[fredoralive]

To avoid breaking stuff basically, easier to have ugly UA strings than persuade every site that does weird UA parsing to fix themselves.

The main exception to this was Opera back when it had its own engine, which did use Opera at the start of its fairly clean default UA string. Then when they reached version 10 they had to make the primary version 9 with a second real version later in the string as sites couldn’t cope with two digit version numbers…

[imiric]

I miss Opera. It's a damn shame that it was so badly mismanaged, and ultimately sold off to investors, which further buried it into irrelevance. It now survives on gaming-oriented gimmicks and shady promotions. I hear that Vivaldi is supposed to be a continuation of it, but from what I've seen it's just another Chromium clone with a closed-source UI, without any distinguishing features.

Opera in the late 90s / early 2000s was excellent. It was lightweight and snappy. Among the first to support tabs. The Presto engine was the most performant on machines of the era. The trialware/adware was annoying, but the browser was solid. The built-in email client was decent as well.

In 2009 they launched a very interesting web server / sharing feature with Opera Unite, which unfortunately didn't gain traction.

Opera Mini was the best mobile browser for a few years as well, before smartphones took off.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It's a damn shame that it was so badly mismanaged

I think even the best management in the world wouldn't have helped it survive the onslaught of Google's Chrome and their massive war chest in that time. It's like a team of girl scouts versus the NBA.

[fredoralive]

Amen brother.

My personal big thing was the ability to "minimise" / deque tabs, a legacy of the really early version of tabs that were basically based around the concept of the Windows task bar (and MDI), not tabs. I'm not a Firefox user as it's the least worst option, and there used to be Firefox extensions that mostly (but not quite) did it, but Mozilla naturally broke it as part of their general view that making Firefox worse will somehow make it popular[1].

Also mouse gestures. Again, you can kinda do it with Firefox, but random stuff like the home shortcut screen don't support it nowadays because???

Also, I want a status bar. I don't care if it's old fashioned, but I want one.

Sorry if this is becoming a Mozilla / Firefox gripe fest.

[1] I don't think Opera had a nice preview view for RSS feeds, but Firefox did. Then they broke it for random reasons? Gee, raw XML is so much better than a sensible view, thank you Mozilla!