alt.hn

3/24/2026 at 7:54:02 AM

Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)

 https://www.web-rewind.com

by thushanfernando

3/24/2026 at 9:16:13 AM

Feels as soulless as the Opera that's been bought by a Chinese company to sell predatory lending: https://qz.com/africa/1788351/operas-okash-opesas-predatory-...

by netsharc

3/24/2026 at 10:13:34 AM

It hurts me that their marketing worked. Gamers are Choosing Opera GX because its "non bs". There's a ton of fingerprinting data being sent to chinese servers. No one is immune to propaganda

by ramon156

3/24/2026 at 11:15:21 AM

You seem to be spreading propaganda yourself by accusing Opera of something I have not seen evidence of. Are you saying this just because the company is Chinese?

by brabel

3/24/2026 at 10:40:53 AM

I have fond memories of Opera. When I migrated off of it to Phoenix, I had a really hard time adjusting to not having mouse gestures. I didn’t know how anyone lived without them.

By the time extensions came around to mimic Opera’s mouse gestures on other browsers, I could never get used to actually using them again.

I was sad to see Opera become just another incarnation of Chrome.

by al_borland

3/24/2026 at 9:28:54 AM

I remember trying Opera for the first time in Windows 98 SE. It was one of those versions that prided itself for fitting on a floppy. I think it was 3.0.6 or 3.6. But anyway I was taken by surprise how good it was in comparison to Internet Explorer which at the time was the only browser I ever used.

by irusensei

3/24/2026 at 9:38:28 AM

Everything else after opera dropped Presto and became a chrome clone felt like a downgrade to me. I never got the same feeling of easy of use and control over a browser. I kept using the 12.16 for as much as I could, then switched to firefox. The new "opera browser" now is a different browser just sharing the same name.

And the beloved opera mini for the mobile was amazing. Back then I would even use it in a vm on my computer sometimes because I had shitty internet (and to use a proxy).

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 10:06:49 AM

When Opera became just another Chromium skin I switch to Firefox. The point for me was Presto, that Opera was really well put together in terms of UI was just a bonus. The developer tools in Opera was better than what shipped in Chrome and Firefox, so switching definitely felt like a downgrade.

Someone, I don't know who, but I assume the new Opera, is still keeping the Opera Mini proxy servers running. It show up in our logs frequently enough that we noticed and have special whitelisting for them to byparse some rate limiting.

by mrweasel

3/24/2026 at 10:07:53 AM

Vivaldi feels like Opera did (makes sense, since it's the same CTO).

by stavros

3/24/2026 at 10:40:43 AM

I bet it is a great browser, but I did not get the same feel as the old opera at the time when I tried, too many features missing back then.

Moreover, not using chromium-based browsers is a kind of matter of principle for me. Chromium has been a monopoly for very long, which gives google too much power on how people may experience the web. This was made especially apparent with the manifest 2 -> 3 transition, but it should have been seen as a concern imo since a good while back.

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 9:33:37 AM

Vivaldi is it's rightful heir

https://vivaldi.com/

by thunderbong

3/24/2026 at 10:05:21 AM

I would follow that Vivaldi team to the ends of the Earth, as nobody ever made a better browser in my opinion then they did with those last versions of Opera before they had to sell (versions 11 or 12 I want to say). But for one thing, which is that Vivaldi is unfortunately also a Chromium based browser.

Which means among other things that they didn't have the capacity to sustain manifest v2 while Google pushed the browser into v3. And some version of that will be true when Google starts pushing, say, mandatory sign in, or AI powered DRM enforcement, or hard coded browser level warnings to comply with the law if you visit Anna's Archive, or limit your search engines to "safe" search providers from a list provided by Google, or using your location to determine if you're in a jurisdiction that has banned certain xxx sites.

