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Opera was amazing in the early days of the web, it was one of the few programs that I gladly paid money for. I used to browse without images and CSS (but only

by jerlam 1y ago

Opera was amazing in the early days of the web, it was one of the few programs that I gladly paid money for. I used to browse without images and CSS (but only one keyboard shortcut away) when bandwidth was low and web development was amateurish. Opera Mini took another leap forward to move rendering off slow smartphones. Things have changed a lot in 20 years. My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that era. And Opera is a zombie company trying to take advantage of its users.

burningChrome 1y ago
I remember just being new to web development and all the developers were so bougie about only using Opera because it was adopting the HTML5 standards faster than any other company. They were one of the first companies to develop standards for video if I remember correctly. They also were the first browser to offer ad blocking which was getting really intrusive.
kstrauser 1y ago
> My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that era. That's an understatement. With the usual caveats that benchmarks lie and all that, here's a pretty fast server I had in 2008 or so vs a modern iPhone[0]. The single core scores are 430 and 3427 respectively, and multi-core scores are 745 vs 8494. The phone wipes the floor with the server on normal tasks. On things that use huge amounts of FLOPS like object detection, it's just about 100x faster. In addition, the entire A18 SoC uses around 10W max, vs the E8400 burning 65W by itself. If you want to go back to exactly 20 years ago, there's a Pentium 4 vs an iPhone.[1] It had single/multi-core performance of 185/216 at 85W (by itself, not including chipset and RAM), and the phone runs math stuff around 500x faster. Yes. Your smartphone is many times faster than most computers of that era. [0] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseline=11093364 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseli... [1]
- apitman 1y ago
  Good thing Apple and Google hamstring the hardware for us. Users can't be trusted with so much power.
  - jeffhuys 1y ago
    Could you elaborate? I’m still happy with the performance of my 12 pro, even with LLMs and SD for instance.
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      I think they're grousing that we can't sideload arbitrary apps onto our phones. There are a couple of reasonable defensible view on the matter, neither of which are relevant to the subject at hand, and I'm not sure why they brought it up.
    - apitman 1y ago
      It essentially boils down to we don't have control over what software can run on these devices, so the extent to which we can harness the hardware is limited to what the OS vendors decide, and they make lots of terrible decisions.

by jerlam 1y ago

burningChrome 1y ago

I remember just being new to web development and all the developers were so bougie about only using Opera because it was adopting the HTML5 standards faster than any other company. They were one of the first companies to develop standards for video if I remember correctly. They also were the first browser to offer ad blocking which was getting really intrusive.

kstrauser 1y ago

> My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that era. That's an understatement. With the usual caveats that benchmarks lie and all that, here's a pretty fast server I had in 2008 or so vs a modern iPhone[0]. The single core scores are 430 and 3427 respectively, and multi-core scores are 745 vs 8494. The phone wipes the floor with the server on normal tasks. On things that use huge amounts of FLOPS like object detection, it's just about 100x faster. In addition, the entire A18 SoC uses around 10W max, vs the E8400 burning 65W by itself. If you want to go back to exactly 20 years ago, there's a Pentium 4 vs an iPhone.[1] It had single/multi-core performance of 185/216 at 85W (by itself, not including chipset and RAM), and the phone runs math stuff around 500x faster. Yes. Your smartphone is many times faster than most computers of that era. [0] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseline=11093364 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseli... [1]

apitman 1y ago
Good thing Apple and Google hamstring the hardware for us. Users can't be trusted with so much power.
- jeffhuys 1y ago
  Could you elaborate? I’m still happy with the performance of my 12 pro, even with LLMs and SD for instance.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    I think they're grousing that we can't sideload arbitrary apps onto our phones. There are a couple of reasonable defensible view on the matter, neither of which are relevant to the subject at hand, and I'm not sure why they brought it up.
  - apitman 1y ago
    It essentially boils down to we don't have control over what software can run on these devices, so the extent to which we can harness the hardware is limited to what the OS vendors decide, and they make lots of terrible decisions.