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

175 pointsposted 18 hours ago
by thushanfernando
(web-rewind.com)

112 Comments

tombert

10 hours ago

I 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.

TheAmazingRace

8 hours ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Presto was very lightweight and, to my knowledge, exceptionally standards compliant as well.

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.

tombert

8 hours ago

Yeah, if the Opera corporation gave a blessing to use the leaked code then that would be great; I'm not going to look at it until I know for sure I'm not going to be sued.

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.

tosti

7 hours ago

There's LadyBird, https://ladybird.org/

tombert

7 hours ago

I'm aware, but that's not usable yet in any real sense. I'm glad we're getting another engine and it would be cool if it becomes competitive with the other. I'm just saying that Presto was already competitive with the others before they changed to Chromium, and I wish that they had open sourced it if they weren't going to use it anyway.

al_borland

15 hours ago

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.

matsemann

13 hours ago

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.

vikingerik

11 hours ago

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.

bergheim

12 hours ago

If you use an extension like vimium, you get this by using the standard [[ and ]] vim motions for this.

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.

matsemann

11 hours ago

I don't disagree, but I haven't used a traditional mouse in years. I have a rollermouse, so it's just a bar just below the space bar, which I can reach with my thumbs without moving my hands from home row!

xtracto

13 hours ago

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

olejorgenb

13 hours ago

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

drooopy

11 hours ago

Those gestures have been permanently tattooed into my brain and muscle memory. So much so that I’ve set Gesturefy on Firefox to mimic the same ones from the old Opera browser.

Bad_CRC

8 hours ago

Mouse gestures, download manager, pop-up blocker, TABS in windows 98.

Ages ahead of other browsers.

tsumnia

7 hours ago

I don't have much to contribute other than HI AL from the MORNING CREW!

Terr_

14 hours ago

Yeah, I had the same experience with mouse-gestures. I think a lot of the pressure was removed by the rise in consumer mice with "back" thumb-buttons.

kome

12 hours ago

Opera 12 was so good, so fast, on ANY hardware, so innovative, so quirky. When Opera became Chrome-based, I moved to Firefox. I just don’t want Google spyware on my computer.

UberFly

6 hours ago

It's based on Chromium, not Chrome.

AlienRobot

13 hours ago

Opera is called Vivaldi now.

spikewall

13 hours ago

Which is a chrome reskin too.

Tomis02

9 hours ago

Reskin isn't quite right. Vivaldi offers a ton of amazing features that Chrome would never dream of having. For example, tab tiling is excellent and criminally underused.

rplnt

11 hours ago

It's a cool idea, but major bugs are being introduced and then ignored. Virtually unusable and I would not recommend it.

UberFly

6 hours ago

Not my experience with Vivaldi even remotely.

Tomis02

9 hours ago

I literally can't function on the web without Vivaldi, for me it's the only usable desktop browser. What problems have you encountered?

rplnt

5 hours ago

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 twice on social media, but then it was just tumbleweeds. It's 100% reproducible with a clean install, on both windows and osx. I gave up and preach for people to just stay away from that browser.

irusensei

16 hours ago

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.

freehorse

16 hours ago

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 computer sometimes because I had shitty internet (and to use a proxy).

stavros

15 hours ago

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

lucideer

13 hours ago

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.

stavros

13 hours ago

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.

lucideer

13 hours ago

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.

thisislife2

11 hours ago

True! Came to post the same thing - one of my favourite feature of Opera Presto engine was how all the websites in your history was also "indexed" locally, so that you could do a simple keyword search on "History" to find the web page you wanted to re-visit. It was fast and accurate and made it a breeze to find any site in that you had browsed and was still cached, and it was an incredibly useful feature.

stavros

13 hours ago

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?

freehorse

15 hours ago

I bet it is a great browser, but I did not get the same feel as the old opera at the time when I tried, too many features missing back then.

Moreover, not using chromium-based browsers is a kind of matter of principle for me. Chromium has been a monopoly for very long, which gives google too much power on how people may experience the web. This was made especially apparent with the manifest 2 -> 3 transition, but it should have been seen as a concern imo since a good while back.

mrweasel

15 hours ago

When Opera became just another Chromium skin I switch to Firefox. The point for me was Presto, that Opera was really well put together in terms of UI was just a bonus. The developer tools in Opera was better than what shipped in Chrome and Firefox, so switching definitely felt like a downgrade.

