I am sure that there are reasons that they cannot easily do this, but I really wish that they'd open source their Presto browser engine now that they've moved to Chromium anyway. I always liked the way that classic Opera made web pages look. Maybe it's just rose tinted glasses but it felt like Opera had a nice smoothness to it, almost like a PDF or something.
If they FOSS'd their old engine, conceivably someone could modernize it and we'd at least have one more competitor in the browser space, though typing this out I'm realizing that maybe that's why they haven't opened it up in the first place.
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.
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.
Opera was my secret weapon back in the day: if it worked in Opera, it would be guaranteed to work in Chrome, IE and Firefox. It significantly reduced the browser quirks stuff I'd have to dig into.
Dragonfly was top notch also: one of the best bits was ability to outline all the elements on the page. There were other features too that weren't (still aren't) in the other browser dev tools
Every year snapshot feels like a 3-sentence Wikipedia article and a picture and wav file. Just sparse and as another commenter put it "soulless". Basically Encarta without the heart, and less info.
I remember using Opera on my Windows 95, 60mhz Pentium with 8mb RAM. I remember the persistent banner ad that was part of the browser UI. I had no problem putting up with the ad because it performed incredibly well compared to IE and Netscape on my hardware. If I remember correctly they were the first browser to support game changing web features like alpha transparency in PNG images.
The image format evolution is equally wild. 1996 was JPEG and GIF only. Now we have WebP, AVIF, and Chrome 145 just shipped JPEG XL decoder. Each format iteration roughly halving the file size at the same quality. Would be curious to see Opera's take on JPEG XL support.
The last time I liked Opera was before they switched to Chromium, I remember how awesome old Opera + Windows 7 aero was, the entire browser was nearly transparent
Sorry, but what this is supposed to be. It's just a spinning WebGL model?
I wish they would rewind back to using Presto and being an independent Norwegian company, but I'm sure everybody who made it a great browser back then is long gone.
Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
(web-rewind.com)173 points by thushanfernando 11 hours ago | 108 comments
Comments
If they FOSS'd their old engine, conceivably someone could modernize it and we'd at least have one more competitor in the browser space, though typing this out I'm realizing that maybe that's why they haven't opened it up in the first place.
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.
This is impressive design, presentation and experience.
Thank you for the experience.
Dragonfly was top notch also: one of the best bits was ability to outline all the elements on the page. There were other features too that weren't (still aren't) in the other browser dev tools
edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
A better way to celebrate 30 years of their browser would be to just open source it. Code's been leaked and irrelevant today anyway but still.
I wish they would rewind back to using Presto and being an independent Norwegian company, but I'm sure everybody who made it a great browser back then is long gone.
Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?