Sorry this one took so long to write. You may be happy to know that I’ve been using Opera this whole time on mobile and desktop. You know, for science.
In this installation of Browser Smackdown, we’ll be focusing on the underdog of the Big 5: Opera. Like a lot of operas, this one’s been around for ages (since the browser war days of the ’90s). The Opera team continues to come out with interesting products for desktop and mobile alike.
In 1994, Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecom company, launched Opera as a research project. Opera 2.0, publicly released two years later, only operated on Windows machines. In 1998, though, Opera began to seriously consider handheld devices, making them one of the forerunners of modern mobile browsing.
Back on dry land (er, um, desktop), things were getting a bit ugly. Remember having to buy browsers? Opera was one of those. In 2000, Opera went from trialware to being littered with built-in banner ads and Google-fueled shopping suggestions. Luckily, as the free competition marched on, Opera was given a sock and became a free app.
Interestingly, in 2006, Opera released modded versions of Opera 9 for use on the Nintendo Wii and DS gaming systems (Internet Channel and DS Browser, respectively). Opera has several other browsers on the market, including Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, and Opera Coast. One of the original founders of the Opera project is in the process of releasing the Vivaldi browser, which is kind of a Firefoxed Opera. But, as Alton Brown says, that’s another show.
Opera runs on WebKit and Blink, just like most other browsers (after dropping their own Presto engine in 2013). They are still the little guy in terms of market share. Even after a sweet rebranding in 2015, Opera holds only 1.5% of browser customers.
Every browser is a snowflake
Opera’s focuses (foci?) seem to be on customization and a small data footprint. To that end, a couple of Opera’s most famed features are Speed Dial and Turbo.
Speed Dial is a kind of entry portal/pin board where you can save your most frequently visited sites to a dashboard. It’s got folders and a customizable background (much like Opera Coast… another show) and tabs for bookmarks, history, and news. Speed Dial aims to be a sort of one-stop-shop for browsing, searching, and keeping current.
Weird little feature: opening an image in a new tab centers the image. Nice.
Other weird little feature: control+tabbing through browser tabs: preview of the window shows up. Also nice.
Another weird feature: double click on the interface to expand browser window to full size.
The pitfalls of the underdog
Unfortunately, when using a browser that, frankly, most people haven’t heard of, you’re bound to run into some red flags. Especially from some of those old-school cookie-wielding sites that can’t recognize the little guy.
Chase.com no longer gives you this warning. I’m not sure when it stopped but it was sometime in January of 2016. Of course, all the normal functions of the site work just fine in Opera.
It was a bit offensive, really, if you were just trying to check your status in a modern, updated, WebKit/Blink browser and you had to deal with that little gray bar at the top of your screen… but here’s the full-screen modal window the California Lottery website still gives you if you visit it using Opera:
Oh, the humanity! The discrimination!
Gambling and losing
In the battle for net neutrality and privacy, Opera immediately put itself at the forefront of user rights, making Opera the first browser with built-in adblocking and VPN (for free!)
The problem is that once these enhancements started rolling out, for me at least, their desktop and mobile browsers have become unusable, refusing to load css on pages that should be cached and other strange and unforgivable sins.
The verdict
I got realy used to Opera but I think it’s just because it was the one I was using. I’ve switched back to Firefox since their new Quantum release is amazingly fast.
Running with the little guys is great. I tend to opt for more voices and options on the internet. But Opera seems to experiment more than most browsers. If you can handle it, go for it. For me, it’s time for something solid again.