[al_borland]

I have fond memories of Opera. When I migrated off of it to Phoenix, I had a really hard time adjusting to not having mouse gestures. I didn’t know how anyone lived without them.

By the time extensions came around to mimic Opera’s mouse gestures on other browsers, I could never get used to actually using them again.

I was sad to see Opera become just another incarnation of Chrome.

[matsemann]

Opera had this feature where it knew what the next page for stuff was, and other things. Not sure if it was a rel link or just some clever heuristics. But browsing BB forums with mouse gestures one felt like a God in how one could move around. Next post, next page, next topic without clicking anything.

[vikingerik]

That was heuristics. It looked for the text "more" or "next" or "->" within an anchor tag. Sometimes it would be fooled if a forum thread or other link had a title containing one of those words.

[mananaysiempre]

Heurisrics augmenting a (half-)standard[1,2,3] that, in a more idealistic time, some people cared enough to follow: <link rel="prev"> et al.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

[2] https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link...

[3] https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...

[bergheim]

If you use an extension like vimium, you get this by using the standard [[ and ]] vim motions for this.

Also, using the keyboard for navigation, while it sounds like a chore, is really quite excellent, and I prefer it to the mouse, as crazy as that might sound.

[matsemann]

I don't disagree, but I haven't used a traditional mouse in years. I have a rollermouse, so it's just a bar just below the space bar, which I can reach with my thumbs without moving my hands from home row!

[olejorgenb]

Opera was by far the best browser for a while for sure. Sad they couldn't keep up :/

[rplnt]

It wasn't about keeping up. It was 100% about Google putting billions in advertising and abusing their dominance. Besides legit stuff like paying millions or more likely billions for billboards, spots in tv/radio/etc... there were monopoly "ads" on google.com, gmail,com, youtube.com homepages. And of course the classic of blocking features based on user agent alone, lying to people they need to use Chrome to access a product or a feature. They just needed to manipulate the masses and now almost everyone uses browser from an advertising company and they can keep pulling the rug.

[xtracto]

I used Opera so much around 2000. Small things like the X-Z shortcuts and the sheer speed blew me away.

[kome]

Opera 12 was so good, so fast, on ANY hardware, so innovative, so quirky. When Opera became Chrome-based, I moved to Firefox. I just don’t want Google spyware on my computer.

[UberFly]

It's based on Chromium, not Chrome.

[drooopy]

Those gestures have been permanently tattooed into my brain and muscle memory. So much so that I’ve set Gesturefy on Firefox to mimic the same ones from the old Opera browser.

[AlienRobot]

Opera is called Vivaldi now.

[spikewall]

Which is a chrome reskin too.

[Tomis02]

Reskin isn't quite right. Vivaldi offers a ton of amazing features that Chrome would never dream of having. For example, tab tiling is excellent and criminally underused.

[dismalaf]

Eh it's got a lot going on... UI has way more features, it's got a built-in ad-blocker, email client, etc...

[rplnt]

It's a cool idea, but major bugs are being introduced and then ignored. Virtually unusable and I would not recommend it.

[Tomis02]

I literally can't function on the web without Vivaldi, for me it's the only usable desktop browser. What problems have you encountered?

[rplnt]

Switching tabs doesn't work like you would expect in Opera for example. The order of tabs gets shuffled randomly. It's completely broken. I downgraded to a version where it had worked, stuck with that for a while. When I complained about it people usually say "just use it like chrome where you can't switch tabs properly anyway lol". It was reported with the precise version that broke it. Vivaldi team asked maybe twice on social media, but then it was just tumbleweeds. It's 100% reproducible with a clean install, on both windows and osx. I gave up and preach for people to just stay away from that browser.

[AlienRobot]

Is this what you're talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1XoTNV1qFY

[rplnt]

Thanks Chrome for ruining web in yet another way. LRU is THE default for virtually every windowed and tabbed application, then Chrome comes and fucks it up. Now we have a video talking about a "fix", and likely not a single user in Vivaldi even using the default (because they would notice it's broken). Kinda hilarious.

[UberFly]

Not my experience with Vivaldi even remotely.

[dismalaf]

Vivaldi is the new Opera (literally same founder), but Opera still exists as Chinese spyware.

[criticalfault]

I didn't really follow opera since Chinese buyout and migration to blink.

any real proof for the Chinese spyware statement? is it really bad?

is it better than Google spyware?

[Bad_CRC]

Mouse gestures, download manager, pop-up blocker, TABS in windows 98.

Ages ahead of other browsers.

[Terr_]

Yeah, I had the same experience with mouse-gestures. I think a lot of the pressure was removed by the rise in consumer mice with "back" thumb-buttons.

[tsumnia]

I don't have much to contribute other than HI AL from the MORNING CREW!