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Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

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Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#121

Post by smusamashah »

thunderbong wrote: post #11
irusensei wrote: post #10

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.

Vivaldi is it's rightful heir https://vivaldi.com/

Opera was so fully packed with features. I started from Opera 2 or 3 from what I recall and stayed until they became Chrome. No other browser came close in features while being fast.

They had lots of cool featues built in:

IRC Client

Email Client

RSS Reader

Note taking (I used it a lot)

Gestures (those were awesome, I fondly remember holding left then right click and the other way around to move back and forward, but these proved to be a sign of Operas decline, some bugs with them were never fixed while we kept getting newe releases, (remember the potato ad?))

Sharing local files as a website right from your browser

They invented tabs

They might have had torrent support too, don't remember clearly.

It was fast even with all this.

Vivaldi's UI is built in JS, it feels slow, all my clicks are slow. I never got myself to using it more than a few minutes.

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#122

Post by smusamashah »

davej wrote: post #34

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.

They use to send you a custom binary with your name on it in the title bar or something.

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#123

Post by smusamashah »

lucideer wrote: post #43
stavros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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)…

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 :)

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#124

Post by rplnt »

AlienRobot wrote: post #116
rplnt wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 twic…

Is this what you're talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1XoTNV1qFY

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.

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#125

Post by rplnt »

olejorgenb wrote: post #52
al_borland wrote: post #31

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 was by far the best browser for a while for sure. Sad they couldn't keep up :/

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.

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#126

Post by elcapitan »

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.

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#127

Post by alex_smart »

throw10920 wrote: post #53
alex_smart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overestimate how much the rest of the world cares about data being sent to “chinese servers”, when all this while our data was being sent to “American servers” anyways.

Whataboutism (doesn't matter if another entity does it - if it's wrong, then pointing out another entity doing it is fallacious), redirection, and false dichotomy (you can care about the US and China doing it - for all you know the parent poster was in the EU and does care about both). Nobody mentioned the US upstream of your comment until you did. This is obvious propaganda - one of the classic maneuvers in the PRC…

Getting snooped on by the US government being so normalized is obviously not propaganda though? Right?

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#128

Post by alex_smart »

throw10920 wrote: post #117
lmm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody mentioned the US upstream of your comment until you did. No, because programs sending telemetry to the US is so routine that and pervasive that we don't even remark on it. > This is obvious propaganda Now who's committing a whole catalogue of fallacies?

> No, because programs sending telemetry to the US is so routine that and pervasive that we don't even remark on it. That's not a valid reason. Nice try, though. > Now who's committing a whole catalogue of fallacies? Calling a fallacious and manipulative comment that literally follows a country's propaganda playbook "propaganda" isn't a fallacy - it's just true. It's extremely telling that you didn't comment on any o…

The original comment was neither false dichotomy nor whataboutism. It was a simple point that the rest of the world is already used to their data being snooped by the US government. So apart from US exceptionalism, there is no particular reason they would be especially alarmed by the prospect of their data being sent to "Chinese servers".

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#129

Post by alex_smart »

bluGill wrote: post #69
kouteiheika wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OP's saying is fundamentally true though? Unfortunately most people don't really care about privacy, regardless of whether it's going to an American company or a Chinese one.

Not exactly. Most US companies have a presence in Europe and so give at least an attempt to obey European laws. While the laws are different and not as strong, the US has privacy laws in place that will protect you. China might have some of those same laws - but they don't apply to the government at all (the US makes some attempt to have laws apply to the government) That doesn't mean you should be happy with data in…

> US has privacy laws in place that will protect you

They don't protect us at all. Thanks to Snowden, we all know that the US government has extremely sophisticated and wide-ranging ability to get access to any data we share with American companies.

> but China is worse

And why so?

Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

#130

Post by criticalfault »

dismalaf wrote: post #118
AlienRobot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera is called Vivaldi now.

Vivaldi is the new Opera (literally same founder), but Opera still exists as Chinese spyware.

I didn't really follow opera since Chinese buyout and migration to blink.

any real proof for the Chinese spyware statement? is it really bad?

is it better than Google spyware?

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