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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)

#41

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.

I used Opera so much around 2000. Small things like the X-Z shortcuts and the sheer speed blew me away.

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

#43
post #24

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).

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.

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

#44

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 is called Vivaldi now.

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

#45
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 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.

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

#47
post #5

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-...

It hurts me that their marketing worked. Gamers are Choosing Opera GX because its "non bs". There's a ton of fingerprinting data being sent to chinese servers. No one is immune to propaganda

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.

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

#48
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#49

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 is called Vivaldi now.

Which is a chrome reskin too.

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

#50
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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?
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