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.

thunderbong

16 hours ago

Vivaldi is it's rightful heir

https://vivaldi.com/

glenstein

15 hours ago

I would follow that Vivaldi team to the ends of the Earth, as nobody ever made a better browser in my opinion then they did with those last versions of Opera before they had to sell (versions 11 or 12 I want to say). But for one thing, which is that Vivaldi is unfortunately also a Chromium based browser.

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.

stavros

15 hours ago

Unfortunately, Google very successfully suffocated innovation on the web by throwing billions at it.

glenstein

15 hours ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

rplnt

11 hours ago

Unfortunate that they can't fix tab switching they broke 2~3 years ago. It's fully broken, on every platform, one of the main interactions with the browser. Doubt there's actually "a team".

eitau_1

16 hours ago

Then Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition

https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser

freehorse

16 hours ago

Looks interesting. Is there a way to use it without compiling it myself? It seems to be somewhat maintained in github but the compiled binaries in github releases or sourceforge have not been updated since 2022.

rob74

11 hours ago

Ok, I guess that explains the floppy shown in the 1995 "episode". Because floppies were already on their way out by 1995 - you still used them to copy data from one PC to another, but most software came on CD-ROM.

netsharc

16 hours ago

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-...

ramon156

15 hours ago

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

alex_smart

13 hours ago

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.

afavour

11 hours ago

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!

soperj

10 hours ago

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.

LtWorf

8 hours ago

Not only that, USA is far more likely to send someone to kill you than china is. So between the 2 I'll take china (I'd prefer my data to not be sent to any foreign power).

tosti

7 hours ago

Well perhaps today is a good day to die.

throw10920

13 hours ago

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 influence playbook is, when called out on anything, to try to implement whataboutism with the United States (even if it's not relevant, like here, which is equally sad and funny).

lmm

7 hours ago

> 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?

kouteiheika

12 hours ago

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.

bluGill

11 hours ago

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 America, but China is worse.

gsnedders

11 hours ago

Last I knew Opera still had a decent amount of engineering staff in Poland, and still had some in Sweden, both in the EU, plus still has some amount of staff in Norway, not in the EU but definitely in Europe.

That’s not to say their privacy story is fantastic, but they very much still have European operations.

mananaysiempre

10 hours ago

> [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.

anal_reactor

8 hours ago

I use Opera Mobile on my phone because it's literally the only mobile browser which UX isn't completely botched.

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.

metabagel

8 hours ago

> 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.

First world problems.

brabel

14 hours ago

You seem to be spreading propaganda yourself by accusing Opera of something I have not seen evidence of. Are you saying this just because the company is Chinese?

flexagoon

14 hours ago

See for example

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop...

(In German, but Kagi translate or Google translate work fine here)

lxgr

13 hours ago

Thanks, that's pretty damning, in particular sending every visited domain to the browser vendor under the guise of "safe browsing". Really sad to see a former world-class browser stooping so low.

And I really couldn't care less if the browser vendor or their servers are in the US, China, or even any supposed "data privacy haven". It's simply none of their business which websites I visit.

For the same reason I'm not using Chrome, which intentionally kneecaps browser history sync when sync encryption is enabled, effectively forcing users to choose between non-synced history and privacy, when e.g. Firefox manages to do encrypted sync just fine.

throw10920

13 hours ago

> For the same reason I'm not using Chrome, which intentionally kneecaps browser history sync when sync encryption is enabled, effectively forcing users to choose between non-synced history and privacy, when e.g. Firefox manages to do encrypted sync just fine.

This is novel to me - what's the kneecap specifically? How do you only kinda sync browser history??

lxgr

12 hours ago

Chrome only syncs "typed URL" (i.e. everything you enter in the address bar/"omnibox") website visits when your profile is encrypted, as far as I remember. "True" history sync is somehow tied to Google's generic "activity sync", which only exists unencrypted.

