Just because they're "trying to innovate" doesn't mean the ideas will be any good, though. Yes, inertia and resistance to the new are a thing, that doesn't mean

Just because they're "trying to innovate" doesn't mean the ideas will be any good, though. Yes, inertia and resistance to the new are a thing, that doesn't mean bad ideas aren't :) Opera has a well established history of innovating web browsing. So many features we consider normal and must-have in modern browsers were pioneered by Opera. The innovation kind of stopped and a lot of features disappeared when they fired the Presto team and switched to webkit, unfortunately. Google on the other hand, has a well established history of developing a pretty great idea and then at some point begin making it shittier with each update. This may be a bias of an old Opera fanboy / IMHO; If you consider innovative features, between Opera (frozen just before they ditched Presto), versus where Chrome has innovated and been developed to today--Developer tooling maybe, but from a user point of view? Nowhere even close. Especially if you consider what was taken away (but then, the entire Presto engine and many of its unique features were taken away too). Opera has had more of a "Yes, and" approach to innovation, but still they (barely) managed to avoid the "kitchen sink" problem. Old features almost never went away. I used to think the built-in torrent client was unnecessary bloat, but in hindsight was that really a bad idea? Main problem was torrent protocol itself was a bit heavy for computers at the time, making it feel bloaty. Unlike the built in IRC client, which was just another lightweight browser tab unlike Chrome (or Firefox) could ever manage. Still, Opera was also famous for it's tiny executable size.