Opera browser used to have P2P file transfers as a short lived feature in ~2010, called Unite. I remember it also had skeuomorphic GUI of a 'fridge' where users could put post-it style notes that could be seen by others.
One of many everything-and-the-kitchen-sink features Opera Presto had during its heyday. Others included a separate Bittorrent client, desktop widgets that could be moved outside of the browser window, full IRC client, email client and peerless hotkey actions customization.
By some miracle the browser still managed to be a rather lean binary.
We did not decide it. Google decided to kill it. In countries where Opera had major share Google ran aggressive and deceptive (something something faster) campaign with billboards, radio and tv ads. Chrome ads were also everywhere on their homepages (google.com, youtube.com).
But more nefariously, Google kept blocking features and apps based on the UA agent alone. Add lots of tech demos with their custom extensions.
Don't forget bundling Chrome with random apps (I remember cCleaner), making it install silently and automatically set itself as default.
I got caught by this as a kid a few times, I was technical enough to know what was going on, and reliant on a screen reader (which Chrome didn't support back then), so it was definitely a memorable annoyance for me, but I guess quite a few people didn't care.
Do you mean Opera Unite, that had p2p file sharing and a 'wall' (I think it was termed the fridge door, all your verified users could leave you notes/images on it IIRC).
Vivaldi is roughly 1000 times slower. You need a pretty good computer to run that UI. It also lacks extremely basic features Opera had; like working LRU tab switching. I liked the idea, but it's impossible to recommend.
Is that true? I remember having to change a setting to switch the behavior of tab switching because it was LRU by default and I prefer it in visible order.
It used to work and broke maybe 2 years ago. This tells me that no one is actually using the browser and that no one is really working on it either. It receives chromium updates and then some money-making features here and there.
It's been a while, 8-10 years ago maybe? But quick look now tells me it's still one person effort. That's both awesome and unfortunate. I wish it got more traction back then to attract more active user/dev base.
I really wished opera had a greater market share than it did. It did relatively well for a few years with share between 1-4%. But was lagging behind defunct browsers like IE6. And back then the browser space was only chrome, Firefox, and IE. Notable mention to safari and KDE fwiw.
The everything browser made it a difficult experience to understand. Kind of a feature overload in the face of minimalism being practiced by chrome and ie7.
Someone made a torrent website software for it which spawned something like 50 good torrent websites. Combined with the build in torrent client and irc client it made a wonderfull experience.
I remember M2, their mail client, which had good "AI" auto labelling of e-mails. For today's standards probably not outstanding, but back then it worked nicely, and I wish I had something like it for Thunderbird, but so far any plugin to auto label anything in Thunderbird has failed me. Thunderbird needs tagging to improve and be better accessible.
One of many everything-and-the-kitchen-sink features Opera Presto had during its heyday. Others included a separate Bittorrent client, desktop widgets that could be moved outside of the browser window, full IRC client, email client and peerless hotkey actions customization.
By some miracle the browser still managed to be a rather lean binary.