Comment by jlarocco

That's not the original Opera. That's middle-aged Opera at best, maybe even over the hill Opera.

I was there for nearly all of it.

I first played with the original Opera when it came out of beta in '96, as an attempt at an alternative to my regulars of Netscape and Thomas Bruce's Cello. It had none of that email or RSS or IRC, just a clean and simple MDI browsing experience.

It was great. By '97 and '98, their capabilities (they added JS, cookies, and image blocking) and performance were solid enough that Opera became my primary browser.

Opera, during '98 and '99, was absolutely the best browser UX around, for me anyway. MDI made up for Windows 95's and later 98's windowing UI which never anticipated that users might have dozens of web pages open at once completely destroying the utility of the Taskbar.

Opera's MDI, like Excel's MDI had done for accountants a decade earlier, was great for "power users" like me, while everyone else making browsers (mostly Netscape and Microsoft but there were a few others) seemed to be targeting newbies or "the enterprise". (The Web was early then, and bringing in new people faster than just about any tech had ever done before, but it didn't have much of the value it does today, so I guess it was reasonable to target new and casual users on the road to critical mass, but after MDI there was almost no going back for me.)

Opera 4, in mid 2000, soon after I joined staff@mozilla.org to help lead the Mozilla project, was the last version I used with any regularity, mostly because I really disliked the redesign and they began cluttering things with each new release while I was trying to convince Mozilla to do the opposite and simplify.

Opera did introduce an MDI switching toolbar then, which is sort of like tabs but really isn't, and that was a good step. But I'd used an actual tabbed browser in the late 90s on occasion, Adam Stiles' Netcaptor, and Opera's MDI toolbar wasn't that. It helped the MDI experience some, but it didn't transform it into tabbed browsing in any meaningful way.

Then Opera 5 introduced the banner ad later that year, just as Mozilla's browser component from the larger internet suite was starting to get decent, good enough that I stopped calling myself an Opera user/fan/booster and started identifying as a Mozilla user.

(The integrated search box on the Opera 5 toolbar did inspire us though, so about a year later we put one in the young Firefox toolbar.)

I checked in with most new Opera releases for many years, but by 2002 Blake and I were deep into working on Firefox and so I was able to help design in some of Opera's earlier simplicity, but with tabs rather than MDI. Rather than wait for Opera to get things back on track, I simply started building the browser I wanted with Firefox.

By the time Opera added email in 2003 and RSS and IRC in 2004, Opera was 8 and 9 years old. Jón S. von Tetzchner's original Opera browser was EOL in 2012 when Presto got cancelled, and was probably dead a year earlier when Jón was forced out (and perhaps even a year before that, when he stepped down as CEO) so yeah, email and RSS and IRC are almost exactly mid-life features in my book. Considering that Opera never recovered after those features were added suggests it was probably over the hill already. Today, and for the last 7 years or so, Opera is little more than a Chinese equity firm's mostly meaningless plaything.