8 ms·
Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
- mememememememo 7mo agoWarning: Asklessly blasts your audio.
- la_oveja 7mo agois there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?
- freehorse 7mo agoYou have to keep the spacebar pressed
- lproven 7mo agoThat'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.
- rpastuszak 7mo agoCheck your ad blockers. I needed to switch off the one blocking the gdpr consent banner
- PurpleRamen 7mo agoYes, 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.
- freehorse 7mo agoIn general https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz 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 https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999
- PurpleRamen 7mo agoI think that overview appears on every year after x visited artifacts. For me, it appeared in 2002.
- netsharc 7mo agoFeels 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-lending-in-nigeria-india-kenya https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...
- ramon156 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoYou 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 7mo agoSee for example https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil13/ https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop... (In German, but Kagi translate or Google translate work fine here)
- lxgr 7mo agoThanks, 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.
- irusensei 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoVivaldi is it's rightful heir https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
- eitau_1 7mo agoThen Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser
- freehorse 7mo agoLooks 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.
- glenstein 7mo agoI 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.
- Flavius 7mo agoThat sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.
- self_awareness 7mo agoErm, how to "use" it? Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?
- teekert 7mo agoDoesn't work well on mobile, it's all spacebar based (hold and tap).
- self_awareness 7mo agoI'm on desktop on vivaldi, i'm holding spacebar and nothing happens
- dag11 7mo agoHow 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 7mo agoTry holding spacebar or tapping it to continue.
- wigster 7mo agonor me. tried space bar. is it a firefox problem?
- rafaelgoncalves 7mo agoor 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 7mo agoCheck your extensions, might be blocking the cookie banner. For me uBlock blocked the cookie banner. Afterwards it worked just fine.
- ivankra 7mo agoEh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: https://oldweb.today/ 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 7mo agoI 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_ 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoI used Opera so much around 2000. Small things like the X-Z shortcuts and the sheer speed blew me away.
- AlienRobot 7mo agoOpera is called Vivaldi now.
- spikewall 7mo agoWhich is a chrome reskin too.
- Tomis02 7mo agoReskin 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.
- dismalaf 7mo agoEh it's got a lot going on... UI has way more features, it's got a built-in ad-blocker, email client, etc...
- rplnt 7mo ago
- dev1ycan 7mo agoThe 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
- davej 7mo agoI 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.
- smusamashah 7mo agoThey use to send you a custom binary with your name on it in the title bar or something.
- riscoe 7mo ago[dead]
- emulio 7mo agoI hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.
- orangewindies 7mo agoYou 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.
- criticalfault 7mo agowe 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 7mo agoturn your volume down before opening...
- Siecje 7mo agoI got 1995 but the dial up sound is not correct.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoNobody alive remembers the correct sound
- InMice 7mo agoI'm quickly reminded how absurdly loud the lowest volume setting is on macs
- superkuh 7mo agoOpera is not 30. Opera is dead. Opera died and never went beyond version 12.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoEvery 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.
- Serhii-Set 7mo ago[flagged]
- botonomous 7mo agoAnything but Netscape!
- tombert 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoThere's LadyBird, https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- tombert 7mo agoI'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.
- jlarocco 7mo agoSorry, 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 7mo agoMySpace page doesn't have a picture of Tom. Not historically accurate.
- spikej 7mo agoOpera 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 7mo agoHuh? 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.
- spikej 7mo agoI had less "custom" work to do with IE 6/7 if I got it working well in Opera first was my experience...
- dev_tools_lab 7mo ago[dead]
- nice_byte 7mo agosucks that opera is no longer with us. used to be my go-to browser before Firefox and eventually chrome...
- f-serif 7mo agoWow, 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 7mo agoYeah 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 7mo agoI am completely astounded that Opera even caught on, as they were one of the very few companies that charged for their browser.
- joezydeco 7mo agoProbably 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 7mo agoProbably the first marketing website ever to feature pictures from rotten.com, i enjoyed it but this was not expected.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoThe 2000 limewire bit was good lol
- elcapitan 7mo agoRather 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.
- kelvinjps10 7mo agoI 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.