Technology

I started using Opera at version 9 point something and was a happy camper for a long time. It was a great browser, but its biggest problem was compatibility - more and more sites were behaving strangely and more and more the Opera folks had to patch things on the browser side. I stopped using it around the time the first alpha version of Vivaldi came out. Yes, Vivaldi had a lot of catching up to do at the beginning, but it was functional enough for a daily driver. Opera's first Blink-based version was some kind of a joke - it didn't even have a proper bookmarking system - it was as if everyone was assumed to have 15-20 bookmarks on their start page and that's it. Anyway, they lost all my trust when they sold out later on.

I'm willing to give Firefox a chance regarding the whole manifest v3 drama, although I see the Vivaldi folks opposing it (not sure how much they'll be able to do once they have to merge the MV3 stuff). My biggest hurdle with Firefox right now is the lack of native mouse gestures. Yes, it's somewhat possible to do it with extensions, but the 1% of the pages it doesn't work on (I know, I know, intentional limitation for all extensions) is enough to break my flow; gestures are so ingrained into my muscle memory at this point that I don't see myself using a browser without them supported the way they are in Vivaldi.

TIL about Hindenburg and the hilarity of their investment strategy.

Also, I really liked that presto engine. The shit was always very dramatically faster than any other browser and I was ok with the odd table or two being mispositioned.

Opera has always been do-do and always had a do-do engine. Now it's spyware.

Opera was useful to me at three very specific points in time for very specific reasons:

When I built my first PC out of old scrap parts in the early 2000s, the only halfway modern browser that was still compatible with Windows 95 and a 486 CPU was Opera. Not the latest version, but new enough to be usable. This version, which came with a permanent toolbar urging users to purchase a full license, already had tabs.

I did not have broadband Internet until 2006. Even 56k modems didn't work with the awful telephone line we had - I had to make do with 48k. The proxy service with compression Opera came with was the only way to browse then current websites without waiting for half an hour for a page to load.

When I bought my first touchscreen phone in early 2009, the LG KP500, a Java-based phone with only 2G and no WiFi that pretended it was a smartphone, Opera Mini was the only browser that was usable, again thanks to its proxy service.

Outside of these niche use cases, I never saw a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox. While it was an important innovator in the beginning, for me personally at least, it has always been nothing but an "emergency" browser and ever since it was bought out by a Chinese firm and switched over to Chromium, there was no reason left to use it other than brand attachment.