Hacker News Reader

Comment by culopatin | Hacker News Reader

Can we have that do-it-all Opera back? RSS, email, torrents.

Feels like we had it all internet wise in 2007-2010 and then decided to throw it all away.

We did not decide it. Google decided to kill it. In countries where Opera had major share Google ran aggressive and deceptive (something something faster) campaign with billboards, radio and tv ads. Chrome ads were also everywhere on their homepages (google.com, youtube.com). But more nefariously, Google kept blocking features and apps based on the UA agent alone. Add lots of tech demos with their custom extensions.

They did that in pretty much every (developed) country not just those where opera has major share.

Good point, I missed a word or two there to make it clear I didn't mean it was only there.

Don't forget bundling Chrome with random apps (I remember cCleaner), making it install silently and automatically set itself as default.

I got caught by this as a kid a few times, I was technical enough to know what was going on, and reliant on a screen reader (which Chrome didn't support back then), so it was definitely a memorable annoyance for me, but I guess quite a few people didn't care.

Do you mean Opera Unite, that had p2p file sharing and a 'wall' (I think it was termed the fridge door, all your verified users could leave you notes/images on it IIRC).

I blogged about it back in the day (15 years ago), https://alicious.com/opera-about-to-change-the-world/.

I think Vivaldi have both RSS and email, it's sort of the spiritual successor to the original Opera.... I miss the old Opera.

Vivaldi is roughly 1000 times slower. You need a pretty good computer to run that UI. It also lacks extremely basic features Opera had; like working LRU tab switching. I liked the idea, but it's impossible to recommend.

Is that true? I remember having to change a setting to switch the behavior of tab switching because it was LRU by default and I prefer it in visible order.

It used to work and broke maybe 2 years ago. This tells me that no one is actually using the browser and that no one is really working on it either. It receives chromium updates and then some money-making features here and there.

have you tried Otter Browser?

It's been a while, 8-10 years ago maybe? But quick look now tells me it's still one person effort. That's both awesome and unfortunate. I wish it got more traction back then to attract more active user/dev base.

What a blast from the past. 0 comments, 0 points. Opera wasn't very popular in US. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7937436

Reply on news.ycombinator.com