- 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.
by al_borland
9 subcomments
- 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.
by irusensei
3 subcomments
- 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.
- Feels as soulless as the Opera that's been bought by a Chinese company to sell predatory lending: https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...
- 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!
by kelvinjps10
0 subcomment
- 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.
- I hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.
- Wow, this is pure gold. I skipped first time thinking it was just random page viewers from past.
This is impressive design, presentation and experience.
Thank you for the experience.
by freehorse
1 subcomments
- In general https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz takes you to year xywz (if exists) but 1999 for some reason takes you to an overview of all years.
edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
- 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.
- 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.
by unsupp0rted
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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
- Opera is not 30. Opera is dead. Opera died and never went beyond version 12.
by Serhii-Set
0 subcomment
- 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.
by mememememememo
0 subcomment
- Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.
- I'm quickly reminded how absurdly loud the lowest volume setting is on macs
- I am completely astounded that Opera even caught on, as they were one of the very few companies that charged for their browser.
by jFriedensreich
0 subcomment
- Probably the first marketing website ever to feature pictures from rotten.com, i enjoyed it but this was not expected.
- is there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?
- MySpace page doesn't have a picture of Tom. Not historically accurate.
- 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
- Eh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: https://oldweb.today/ - browse old web (from archive.org) with old browsers (in Wasm)
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 got 1995 but the dial up sound is not correct.
by dsrtslnd23
0 subcomment
- turn your volume down before opening...
by botonomous
0 subcomment
- Anything but Netscape!
- sucks that opera is no longer with us.
used to be my go-to browser before Firefox and eventually chrome...
by self_awareness
1 subcomments
- Erm, how to "use" it?
Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?
- 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.
by Forgeties79
0 subcomment
- The 2000 limewire bit was good lol
by dev_tools_lab
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
- That sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.
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