Opera was at it's best and cutting edge when it used Presto rendering engine, and Dragonfly for devtool. It took a shit on the competition, easily and handily!
I still miss and lament the loss. We lose something beautiful!
Now I follow ladybird browser, I have very high hopes for a true fresh take on a browser.
Vivaldi replaced opera for me. I was using opera since presto until around 2020 but then it decided to go gaming ui nonsense.
Never cared about it being chinese. It sending anything suspicious^ will be discovered instantly and kill the product. It’s delulu for an average joe to consider this as a personal attack vector. Journalists and politicians - maybe. But not the tinfoil club.
^ above the usual info that all browsing regimes collect either way and lose in breaches
It's kinda nuanced. Opera devs in late 90's and early 00's were truly innovative. Tabs is just one of the things introduced by Opera and later adopted by every other browser. But they also introduced a lot of under the hood tricks to render pages on slow connections, delay loading images etc.
But their problem was in quality. Partially it was MS with IE dominance to blame, but anyway, html rendering by Opera was inconsistent. So as a paid browser they failed as soon as 33600 modems turned history and Firefox introduced most of Opera features for free with much more consistent page rendering.
I remember Opera as being decent in the very early 2000's before Firefox took off. I also occasionally used it in the early 2010's but switched it for Vivaldi when Opera was sold to chinese ownership.
Opera mini was also great for pre-touchscreen Nokia sybian phones in the mid 2000's as it made browsing the internet somewhat bearable.
You remember right, they used to have their own rendering engine and lota of neat featurs like lightning-fast notes and and even email client.
Around 2013 this all disappeared - they switched to Chromium's engine, and dropping all of their special features. Opera 15 was super-generic chromium fork. This was when I've stopped using it.
Fallen from grace...
I used Opera like 20(?) years ago. At the time it seemed better and had tabs.
Do I remember it wrong? Was it way better at some point?