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.
It hurts me that their marketing worked. Gamers are Choosing Opera GX because its "non bs". There's a ton of fingerprinting data being sent to chinese servers. No one is immune to propaganda
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, after hitting and/or holding spacebar, something happens, or you change to a new year. Sometimes it's just pictures with some text of whatever was important at that year, sometimes it's animations, sometimes stuff you can interact(?) with. In 1995, there is an old Desktop-PC with Windows 95 booting and starting a modem-connection, and you can type on the keyboard. Pretty pointless, but kinda neat.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://vivaldi.com/
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.
https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser
edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
This is more like it: https://oldweb.today/ - browse old web (from archive.org) with old browsers (in Wasm)
It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.
Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?