In our times, the ramblings of the minimalists are of being overwhelmed by a less of an Emacs-like browser with the name ‘Vivaldi’. These minimalists stress that a browser is limited to a set of tasks or should I put it simply; displaying a webpage on the internet. They call Vivaldi’s inheritance ‘gimmicky’, unnecessary and all sorts of modern anti-hype culture speech if you will. The minimalists surely have their say but what if there is no end to innovation? Meet Presto Opera 12.18, the browOS (Browser+OS) , window manager, email client, note taker and too much more.
Can you believe that at a time when onetabbers were crawling the web with their caveman browsers (Internet Explorer ofcourse), Opera fans were enjoying what we may take for granted in a time when all most people knew about a web browser is Internet Explorer with the lucky ones having to have interacted with Firefox. The future of web browsing was on their hands and that would be unfortunately taken away due to disconnect between Opera Software and their customers, especially their diehard fans. Opera seems to have been on the high end of browser technology at the days of version 12.18 and surely lightyears ahead of its time. It was simply BETTER, but may have not have been as fast as IE. But what most unique feature did Opera possess that made it stand out?
Dynamic tiling
You see that? You see that? And it’s way better than Vivaldi’s tiling. Seriously. When you press the tile button found on the main bar, it automatically tiles ALL tab bars like some Linux/UNIX tiling Window manager. If you close one of these tabs and press the tile button again, the tabs retile as if it was the Hyprland of browsers, something Vivaldi is yet to acheive even though it has the best tab management of all browsers in the universe. The only problem is there is no untile option when you rightclick. This was most shocking to find a browser of this kind. It’s the browser from the future-past. And this browser can tiling any amount of tabs with the tab bar on the right or left. Yes, that’s right. You can put your tabs wherever you want. The customizability is insane, even for an average Vivaldi user. And we’re talking about 2011. We are in 2024 for goodness sake and no browser beats this browser’s feature set.
Tab Cascading
god mode initiated. Infinity stones set in place. THIS IS PRESTO OPERA!!! If you are familiar with Windows Vista’s task view/switcher, then this is close but you can’t switch tabs the vista way although you can press them manually to move from tab to tab and they float around as if they are using a floating window manager. But still, tell me which other browser does this. Which one? Not even Vivaldi. Not even it’s heir, the great Vivaldi. “That’s gimmicky Kjala 🤓”, someone may interject. But you don’t get it. This browser was made for use by forces beyond our world. (Even Wikipedia states “The ECMAScript engines used with Opera have been named after ancient and traditional writing scripts, including undeciphered Linear A, Ancient Greek Linear B, Runic Futhark, and Javanese Carakan.”) In all seriousness, when the world of browsers was only filled with blandness and repetitiveness, Presto Opera was the resistance. Sadly, Presto is gone and to use it in current day would be a security risk that is not worth it.
Turbo mode
The famous turbo mode that was friend to the part of the world where internet was as new as the latest born baby. While I may be too late to the party having only entered the Vivaldiverse months ago, I’m pretty sure there is a good reason why Vivaldians from old Opera keep requesting for this feature.
Conclusion
While the demise of Presto Opera is no small issue and it may seem a bit of ,um… what do you call when someone keeps whining about a gone loved-one or lover even after entering a new relationship?, we could always bring good times back. It’s not all gone until we force it to. The current situation shows what the famed chrome web store truly is. Google can even go on with a manifest v4 and do it the google way. They can entrashify Chromium as is the order of the day for corpos in 2024 going forward. Then we will see how it goes for Vivaldi. But I don’t know. I can only wait and see. But even with blink there are no horizons. Vivaldi Technologies will set those horizons themselves. Thank goodness they are more in touch with the community more than most of their competitors (Moz(REDACTED)). This has been Kjala, signing off.
Great article.
Opera, version 13 and later, never worked for me and I didn’t go back. Vivaldi is as close as we get so it is the newest and bestest.
Installed ChrOpera for developers after checking out Opera 12.18 and tried it out for three days. Workspaces as icons on the Sidebar is unusual for browsers. The search box on the start page always defaults to google and no one can change that which is garbage for an experience. Like I have to remove that big fat overly-rounded searchbox to hide google search!!! The setup allows you to change what Data you want (not) to be shared but I don’t know if that changes anything. The UI is like a Yandex.Browser remix of a Chrome skin (the chrome pages are more apparent), with Yandex Browser window buttons, similar speed dials, a not-too-similar sidebar, cursed AI that DEMANDS selling your soul to the Devil (a Chropera account) to interact with it. But I envied the Ctrl+Tab cycler of Opera since it reminded me Cascading tabs.
At least Yandex.Browser has an identity of being a simple browser without having an ugly UI like chrome’s. Basic functionality like Tab groups in the normal way and the added bonus of neural summarization of videos in case of a video especially a long one has no chapters. What people call Opera today isn’t actually Opera and even in their forums, they acknowledge. Just some browser with an O letter logo. In fact Google can just ditch Chrome and replace it with Chropera because it’s really trying to be another Google Chrome.
Hey, dude, hands off onetabbers! There is nothing at all wrong with the KISS principal, and I simply cannot understand this fashion for having shitloads of tabs open at once – IMO it’s recipe for trouble! I am a proud onetabber, and in the close on two years I’ve been using Vivaldi I have had not one single crash, freeze, data loss or any of the other “critical” bugs that litter the Forum from loadsatabbers like you! Which is why I love the browser, it works fine for me (though not really any better than Edge had previously), but looks a ton better once you customise it in ways Microsoft and Google and the others don’t offer. Never heard of Presto Opera: I tried Opera three or four times and frankly couldn’t get it to look right or work properly so it can go do one as far as I’m converned.
Good piece though, even I don’t agree with a word of it!
I’ve come to treat Browsers like an Operating System, especially Windows 10. While I think having only one tab is a good way to getting rid of distractions, I do prefer having options rather than being forced to a certain way. Tiling tabs is something I try replicating on my secondary browser (Firefox) using Side View, especially when I want to have notes open alongside my research. So Vivaldi’s philosophy is exactly my thoughts of what my browser should be. An average Win10 user has never seen the gazilion settings apps (Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools), the three system monitors (Task Manager, Resource Monitor, Process Explorer), the three CLI Applications (cmd, Windows Powershell, Powershell 7) and all those ‘poweruser’ stuff that comes with Win10. Probably Windows 10 is just a bootloader for Chrome or their browser of choice. But this is what I came to appreciate once my PC stopped being a bootloader for Firefox in my simpler times. I just look what Microsoft is doing with Win11 Control Panel in the name of muh ‘design consistency and Mozilla removing features from Firefox and adding an anti-feature (Ads) with the old ‘no one uses it’ excuse and I appreciate that Vivaldi adapts to just about anyone’s workflow and way of browsing.