bityard]

Vivaldi is pretty good and though it's based on chromium, is the new opera in spirit.

[IndrekR]

No coincience. Vivaldi is co-founded by ex-CEO and co-founder of Opera.

I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...

[copperx]

> I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...

Congratulations. This is the most persnickety HN comment I've read. And I've been here more than a decade.

[dijksterhuis]

I might try Vivaldi out after your comment and because of their completely sarcastic pricing section on the download page.

Genius.

[vorticalbox]

Built in email and rss feeds are really nice as is the calendar base history page.