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

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.

freehorse7• 4 months ago

In general https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz takes you to year xywz (if exists) but 1999 for some reason takes you to an overview of all years.

edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999

PurpleRamen2• 4 months ago

I think that overview appears on every year after x visited artifacts. For me, it appeared in 2002.

netsharc• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

brabel• 4 months 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?

alex_smart4• 4 months 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.

anal_reactor• 4 months 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.

irusensei2• 4 months 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.

thunderbong• 4 months ago

Vivaldi is it's rightful heir

https://vivaldi.com/

eitau_1• 4 months ago

Then Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition

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

glenstein2• 4 months 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.

smusamashah3• 4 months ago

Opera was so fully packed with features. I started from Opera 2 or 3 from what I recall and stayed until they became Chrome. No other browser came close in features while being fast.

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.

freehorse7• 4 months 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).

mrweasel• 4 months 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.

stavros4• 4 months ago

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

rob74• 4 months 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.

Flavius• 4 months ago

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

self_awareness2• 4 months ago

Erm, how to "use" it?

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

teekert• 4 months ago

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

self_awareness2• 4 months ago

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

dag11• 4 months 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!

elAhmo• 4 months ago

Try holding spacebar or tapping it to continue.

wigster• 4 months ago

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

rafaelgoncalves• 4 months 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.

gempir• 4 months ago

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

ivankra• 4 months 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.

al_borland• 4 months 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.

Terr_• 4 months 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.

xtracto• 4 months ago

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

AlienRobot2• 4 months ago

Opera is called Vivaldi now.

spikewall• 4 months ago

Which is a chrome reskin too.

rplnt5• 4 months ago

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

dismalaf3• 4 months ago

Vivaldi is the new Opera (literally same founder), but Opera still exists as Chinese spyware.

matsemann2• 4 months 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.

bergheim• 4 months 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.

vikingerik• 4 months 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.

olejorgenb• 4 months ago

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

rplnt5• 4 months ago

It wasn't about keeping up. It was 100% about Google putting billions in advertising and abusing their dominance. Besides legit stuff like paying millions or more likely billions for billboards, spots in tv/radio/etc... there were monopoly "ads" on google.com, gmail,com, youtube.com homepages. And of course the classic of blocking features based on user agent alone, lying to people they need to use Chrome to access a product or a feature. They just needed to manipulate the masses and now almost everyone uses browser from an advertising company and they can keep pulling the rug.

kome• 4 months 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.

UberFly2• 4 months ago

It's based on Chromium, not Chrome.

drooopy• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

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

Ages ahead of other browsers.

tsumnia• 4 months ago

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

dev1ycan• 4 months 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

mememememememo• 4 months ago

Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.

davej• 4 months 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.

smusamashah3• 4 months ago

They use to send you a custom binary with your name on it in the title bar or something.

emulio• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

criticalfault2• 4 months ago

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.

dsrtslnd23• 4 months ago

turn your volume down before opening...

Siecje• 4 months ago

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

MagicMoonlight• 4 months ago

Nobody alive remembers the correct sound

InMice• 4 months ago

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

superkuh• 4 months ago

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

unsupp0rted• 4 months 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.

botonomous• 4 months ago

Anything but Netscape!

tombert3• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

tombert3• 4 months 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.

jlarocco• 4 months 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.

alpineman• 4 months ago

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

spikej2• 4 months 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

mananaysiempre4• 4 months 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.

spikej2• 4 months ago

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

nice_byte• 4 months ago

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

f-serif• 4 months 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• 4 months 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!

NoSalt• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

jFriedensreich• 4 months ago

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

Forgeties79• 4 months ago

The 2000 limewire bit was good lol

elcapitan• 4 months ago

Rather than a rewind to the past, this is ironically exactly the web I've come to loathe, where you have to waste unpredictable amounts of time to jump through hoops of interactive nonsense to get a tiny bit of information from some overdesigned interactive pages. Content that could have been a 5 minutes youtube clip or a couple of links to archive.org.

kelvinjps102• 4 months ago

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.

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

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