this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
169 points (76.0% liked)
Technology
67422 readers
5692 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I beg to differ, when Opera had its own engine and wasn't Chinese owned - back in the early '00s.
Opera also was a good alternative on Symbian phones right or whatever OS Nokia used before they switched to Windows Phone, I think.
Opera mini was also great when I had very little MBs of internet traffic in my plan. Nowadays I have pretty much infinite traffic, so I haven't used it in ages
I think I remember Opera Mini's layout though I didn't much use it. It was a great alternative especially on mobile more than a decade back.
But yes especially after changing ownership, switching browser engines and years down the line; things have changed.
I think I gave their desktop variant a try sometime ago but didn't find it compelling enough. I haven't even used their Android fork. I keep using a Firefox fork only :p.
Opera was so good. Disable images, force custom CSS, gestures! Stuff no one else had at the time.
And the ability to switch browser engines on the fly. That was a great feature.
And it has some options to interpret data following strict W3C standards. Which was incredibly helpful when learning, as it encouraged me (and a lot of others) to don't go down the IE/Netscape and later Chrome "specialities" road. (Yes,I am that old....I still remember MS fucking FrontPage)
User agent spoofing, tabs back when nobody had them, sidebar...
Still the reason that 20+ years later the second thing I install on any browser is a gestures extension (the first one is always uBlock Origin, obviously).
this era of the internet was such a fun time.
I suspect that we may be looking back with rose tinted glasses, but the main stream internet is pretty crap atm
Yeah I was 100% Opera on desktop and mobile until they switched to chromium and broke everything from before. Still pissed about that, lost all my bookmarks and notes at one point.
Opera Corp. is Norvegian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)
The browser was sold to Chinese investors though.