Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30) • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by criticalfault » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

orangewindies wrote: post #60

emulio wrote: post #40

I hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.

You can't browse the modern web with Presto. I used to work at Opera and we were sad to switch to Chromium/Blink but a company the size of Opera just didn't have the resources to keep up with Google.

we were also sad. still the browser I ever used.

but, maybe the company didn't adjust well? maybe it was a bad time to do this, but ladybird is not a big company and they seem to be progressing well.

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

#132

Post by self_awareness » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 11:39 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #42

self_awareness wrote: post #17

Erm, how to "use" it? Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?

Doesn't work well on mobile, it's all spacebar based (hold and tap).

I'm on desktop on vivaldi, i'm holding spacebar and nothing happens

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

#133

Post by spikej » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #91

spikej wrote: post #89

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

Huh? If it worked in Opera, it absolutely wasn’t guaranteed to work in IE < 9 (conservatively; honestly probably every pre-Edge IE). At one point Opera had a more faithful CSS (2) implementation than even Firefox. And nothing guaranteed it worked in IE except checking in IE.

I had less "custom" work to do with IE 6/7 if I got it working well in Opera first was my experience...

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

#134

Post by irusensei » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 3:14 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #24

freehorse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Vivaldi feels like Opera did (makes sense, since it's the same CTO).

Is it the same guy who pulled the stunt saying he was going to swim from Norway to the US?

https://press.opera.com/2005/04/21/the-one-million-download-...

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

#135

Post by kelvinjps10 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:59 AM UTC

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.

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

#136

Post by kelvinjps10 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

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)…

it was also the only browser that ran well in the era of 3g mobile phones

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

#137

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:30 AM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #128

throw10920 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by throw10920 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #129

bluGill wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> They don't protect us at all.

Factually incorrect. US privacy laws pose a huge burden to US intelligence. The 4th amendment still applies. Warrants still exist.

> 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.

Citation needed.

> And why so?

In the PRC, there are no privacy laws to protect you from the government. "Private" companies are an extension of the government and all of the larger ones are required to have a CCP party member on board to ensure that they are "aligned" with what the party wants. The party happily disappears dissidents at will, threatens dissidents in other countries, requires that all domestic companies provide encryption keys (or otherwise made encrypted data accessible) on demand with zero warrants or other legal protections, maintains the largest network of surveillance cameras in the world (several times more than the total number of those in the United States), and many more things.

This is extremely common knowledge, easily searchable online, and is factually and categorically different than anything the US, or any other Western country, does. Only the terminally ignorant or the propagandists believe that the PRC's surveillance is remotely similar to that of any western country - the available evidence comprehensively disproves that conspiracy theory.