Love the team, but the world isn't fair. They are the example I keep coming back to whenever I hear people say "Mozilla should focus on the browser!" (as if they don't). Opera is your perfect natural experiment in demonstrating that success is driven much more by distribution monopolies. If focusing on the browser and delivering best in class performance and focusing on core features your users most wanted were the things that delivered market share we would all be using Opera right now and they never would have had to sell.

by glenstein

3/24/2026 at 10:08:46 AM

Unfortunately, Google very successfully suffocated innovation on the web by throwing billions at it.

by stavros

3/24/2026 at 10:33:52 AM

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

by glenstein

3/24/2026 at 9:39:56 AM

Then Otter Browser is a bastard faithful to the tradition

https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser

by eitau_1

3/24/2026 at 9:45:30 AM

Looks interesting. Is there a way to use it without compiling it myself? It seems to be somewhat maintained in github but the compiled binaries in github releases or sourceforge have not been updated since 2022.

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 11:10:49 AM

I remember using Opera on my Windows 95, 60mhz Pentium with 8mb RAM. I remember the persistent banner ad that was part of the browser UI. I had no problem putting up with the ad because it performed incredibly well compared to IE and Netscape on my hardware. If I remember correctly they were the first browser to support game changing web features like alpha transparency in PNG images.

by davej

3/24/2026 at 9:14:19 AM

In general https://www.web-rewind.com/xywz takes you to year xywz (if exists) but 1999 for some reason takes you to an overview of all years.

edit: https://www.web-rewind.com/1999 would take you to an overview of all years but now it takes you to year 1999

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 10:04:04 AM

I think that overview appears on every year after x visited artifacts. For me, it appeared in 2002.

by PurpleRamen

3/24/2026 at 11:09:38 AM

Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.

by mememememememo

3/24/2026 at 9:57:47 AM

How do you proceed? I've tried clicking and interacting with everything I can find but I just see the spinning cassette model. Looks cool though!

by dag11

3/24/2026 at 11:08:08 AM

The last time I liked Opera was before they switched to Chromium, I remember how awesome old Opera + Windows 7 aero was, the entire browser was nearly transparent

by dev1ycan

3/24/2026 at 10:12:02 AM

Eh, marketing fluff. This is more like it: https://oldweb.today/ - browse old web (from archive.org) with old browsers (in Wasm)

A better way to celebrate 30 years of their browser would be to just open source it. Code's been leaked and irrelevant today anyway but still.

by ivankra

3/24/2026 at 9:07:17 AM

is there anything else to it than the cassette 3d thing?

by la_oveja

3/24/2026 at 10:06:51 AM

Yes, after hitting and/or holding spacebar, something happens, or you change to a new year. Sometimes it's just pictures with some text of whatever was important at that year, sometimes it's animations, sometimes stuff you can interact(?) with. In 1995, there is an old Desktop-PC with Windows 95 booting and starting a modem-connection, and you can type on the keyboard. Pretty pointless, but kinda neat.

by PurpleRamen

3/24/2026 at 9:12:22 AM

You have to keep the spacebar pressed

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 9:18:09 AM

So it doesn't work on phones apparently.

by cubefox

3/24/2026 at 9:26:26 AM

There is a "hold to rewind" button on the bottom in mine (ios).

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 10:17:30 AM

Ah thanks, it was just my ad blocker who blocked it.

by cubefox

3/24/2026 at 10:03:56 AM

True simulation of 1996 browsing

by CalRobert

3/24/2026 at 9:43:11 AM

Check your ad blockers. I needed to switch off the one blocking the gdpr consent banner

by rpastuszak

3/24/2026 at 9:23:05 AM

That's all I see too: an ugly rendered cassette thing I can spin.

It would be very fitting if it didn't work on Firefox: a sign of the growing enshittification of the Web.

by lproven

3/24/2026 at 9:28:48 AM

I use firefox and it works for me

by freehorse

3/24/2026 at 9:57:09 AM

Erm, how to "use" it?

Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?

by self_awareness

3/24/2026 at 11:15:03 AM

[dead]

by riscoe

3/24/2026 at 9:44:52 AM

That sure took a lot of work for something that nobody's gonna watch.

by Flavius