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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Feels as soulless as the Opera that's been bought by a Chinese company to sell predatory lending: <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-lending-in-nigeria-india-kenya" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>I was sad to see Opera become just another incarnation of Chrome.
Mouse gestures, download manager, pop-up blocker, TABS in windows 98.<p>Ages ahead of other browsers.
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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Attributes/rel" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link_type_extensions" rel="nofollow">https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xml" rel="nofollow">https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...</a>
If you use an extension like vimium, you get this by using the standard [[ and ]] vim motions for this.<p>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!
I used Opera so much around 2000. Small things like the X-Z shortcuts and the sheer speed blew me away.
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.
Opera was by far the best browser for a while for sure. Sad they couldn't keep up :/
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.
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.
Opera is called Vivaldi now.
It's a cool idea, but major bugs are being introduced and then ignored. Virtually unusable and I would not recommend it.
Which is a chrome reskin too.
Wow, this is pure gold. I skipped first time thinking it was just random page viewers from past.<p>This is impressive design, presentation and experience.<p>Thank you for the experience.
Yeah I'm really not sure why everyone is shitting on it so hard, I mean it is a cool interactive experience. I understand that present-day Opera has some serious problems, sold to a Chinese company, people feel like it's a separate thing from old Opera, that it's lost its soul, all very fair. But we should be able to evaluate this experience as a separate thing, and it's pretty slick!
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.<p>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).
Vivaldi feels like Opera did (makes sense, since it's the same CTO).
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.<p>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).<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Vivaldi is it's rightful heir<p><a href="https://vivaldi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Unfortunately, Google very successfully suffocated innovation on the web by throwing billions at it.
Unfortunate that they can't fix tab switching they broke 2~3 years ago. It's fully broken, on every platform, one of the main interactions with the browser. Doubt there's actually "a team".
Then Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition<p><a href="https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser</a>
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.
How do you proceed? I've tried clicking and interacting with everything I can find but I just see the spinning cassette model. Looks cool though!
Check your extensions, might be blocking the cookie banner. For me uBlock blocked the cookie banner. Afterwards it worked just fine.
nor me. tried space bar. is it a firefox problem?
Try holding spacebar or tapping it to continue.
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.<p>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 hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.
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.
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.
In general <a href="https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz" rel="nofollow">https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz</a> takes you to year xywz (if exists) but 1999 for some reason takes you to an overview of all years.<p>edit: <a href="https://www.web-rewind.com/1999" rel="nofollow">https://www.web-rewind.com/1999</a> would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
Opera is not 30. Opera is dead. Opera died and never went beyond version 12.
MySpace page doesn't have a picture of Tom. Not historically accurate.
I'm quickly reminded how absurdly loud the lowest volume setting is on macs
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.
Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.
is there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?
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.
Check your ad blockers. I needed to switch off the one blocking the gdpr consent banner
You have to keep the spacebar pressed
That's all I see too: an ugly rendered cassette thing I can spin.<p>It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.
Anything but Netscape!
I got 1995 but the dial up sound is not correct.
sucks that opera is no longer with us.
used to be my go-to browser before Firefox and eventually chrome...
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
turn your volume down before opening...
Eh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: <a href="https://oldweb.today/" rel="nofollow">https://oldweb.today/</a> - browse old web (from archive.org) with old browsers (in Wasm)<p>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.
Sorry, but what this is supposed to be. It's just a spinning WebGL model?<p>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.
Erm, how to "use" it?<p>Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?
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That sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.