What was it like to use Opera before it became a Chrome clone?

What was it like to use Opera before it became a Chrome clone?

It was the best. Still is, although it's showing its age.

The nostalgiafags will tell you otherwise but it was bloated garbage.

>I've never used Opera

>implying

it was the best by miles

mouse gestures, integrated bittorrent and irc client.

You don't like it; clearly you haven't.

opera 9 was the best back in the day.

it was on my wii and about equivalent to Internet explorer

Where should I go if I want the good Opera experience? Are there any clones? What if I install an older version?

opera 12 was the last one before it became a chrome clone i think

The Wii and DS browsers are made by Opera but aren't really comparable to the actual desktop browser.

Download Opera 12.16 unless you're on Windows, then 12.18 is the newest version.

bump

8 9 10 was a great time. There was even a build of opera + tor called "Operator" that i thought was pretty cool. Then they stopped it.

the lead opera dev left when it became chinese botnet and started vivaldi

I am using vivaldi + umatrix + ublock + disconnect and it it blazingly fast and is the only modern browser that makes me feel like opera did back in the day.

even just thinking about hotkey f11 javascript toggle gives me feels

I miss IRC and torrent integration.. So yea, it was pretty good except when specific sites would cause it shit itself.

Pre-chromium Opera was "bloated" if you consider all the functionality it has. But all of it was useful.

Being able to manage torrents, use IRC, check my mail and web browsing within the actual web browser felt so good.

Was there any reason why they decided to kill all those things and make Opera this poor?

I forgot, old Opera also had a built-in adblocker (very different to the solution they offer with the new Opera) as well as a bulk downloader to download all the pictures of a website. I always used it to download pics from the battlestation threads or the wallpaper ones

Was at the time, at least on my machine, faster than alternatives and that's why it was my favorite browser back then, though I was switching to Firefox for some of it's functionality at times. Using non-chromium Opera these days is mostly impossible. Current Opera is much better even though there are oldfag Opera shills who'll tell you Opera 12 is still completely usable.
These days I've switched to Firefox simply because it's as fast as anything else (despite the anti-firefox shills saying otherwise), isn't botnet, doesn't force ads and has the best settings.

How do you use the bulk downloader? All I'm finding in Google are Chropera extensions.

I ended up switching to firefox. The only reason I started using it over chrome was because I saw this one study that found opera users had the highest IQ. I figured this meant opera was the best. The study also turned out to be a hoax. Opera was still really good.

That feel

It was fuckin beautiful, mate.
It was a little too resource hungry, but goddamnit it was FAST. The interface was nice, everything was slick.
I used to install it on my school computers as a replacement to internet explorer.