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 wholeheartedly agree. Presto was very lightweight and, to my knowledge, exceptionally standards compliant as well.
I think the last version of the Presto engine did have a source code leak, but naturally it's not a great idea to work on it unless you want to catch a lawsuit.
Yeah, if the Opera corporation gave a blessing to use the leaked code then that would be great; I'm not going to look at it until I know for sure I'm not going to be sued.
It's too bad, I hate that we basically only have two browsing engines that people take seriously: Blink/Chromium and Safari for iOS. Firefox is there but it lags pretty far behind those two. Having a little more competition in this space could be good.
I'm aware, but that's not usable yet in any real sense. I'm glad we're getting another engine and it would be cool if it becomes competitive with the other. I'm just saying that Presto was already competitive with the others before they changed to Chromium, and I wish that they had open sourced it if they weren't going to use it anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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].
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Rather than a rewind to the past, this is ironically exactly the web I've come to loathe, where you have to waste unpredictable amounts of time to jump through hoops of interactive nonsense to get a tiny bit of information from some overdesigned interactive pages. Content that could have been a 5 minutes youtube clip or a couple of links to archive.org.
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
I remenber opera from being the only good browser on phones and they always had features that others browser didn't have.
I just remenbered, they had some to load pages faster.
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.
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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 think the last version of the Presto engine did have a source code leak, but naturally it's not a great idea to work on it unless you want to catch a lawsuit.
It's too bad, I hate that we basically only have two browsing engines that people take seriously: Blink/Chromium and Safari for iOS. Firefox is there but it lags pretty far behind those two. Having a little more competition in this space could be good.
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.
[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...
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.
any real proof for the Chinese spyware statement? is it really bad?
is it better than Google spyware?
Ages ahead of other browsers.
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).
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.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079
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 :)
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://press.opera.com/2005/04/21/the-one-million-download-...
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.
https://vivaldi.com/
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 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
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?