5 features Opera Browser did first | Hacker News Reader

5 features Opera Browser did first

slashgeek.net

18 pointspavs8 comments

By the way, if you're looking for a replacement for Opera, there are still options for the look and feel, even if not the internal tech features.

I stopped using the Big O pretty much when Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner did. He went on to found the Vivaldi browser[1]. They gave up on their own rendering engine and are just using Chromium. But Vivaldi is still my browser of choice if only because the gestures and tab ordering work the way I expect them to without having to hunt down plugins.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/

I think vivaldi is using Blink (fork of webkit) as a rendering engine - which both chrome and chromium also uses.

They certainly are using Blink, yes. But their changelogs include such lines as "Updated Chromium to 64.0.3282.143" so it's reasonable to think they add custom patches to Chromium, and don't pull Blink.

Opera never stopped inventing new features and was (for me) the fastest browser especially on slower hardware, nevertheless, compared to IE and FF (there was no Chrome in these days).

I remember the F9 quick configuration menu which allowed you to quickly turn on or off certain features, or the custom CSS bar to change the style of a website. Opera was also the first browser with a useful zoom function. One feature which was never adopted widely but was also quite useful were graphical tabs (today this is widespread in Windows and KDE for regular window previews). The list of opera features is kind of endless. It's such a pity this great browser was no further developed.

I wonder why the developers did not open source the code/old engine in a way Netscape did it with Mozilla.

An IE shell called Netcaptor was the first browser to implement tabs, back in 1997. I used it myself until Phoenix (nee Firefox) released a couple years later.

Contrary to what this silly site says, MDI windows are not by any stretch of the imagination _tabs_.

Opera did a lot of great things, but introducing tabs was not one of them. Tabbed browsing is a bug, not a feature. (At least in all os' ive used, there is already a "tab bar")

Opera was the first browser on windows to use tabs. Tabbed browsing was introduced years before in iBrowse for the Amiga.

#6. drift into nothingness

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