For me, this completely defeats the point of having history sync in the first place, so this particular change was what made me switch browsers several years ago.

dag11

16 hours ago

How do you proceed? I've tried clicking and interacting with everything I can find but I just see the spinning cassette model. Looks cool though!

gempir

11 hours ago

Check your extensions, might be blocking the cookie banner. For me uBlock blocked the cookie banner. Afterwards it worked just fine.

wigster

13 hours ago

nor me. tried space bar. is it a firefox problem?

rafaelgoncalves

12 hours ago

or an ad blocker, here i had to disable to load the cookies consent window. On Firefox worked better for me here, Chrome had some lag.

elAhmo

14 hours ago

Try holding spacebar or tapping it to continue.

f-serif

8 hours ago

Wow, this is pure gold. I skipped first time thinking it was just random page viewers from past.

This is impressive design, presentation and experience.

Thank you for the experience.

amilios

8 hours ago

Yeah I'm really not sure why everyone is shitting on it so hard, I mean it is a cool interactive experience. I understand that present-day Opera has some serious problems, sold to a Chinese company, people feel like it's a separate thing from old Opera, that it's lost its soul, all very fair. But we should be able to evaluate this experience as a separate thing, and it's pretty slick!

emulio

14 hours ago

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

orangewindies

12 hours ago

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.

davej

14 hours ago

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.

unsupp0rted

11 hours ago

Every year snapshot feels like a 3-sentence Wikipedia article and a picture and wav file. Just sparse and as another commenter put it "soulless". Basically Encarta without the heart, and less info.

spikej

10 hours ago

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

mananaysiempre

9 hours ago

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.

superkuh

12 hours ago

Opera is not 30. Opera is dead. Opera died and never went beyond version 12.

Serhii-Set

11 hours ago

The image format evolution is equally wild. 1996 was JPEG and GIF only. Now we have WebP, AVIF, and Chrome 145 just shipped JPEG XL decoder. Each format iteration roughly halving the file size at the same quality. Would be curious to see Opera's take on JPEG XL support.

jFriedensreich

6 hours ago

Probably the first marketing website ever to feature pictures from rotten.com, i enjoyed it but this was not expected.

NoSalt

7 hours ago

I am completely astounded that Opera even caught on, as they were one of the very few companies that charged for their browser.

joezydeco

7 hours ago

Probably because their model let you customize it for the application.

If you have a Mazda from the mid 2010s, the infotainment system runs in JavaScript on an Opera browser customized for the car system.

InMice

12 hours ago

I'm quickly reminded how absurdly loud the lowest volume setting is on macs

alpineman

10 hours ago

MySpace page doesn't have a picture of Tom. Not historically accurate.

la_oveja

16 hours ago

is there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?

PurpleRamen

15 hours ago

Yes, after hitting and/or holding spacebar, something happens, or you change to a new year. Sometimes it's just pictures with some text of whatever was important at that year, sometimes it's animations, sometimes stuff you can interact(?) with. In 1995, there is an old Desktop-PC with Windows 95 booting and starting a modem-connection, and you can type on the keyboard. Pretty pointless, but kinda neat.

rpastuszak

16 hours ago

Check your ad blockers. I needed to switch off the one blocking the gdpr consent banner

freehorse

16 hours ago

You have to keep the spacebar pressed

cubefox

16 hours ago

So it doesn't work on phones apparently.

freehorse

16 hours ago

There is a "hold to rewind" button on the bottom in mine (ios).

cubefox

15 hours ago

Ah thanks, it was just my ad blocker who blocked it.

CalRobert

16 hours ago

True simulation of 1996 browsing

lproven

16 hours ago

That's all I see too: an ugly rendered cassette thing I can spin.

It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.

freehorse

16 hours ago

I use firefox and it works for me

lproven

12 hours ago

OK. Good to know. Thanks!

What are we supposed to do, and what is supposed to happen?

dev1ycan

14 hours ago

The last time I liked Opera was before they switched to Chromium, I remember how awesome old Opera + Windows 7 aero was, the entire browser was nearly transparent

Siecje

12 hours ago

I got 1995 but the dial up sound is not correct.

ivankra

15 hours ago

Eh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: https://oldweb.today/ - browse old web (from archive.org) with old browsers (in Wasm)

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.

dsrtslnd23

13 hours ago

turn your volume down before opening...

nice_byte

9 hours ago

sucks that opera is no longer with us. used to be my go-to browser before Firefox and eventually chrome...

jlarocco

10 hours ago

Sorry, 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.

self_awareness

16 hours ago

Erm, how to "use" it?

Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?

teekert

13 hours ago

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

Forgeties79

6 hours ago

The 2000 limewire bit was good lol

Flavius

16 hours ago

That sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.