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I was a die-hard Opera user when it ran Presto - I tried the Chrome version for a while, & I have Vivaldi installed so I can periodically open it & try it out f

I was a die-hard Opera user when it ran Presto - I tried the Chrome version for a while, & I have Vivaldi installed so I can periodically open it & try it out for a while, but absolutely everything since Opera 12, Vivaldi included, has paled in comparison. Opera 12 was instantaneous in everything it did, even with a session with 100s of tabs open (without auto-unloading them in the background like modern browsers do) & thousands of local emails in M2. The instant history navigation in particular is something no modern browser has even attempted to copy, Vivaldi included (likely because it's a core Chromium functionality that would be difficult to override). There's just so many tiny details of its UX that were slick & seamless & have been lost. Little things that seem minor but were huge on aggregate like text selection of linkified text - it simply does not work in Gecko or Blink browsers but somehow Presto did it with ease. The page you're leaving remaining fully responsive during navigation to facilitate change-of-mind on mis-clicks, etc. Millions of tiny UX details like this just made the whole daily browsing experience so painless.

stavros 7mo ago
It really was. I had a computer with 16 MB RAM and Opera was basically the only browser that worked on it. The back button was instant in a way nothing has ever been again.
- lucideer 7mo ago
  They had some kind of intermediate representation of page renders that was efficiently cached on disk so that it made zero network requests on history navigation. I suspect this same approach also played a part in facilitating the fulltext history search feature I've also never seen in a browser since. I'm guessing with the way web standards have evolved & become more complex this might actually be impossible to do today while remaining compliant - honestly give me non-compliance though.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    Yeah, I don't know, I don't see how you can't pause execution and store the entire interpreter state and DOM somewhere. Maybe it's just that nobody cares enough to go through all the effort?
    - mananaysiempre 7mo ago
      Modern pages would also likely be much more touchy about the imperfections of such a mechanism. A lot of “old browsers good” in general seems to be about modern webdev, not modern browsers[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079 https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079
  - thisislife2 7mo ago
    True! Came to post the same thing - one of my favourite feature of Opera Presto engine was how all the websites in your history was also "indexed" locally, so that you could do a simple keyword search on "History" to find the web page you wanted to re-visit. It was fast and accurate and made it a breeze to find any site in that you had browsed and was still cached, and it was an incredibly useful feature.
smusamashah 7mo ago
They had funny ads about it being fast. One showed opening a tab vs peeling a potato. Another one was opening a tab vs starting a jet. I loved gestures, built in IRC client, RSS reader, notes and the experimental website hosting from the browser. There were many cool plugins too. Did it have a torrent client too? I seem to remember as if it had everything :)
kelvinjps10 7mo ago
it was also the only browser that ran well in the era of 3g mobile phones

stavros 7mo ago

It really was. I had a computer with 16 MB RAM and Opera was basically the only browser that worked on it. The back button was instant in a way nothing has ever been again.

lucideer 7mo ago
They had some kind of intermediate representation of page renders that was efficiently cached on disk so that it made zero network requests on history navigation. I suspect this same approach also played a part in facilitating the fulltext history search feature I've also never seen in a browser since. I'm guessing with the way web standards have evolved & become more complex this might actually be impossible to do today while remaining compliant - honestly give me non-compliance though.
- stavros 7mo ago
  Yeah, I don't know, I don't see how you can't pause execution and store the entire interpreter state and DOM somewhere. Maybe it's just that nobody cares enough to go through all the effort?
  - mananaysiempre 7mo ago
    Modern pages would also likely be much more touchy about the imperfections of such a mechanism. A lot of “old browsers good” in general seems to be about modern webdev, not modern browsers[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079 https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/2001483275546825079
- thisislife2 7mo ago
  True! Came to post the same thing - one of my favourite feature of Opera Presto engine was how all the websites in your history was also "indexed" locally, so that you could do a simple keyword search on "History" to find the web page you wanted to re-visit. It was fast and accurate and made it a breeze to find any site in that you had browsed and was still cached, and it was an incredibly useful feature.

smusamashah 7mo ago

They had funny ads about it being fast. One showed opening a tab vs peeling a potato. Another one was opening a tab vs starting a jet. I loved gestures, built in IRC client, RSS reader, notes and the experimental website hosting from the browser. There were many cool plugins too. Did it have a torrent client too? I seem to remember as if it had everything :)

kelvinjps10 7mo ago

it was also the only browser that ran well in the era of 3g mobile phones