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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

Opera 12 had torrent...

It's incredible how Opera was innovative at the time. Nowadays it just another useless chrome.

Opera's layout engine and UI were incredibly fast, responsive, and lightweight, remaining the fastest for decades. I have no doubt it was the product of a very small team of brilliant engineers. Its userscript support was also top-notch, allowing things that are tricky or impossible even today in a browser extension.

Too bad it couldn't keep up with the whole Web 2.0 sh*tstorm.

What's point in bundling unrelated features? I used Opera in the past, but I never used nor IRC, nor mail (their mail was very cumbersome for me, I used The Bat instead), so it was wasted effort for me. Now if Opera would provide JS API for torrents or mail to enable further integration between those technologies, that would be interesting and innovative.

I also didn't like its mail client, but IRC was useful multiple times. Especially when browsing some kind of open source project and wanted to get an answer, I just clicked on a link on their page and was able to join their channel.

The great thing was that Opera 12 even with IRC, mail, torrent and other goodies (such as HTTP server) was still lighter on resources than Firefox and Chrome.

I really do miss the old Opera, and even the Vivaldi is not really good replacement since it still uses Blink engine.

I switched to Firefox after, I like its extensions but it's not perfect.

Somehow they still managed to keep the installer size small, ux reasonable and product fast. If you can do this, I don't care how many useless features you add. Nowadays it's opposite. I didn't use those features either but they never bothered me.

It also had Unite!

Yes, and it also had an IRC client. Having lots of features unrelated to web browsing did not make it better.

But it was better. The UX was way too good, even if things like standards implementation weren't great.

I seem to recall that back then Opera stood shoulder to shoulder with Mozilla about standard correctness.

Iirc, Opera was actually quite ahead of Firefox in passing acid3, though can't remember if they were first or if WebKit was

It probably helped that Håkon Lie, who proposed/invented CSS, worked at Opera.

Until ~2010ish, Opera was per-se pretty much competitive (after that, the other vendors were implementing new specs quicker), but there were some notable differences, especially around places where specs allowed multiple behaviours and every vendor except for Opera had converged on one behaviour a decade earlier (rounding of CSS values comes to mind here, but was far from the only case), and that caused more and more problems and web-developer pain as the web became increasingly complex.

I seem to recall that the Mozilla suite had a irc client as well.

They did and still do. The SeaMonkey[0] product from Mozilla comes with all the components that Netscape^ shipped with. A browser, an email client, an IRC client and an WYSIWIG editor for HTML called Composer.

[0] http://www.seamonkey-project.org/start/

^ version 4 I think but maybe earlier versions too

Thunderbird can also connect to IRC (as well as XMPP). It also offers choices of Google Talk, Twitter, and Yahoo.

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