Opera (Web Browser)

3 of 5 Stars

The Opera web browser, as it exists today, just doesn't appeal to me. It's one of many Chromium-based browsers, and there isn't a whole lot to distinguish it from the crowd. The things that set it apart most are things that I don't want or need:

I don't need my browser to be tied into cryptocurrencies.
I don't need it to be tied into messenger apps that I don't use.
I don't need a VPN built into my browser as an afterthought when most websites use HTTPS these days and I'd rather use something where privacy is their whole deal (and besides, if I really need privacy, I'd be better off with something like Tor anyway).
I don't need a special browser "for gamers" instead of having, you know, settings.

About the only feature they've added since 2013 that I want that isn't available in Vivaldi or Firefox is built-in IPFS support, and even that's tied into the whole cryptocurrency thing. (And I can use an add-on with those browsers when I want to mess around with IPFS.)

=> Vivaldi

The company is also just one part of an international conglomerate, which can go one of two ways: either the parent company sees you're making money and leaves you alone until they don't, or they want to squeeze out every last drop of money they can without regard to what makes your particular business niche work (or not). In my opinion Opera had already reached that point by the time they were bought in 2016 -- and long before they got involved in things like predatory loan apps in Africa) that will spam all your contacts (including your boss and your in-laws) to embarrass you if you don't pay back on time. And that wasn't even the parent company: it was subsidiaries of Opera.

=> predatory loan apps in Africa

Opera wasn't always like that.

It Used To Be Good

These would be my ratings for Opera at different times since I first used it:

The original Norwegian company has been around since the early days of the web. I bought (yes, bought) my first copy for $18 with a student discount -- it fit on a floppy disk, back when that mattered -- after a classmate showed me how fast it was compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer. It got really cluttered and slow in the early 2000s, but by 2005 it was streamlined and fast again.

Innovation

Opera was the scrappy underdog in the "browser wars," pioneering innovations that caught on -- like Speed Dial (2007), or bookmark syncing (not sure when), or using JavaScript to patch high-profile websites that don't quite work (2005) -- and others that didn't, but were fascinating experiments.

=> innovations that caught on

My favorite of those was Opera Unite (2009), which built peer-to-peer features so you could set up a simple website or photo gallery, share files with your friends, have your own chat room or collaborate real-time, etc. without having to get into the technical details or hosting, and without relying on a central server.

=> Opera Unite

That's right: Opera tried to decentralize the web before it was cool!

Unfortunately, because it wasn't cool yet, Opera Unite was removed just a couple of major versions later in 2012.

=> Opera Unite was removed

Mobility

They also got into the mobile web early on, with both a version for what passed for smartphones at the time, and a Java version, Opera Mini, that could run on higher-end "regular" cell phones. Seriously, I used it on a flip phone with actual buttons.

sigh Yes, it was a Motorola RAZR, thank you for asking.

At a time when sites were making alternate, stripped down mobile versions of their websites that might have a chance of actually loading over an edge cellular network (2G if you were lucky) at speeds so slow you'd otherwise throw your hands up in frustration trying to access today's typical websites, then realize you'd accidentally thrown your phone away and decide to leave it and go live in a cabin in the woods instead, Opera was promoting the idea that there should only be one web, and sites should adapt to the device and browser you use.

Opera Mobile and Opera Mini used a proxy to compress the sites you visited. Downside: your browsing passed through the proxy. Upside: you could actually get the page to download onto your phone. They later (2009) adapted this proxy into an optional Turbo mode that did the same for the desktop.

Bucking Trends

Opera kept the email and news (and later calendar) components in the application long past the point when other "browser suites" had separated them out, which was nice, but not a huge deal for me.

They kept a paid (with free trial) business model for years -- the one where you're the customer, not the ad network or whoever -- until it became clear that you just couldn't get people to buy a web browser anymore.

Fortunately this was the old payment model for software, where you buy a major version once and get free fixes and sometimes free or discount upgrades to new major versions, but you can keep using the old version as long as you want. Not the new model where you keep paying for a subscription whether you want to upgrade or not, and whether you think the new version is enough to justify the money you're paying for it.

Before going totally free/gratis, they tried free-with-ads / paid-without-ads for a while, which was annoying, but not as annoying as the ones on the websites themselves.

No, really. The ads in the toolbar were a lot less less intrusive than pop-ups, pop-overs, multiple banners cluttering up a page and preventing it from loading, all of which track you as you go from one site to the next until they figure out that you finally bought that space heater six months ago, and you don't want to buy another one because this one works fine, and besides, you put it away because it's summer.

Blocking Monoculture

Going into techie/nerd mode for this section. I was really into promoting web standards and interoperability for a while, and I still see the software landscape through that lens.

=> promoting web standards and interoperability

Because Opera also developed their own web rendering engine, it served as a critical check against a monoculture in which one primary rendering engine, controlled by one company, could have outsized influence on the future of web technology. And outsized influence on the bugs in web technology.

To pick a recent example: an Ars Technica article on a 2023 security vulnerability in libwebp, a software library widely used to display WebP images, noted that "The number of affected software packages is too large to check all of them." (emphasis added)

=> 2023 security vulnerability in libwebp

Back then we were worried about Microsoft and Internet Explorer. IE had stagnated as soon as it won the "Browser Wars" and only started catching up again when enough people were using Firefox to make them worry. For a while there we had Microsoft/IE (Trident, later Edge), Mozilla/Firefox (Gecko), Apple/Safari (WebKit) Google/Chrome (also WebKit) and Opera (Presto) all with a seat at the table.

In 2013, Opera switched to WebKit. At the time I wrote:

=> Opera switched to WebKit

Remember the bad old days when people just wrote for Internet Explorer, and there was basically no innovation in web browser capabilities? It took Firefox’s success to turn the tide, but Opera was there, needling the industry with things like the “Bork edition” which turned the tables on browser-sniffing websites. Opera was a constant reminder that no, the web isn’t just Internet Explorer and Firefox, or just Internet Explorer and Webkit, or just two flavors of WebKit. That it was worth building technologies to leverage cross-browser web standards instead of picking the current 800-pound gorilla and feeding it even more.

Within a year Opera shut down the user community site. Within three, the company was split up, most of it sold to an international conglomerate.

=> Opera shut down the user community site | the company was split up

By 2018, Microsoft threw in the towel too, and now almost everything runs on WebKit (iOS & macOS) or Chromium (everywhere else). Firefox is still around, but its user share is drastically low, and Mozilla seems to be flailing around trying to find any way to make money except improving the browser. Google can dominate the direction of web tech, and it's clearly not the browser team at Google that's in charge.

=> Microsoft threw in the towel

Finally: Vivaldi

Vivaldi.net was created by one of Opera's co-founders (who had already left the company) as a new online home for the people who had come to rely on the My Opera community forums, blogs, and other services. Around the time Opera broke up, Vivaldi launched a browser focusing on power users and customizability. Both browsers are still around, but I trust Vivaldi more, which is why I picked it to replace Chrome...and currently use it as my main browser.

=> Vivaldi.net | Vivaldi launched a browser | I trust Vivaldi more

— Kelson Vibber, 2025-01-02

External

=> Opera (Web Browser)