I believe what he means is that opera has been the first to bring in a ton new features which were later copied by other browsers (or still even yet to) such as

I believe what he means is that opera has been the first to bring in a ton new features which were later copied by other browsers (or still even yet to) such as tabbed browsing mouse gestures tab thumbnails page zooming opera turbo bookmark sync first to pass acid 3 opera unite Spatial navigation HTML5 datepicker (currently the only one) and the list keeps going. These are just some of the major ones.