Anything but Netscape!
Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
81–90 of 138 posts
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#82I 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.
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#83Sorry, 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.
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#84Earlier 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…
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Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#85Earlier 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…
> [T]he US has privacy laws in place that will protect you [...] (the US makes some attempt to have laws apply to the government)
I believe the US stance is that nobody outside the US is entitled to court relief against the US government regarding their privacy, and nobody outside the US and EU is entitled to any relief at all, even from the executive (the “Data Protection Review Court” non-court, formerly the “Privacy Shield Ombudsperson”). In the EU, there are some protections in some countries but for example the GDPR specifically does not apply to governments.
I mean, the Chinese government is worse on this, but the US is nevertheless really bad and a number of EU countries also suck to a remarkable extent. Until the US press starts dropping the “of Americans” from their latest surprised-Pikachu headlines on “mass government surveillance of Americans”, I’m unconvinced the situation will improve.
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#86Earlier 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.
I think OP's point is that sending your browsing data to a server, be it American or Chinese, isn't "no bs". I see this recurrent feeling on HN that because the US does bad things we shouldn't care about other countries doing the same. I think we should care about all of them!
The feeling is that "no one" cares about it being sent to American servers, why should they suddenly care about it going to Chinese servers just because they're Chinese.
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#87MySpace page doesn't have a picture of Tom. Not historically accurate.
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: et al.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
[2] https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values#HTML5_link...
[3] https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#89Opera 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
Re: Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Modern pages would also likely be much more touchy about the imperfections of such a mechanism. A lot of “old browsers good” in general seems to be about modern webdev, not modern browsers[1].
[1] https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079