[irusensei]

I remember trying Opera for the first time in Windows 98 SE. It was one of those versions that prided itself for fitting on a floppy. I think it was 3.0.6 or 3.6. But anyway I was taken by surprise how good it was in comparison to Internet Explorer which at the time was the only browser I ever used.

[freehorse]

Everything else after opera dropped Presto and became a chrome clone felt like a downgrade to me. I never got the same feeling of easy of use and control over a browser. I kept using the 12.16 for as much as I could, then switched to firefox. The new "opera browser" now is a different browser just sharing the same name.

And the beloved opera mini for the mobile was amazing. Back then I would even use it in a vm on my computer sometimes because I had shitty internet (and to use a proxy).

[stavros]

Vivaldi feels like Opera did (makes sense, since it's the same CTO).

[lucideer]

I was a die-hard Opera user when it ran Presto - I tried the Chrome version for a while, & I have Vivaldi installed so I can periodically open it & try it out for a while, but absolutely everything since Opera 12, Vivaldi included, has paled in comparison.

Opera 12 was instantaneous in everything it did, even with a session with 100s of tabs open (without auto-unloading them in the background like modern browsers do) & thousands of local emails in M2. The instant history navigation in particular is something no modern browser has even attempted to copy, Vivaldi included (likely because it's a core Chromium functionality that would be difficult to override).

There's just so many tiny details of its UX that were slick & seamless & have been lost. Little things that seem minor but were huge on aggregate like text selection of linkified text - it simply does not work in Gecko or Blink browsers but somehow Presto did it with ease. The page you're leaving remaining fully responsive during navigation to facilitate change-of-mind on mis-clicks, etc. Millions of tiny UX details like this just made the whole daily browsing experience so painless.

[stavros]

It really was. I had a computer with 16 MB RAM and Opera was basically the only browser that worked on it. The back button was instant in a way nothing has ever been again.

[lucideer]

They had some kind of intermediate representation of page renders that was efficiently cached on disk so that it made zero network requests on history navigation. I suspect this same approach also played a part in facilitating the fulltext history search feature I've also never seen in a browser since.

I'm guessing with the way web standards have evolved & become more complex this might actually be impossible to do today while remaining compliant - honestly give me non-compliance though.

[thisislife2]

True! Came to post the same thing - one of my favourite feature of Opera Presto engine was how all the websites in your history was also "indexed" locally, so that you could do a simple keyword search on "History" to find the web page you wanted to re-visit. It was fast and accurate and made it a breeze to find any site in that you had browsed and was still cached, and it was an incredibly useful feature.

[stavros]

Yeah, I don't know, I don't see how you can't pause execution and store the entire interpreter state and DOM somewhere. Maybe it's just that nobody cares enough to go through all the effort?

[smusamashah]

They had funny ads about it being fast. One showed opening a tab vs peeling a potato. Another one was opening a tab vs starting a jet.

I loved gestures, built in IRC client, RSS reader, notes and the experimental website hosting from the browser. There were many cool plugins too. Did it have a torrent client too? I seem to remember as if it had everything :)

[kelvinjps10]

it was also the only browser that ran well in the era of 3g mobile phones

[freehorse]

I bet it is a great browser, but I did not get the same feel as the old opera at the time when I tried, too many features missing back then.

Moreover, not using chromium-based browsers is a kind of matter of principle for me. Chromium has been a monopoly for very long, which gives google too much power on how people may experience the web. This was made especially apparent with the manifest 2 -> 3 transition, but it should have been seen as a concern imo since a good while back.

[irusensei]

Is it the same guy who pulled the stunt saying he was going to swim from Norway to the US?

https://press.opera.com/2005/04/21/the-one-million-download-...

[mrweasel]

When Opera became just another Chromium skin I switch to Firefox. The point for me was Presto, that Opera was really well put together in terms of UI was just a bonus. The developer tools in Opera was better than what shipped in Chrome and Firefox, so switching definitely felt like a downgrade.

Someone, I don't know who, but I assume the new Opera, is still keeping the Opera Mini proxy servers running. It show up in our logs frequently enough that we noticed and have special whitelisting for them to byparse some rate limiting.

[thunderbong]

Vivaldi is it's rightful heir

https://vivaldi.com/

[glenstein]

I would follow that Vivaldi team to the ends of the Earth, as nobody ever made a better browser in my opinion then they did with those last versions of Opera before they had to sell (versions 11 or 12 I want to say). But for one thing, which is that Vivaldi is unfortunately also a Chromium based browser.

Which means among other things that they didn't have the capacity to sustain manifest v2 while Google pushed the browser into v3. And some version of that will be true when Google starts pushing, say, mandatory sign in, or AI powered DRM enforcement, or hard coded browser level warnings to comply with the law if you visit Anna's Archive, or limit your search engines to "safe" search providers from a list provided by Google, or using your location to determine if you're in a jurisdiction that has banned certain xxx sites.

Love the team, but the world isn't fair. They are the example I keep coming back to whenever I hear people say "Mozilla should focus on the browser!" (as if they don't). Opera is your perfect natural experiment in demonstrating that success is driven much more by distribution monopolies. If focusing on the browser and delivering best in class performance and focusing on core features your users most wanted were the things that delivered market share we would all be using Opera right now and they never would have had to sell.

[stavros]

Unfortunately, Google very successfully suffocated innovation on the web by throwing billions at it.

[glenstein]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

[dismalaf]

> Which means among other things that they didn't have the capacity to sustain manifest v2 while Google pushed the browser into v3.

No but they did build an ad-blocker right into the browser so the main reason people were against the change doesn't really matter any more.

[rplnt]

Unfortunate that they can't fix tab switching they broke 2~3 years ago. It's fully broken, on every platform, one of the main interactions with the browser. Doubt there's actually "a team".

[eitau_1]

Then Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition

https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser

[freehorse]

Looks interesting. Is there a way to use it without compiling it myself? It seems to be somewhat maintained in github but the compiled binaries in github releases or sourceforge have not been updated since 2022.

[smusamashah]

Opera was so fully packed with features. I started from Opera 2 or 3 from what I recall and stayed until they became Chrome. No other browser came close in features while being fast.

They had lots of cool featues built in:

IRC Client

Email Client

RSS Reader

Note taking (I used it a lot)

Gestures (those were awesome, I fondly remember holding left then right click and the other way around to move back and forward, but these proved to be a sign of Operas decline, some bugs with them were never fixed while we kept getting newe releases, (remember the potato ad?))

Sharing local files as a website right from your browser

They invented tabs

They might have had torrent support too, don't remember clearly.

It was fast even with all this.

Vivaldi's UI is built in JS, it feels slow, all my clicks are slow. I never got myself to using it more than a few minutes.

[rob74]

Ok, I guess that explains the floppy shown in the 1995 "episode". Because floppies were already on their way out by 1995 - you still used them to copy data from one PC to another, but most software came on CD-ROM.