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

la_oveja

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

freehorse

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

netsharc

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-...

irusensei

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.

Flavius

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

self_awareness

Erm, how to "use" it? Or it's just the cassette thing rotating and that's it?

dag11

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!

ivankra

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.

al_borland

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.

dev1ycan

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

mememememememo

Warning: Asklessly blasts your audio.

davej

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.

emulio

I hope Opera will be resurrected on the old Presto engine. It was amazingly fast. Back then, Chromium and Firefox were much slower.

dsrtslnd23

turn your volume down before opening...

Siecje

I got 1995 but the dial up sound is not correct.

InMice

I'm quickly reminded how absurdly loud the lowest volume setting is on macs

superkuh

Opera is not 30. Opera is dead. Opera died and never went beyond version 12.

unsupp0rted

Every year snapshot feels like a 3-sentence Wikipedia article and a picture and wav file. Just sparse and as another commenter put it "soulless". Basically Encarta without the heart, and less info.

Serhii-Set

The image format evolution is equally wild. 1996 was JPEG and GIF only. Now we have WebP, AVIF, and Chrome 145 just shipped JPEG XL decoder. Each format iteration roughly halving the file size at the same quality. Would be curious to see Opera's take on JPEG XL support.

botonomous

Anything but Netscape!