Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertising to
They did done awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn’t think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.
And despite being designed to run on potatoes with a 2G connection it somehow felt just as smooth as modern mobile browsers (at least as I remember it). It’s crazy how well it worked considering the hardware and network limitations of the time.
Didn’t opera cache images on their server and feed you a lower res version instead of what the website had? Granted with the limited bandwidth available back then, that was fine but now I don’t think many people would want that.
Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.
In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn’t do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.
I remember an ex-girlfriend daily driving it on her phone for all kinds of communications, so maybe this is why she preferred it, I never wondered why, I was very happy with my Linux machine and I barely used my mobile phone at those times anyway.