OSNews

That's funny because actually Opera got it's design from Firefox.
Firefox has been VERY slow in development between 2x and 4x and they have a quasi fully open development model.

This means the Firefox UI sketches where up and look just like FF 5 and Opera, 2 or 3 years ago (!)

Opera copied it and released first. Sure it's fair competition - but let's not confuse who did what. Mozilla pioneered that UI and that's why they use it.

In fact, Mozilla has become the "lets insult that company" because they grew bigger and don't sound as cool as Google. But they kept to their roots so far.

Most of the browsers out there took many design cues from Opera. Most notable is multi-modal interface. Tabs if you will. Nowadays everybody seem to want to emulate Chrome. Oh well to each his own. I'm an Opera guy...

I feel like Opera's current iteration looks like an alpha version of Firefox 5. You have tabs on top but you can't throw your mouse to the top and click. You have a single button instead of menubar but they have just thrown all menus in it instead of redesigning it for the button.

They've intentionally left a gap so that the titlebar can be dragged in Windows 7 (a mistake in my opinion). but you can tweak it to remove the gap and make tabs more fitts' law friendly, in fact some skins do that for you.



That's not true. Turn the full menubar back on and you'll see that the menus in the button have a significantly different layout.

It was actually possible to reduce the standard menu bar to a button a good few years before the new menu button was made a default.

Really? Since 1996 you say? I'm sorry but it sounds an awful lot like you peeked at the Wikipedia article, saw the year, and ran with it to look impressive.

For one thing, Opera may have been released in the last three weeks of 1996, but from what I remember (and I first heard of it in late 1998) it was about as popular then as the Midori browser is today, i.e. far less than 1% usage. In those days it was Netscape vs Internet Explorer all the way. I can't imagine you having used it since 1996 unless you were on the dev team or a beta tester. If you were I apologize for my rude assumptions, but cynic that I am, I highly doubt it.

For another thing, Opera's interface has changed so much in the past decade and a half that it really is an entirely different browser from its early days. That tends to be the case with pretty much all of the current browsers save Chrome, which in its short life has had more "under the hood" changes than anything. If you really have stuck with Opera since day one, I certainly applaud you. I found it to be a curiosity when I first discovered it, mildly useful when I revisited it in 2000-2001, and more or less abhorrent in the years since. I will say that its mobile versions are very nicely done though.

So, please forgive my inherent skepticism, but I think you are making that up to sound smart, and it's not working dude.

Or - and this is just a wild guess out of the goodness of my heart - he doesn't know exactly when he started using it, and guessed 1996.

I don't know he looks Scandinavian in his profile pic. Opera started in Norway and was a hit in the Nordic countries due to the different language versions.

Heck, I'm a US citizen and I was using Opera in mid 1997. The lab computers were stuck with Netscape 2 ( Netscape 4 was already out), and I didn't have admin privileges to install anything. I could install opera ( opera 2.x? don't remember) to a 1.44 mb floppy and take it from computer to computer. It was lightening fast compared to Netscape (2,3, or eventually 4) on those computers.

I used it when it still fit in a 3.5" Floppy. So when was that. Even remembered using it in it's beta stages back then which crashed a lot. Nah Don't need to sound impressive. I just love the software even back then. Even more so now.