Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

Feels 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-...

I 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.

turn your volume down before opening...

I 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.

How 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!

I hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.

In general 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 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999

I 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.

is there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?

Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.

The 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

Eh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: 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.

Erm, how to "use" it?

Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?

[dead]

That sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.