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.
I think the last version of the Presto engine did have a source code leak, but naturally it's not a great idea to work on it unless you want to catch a lawsuit.
It's too bad, I hate that we basically only have two browsing engines that people take seriously: Blink/Chromium and Safari for iOS. Firefox is there but it lags pretty far behind those two. Having a little more competition in this space could be good.
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.
Also, using the keyboard for navigation, while it sounds like a chore, is really quite excellent, and I prefer it to the mouse, as crazy as that might sound.
Ages ahead of other browsers.
And the beloved opera mini for the mobile was amazing. Back then I would even use it in a vm on my computer sometimes because I had shitty internet (and to use a proxy).
Someone, I don't know who, but I assume the new Opera, is still keeping the Opera Mini proxy servers running. It show up in our logs frequently enough that we noticed and have special whitelisting for them to byparse some rate limiting.
Which means among other things that they didn't have the capacity to sustain manifest v2 while Google pushed the browser into v3. And some version of that will be true when Google starts pushing, say, mandatory sign in, or AI powered DRM enforcement, or hard coded browser level warnings to comply with the law if you visit Anna's Archive, or limit your search engines to "safe" search providers from a list provided by Google, or using your location to determine if you're in a jurisdiction that has banned certain xxx sites.
Love the team, but the world isn't fair. They are the example I keep coming back to whenever I hear people say "Mozilla should focus on the browser!" (as if they don't). Opera is your perfect natural experiment in demonstrating that success is driven much more by distribution monopolies. If focusing on the browser and delivering best in class performance and focusing on core features your users most wanted were the things that delivered market share we would all be using Opera right now and they never would have had to sell.
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.
In Firefox you cannot choose the folder to save files to, which is something I absolutely need because I mostly download porn but once in a while I have non-porn and these two must be in different folders.
Chrome doesn't support text reflow on zoom. I don't even have a comment because this makes it literally impossible to use desktop view which usually provides better experience.
I'm not even a power user. These features are IMO extremely basic things. Opera's built-in VPN is nice for browsing Twitter but that's an extra I could live without.
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.
edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
This is impressive design, presentation and experience.
Thank you for the experience.
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
It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.
If you have a Mazda from the mid 2010s, the infotainment system runs in JavaScript on an Opera browser customized for the car system.
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 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.
Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?
