[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?

[mananaysiempre]

Modern pages would also likely be much more touchy about the imperfections of such a mechanism. A lot of “old browsers good” in general seems to be about modern webdev, not modern browsers[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079

[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