Opera 12.15 source code

Sure: often using shorts where other browsers used ints, using floats where others used doubles, or even using ints where others used doubles (back when much of that code was written, Presto was far more concerned about performance on devices without FPUs than other browsers). All of this could easily be observed through layout and scripting, and much of it led to many of the hardest to tackle site compatibility bugs that were ultimately never fully fixed (and most never had any fix shipped). `z-index` was a pain point, as was the use of ints for all percentages in CSS.

> How many people I could track down who worked on opera 12 and now vivaldi? None.

Almost all those who are listed at https://vivaldi.com/team/ worked on either Presto-based Opera Desktop or Presto itself (which were, post Presto being a thing, distinct teams). Heck, Yngve was literally the first person aside from their founders to work on Opera, and owned the much of the network code in Presto till near the end; Petter I think was the only other person to have worked for over 20 years at Opera, having worked on the Desktop browser for the majority (all?) of the time.

If my memory is correct, the names in the source-tree were module owners and module QA, which amounts to a fraction of the number of people involved (esp. historically: those who had moved on to other things or whatever you're unlikely to find by name in the source tree). At any given point there was maybe a quarter of the current team with names anywhere in the source tree… and that's only considering Presto. Desktop had an even smaller ratio, as far as I'm aware.

If you looked in the ES engine, I'm pretty sure my name should be there as the module QA (though I'm not sure this will be true at the point desktop 12.1x forked). So, uh, I might know the people involved and know their employment history… Very few people from the old Core department (that worked on Presto) remain at Opera, maybe 20% at absolute most, and AFAIK mostly left voluntarily.

As for those you listed, half of them joined relatively late on, and not that long before the move to WebKit (announced Feb 2013). And Dave Rune isn't a person, I presume you're potentially mixing Dave Vest and Rune Lillesveen?

[1] "'They' are not even 'they' anymore. At this point, Opera is pretty much just a brand name making a mockery of the former program."

[2] "That the fork will outcompete current Blink-based Opera?"

[3] "they would risk competitor using 1/4 memory, loading instantly, and with zero UI latency(load 40 tabs in anything Chromelike and then try fullscreening YT video- takes almost one second)."

Again, at the time of my comment there were only 7 or 8 in the thread altogether. So... "so much", then.

If you wish, you could quibble over whether these are sufficiently "salty". I don't care if our opinions differ. Regardless, you're implying that a positive counterpoint to negativity over Opera is out of place here, and that's nonsense.

A much fairer comparison is to compare source side by side. Chromium source is about 4x larger than operas, when not counting any 3rd party dependencies.

Or even better, compile times. Chromium build (or firefox) is half a day job on mid-range laptop (especially with 4/8G memory).

Opera builds in about 20 minutes. I was also pleasently surprised the codebase is not particularly bitrotten, and both VS2015 and modern gcc could cope with it.

Considering that source code is written in a human-readable language and syntax, and machine code only needs to contain enough information for a CPU to decode, it would seem to follow that the source code should be a less efficient method for describing the program.