Lynx was my first web-browser, back in the day. From there, I went on to NetScape...took me something like 3 hours to download it via dial-up. No joke.

Those links appear to be rather dead. A bit of a shame, but there are actual installers close to the actual source.

oops, i didn't check the download links, only somewhere i thought it would be good...

Still finding a native win32 port shouldn't be too hard...

Doubt it. Opera never had more than fumes of the browser market and power users such as myself make up a very small percentage of total browser users, so it would seem this new browser targets the minority within the minority so to speak. I've used Opera and usually had it installed for web development testing even though I never used it much for my own purposes, I did go through all of its features etc. and it was an ok browser overall. It just didn't have enough differentiation of things that matter to sway enough people toward it I guess.

When it comes to browsers for power users, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Firefox. Out of the box without addons Firefox has consistently had more features and functionality exposed to the user via the user interface, pulldown menus, and configuration dialogs than any of the other major browsers as far back as I can remember. Every browser has individual features that the others don't which can be used to promote them in some way as superior, but taken as a whole, I believe Firefox stands out as the Swiss Army Chainsaw of browsers.

Then we get to customization, and Firefox has always had endless numbers of addons available for it for just about any purpose, some of them high quality and some of them crap, but overall the sea of addons is virtually endless, and even more so when looking at Greasemonkey and similar addons which themselves have addons.

Now I'm not in any way claiming Firefox is the absolute superior browser hands down for all people for all purposes, as I don't believe that is true for any browser now or ever in the future. I think it is a very individual thing because everyone has unique needs and preferences or we wouldn't have multiple browsers to begin with. But in terms of the number of power features available out of the box, and via addons I believe Firefox will always be the more widely used browser of power users, and another reason for that is existing market share. Even in 2015 websites out there have to be customized and tested on every browser in order to ensure compatibility smoothly, and for sites that put that much effort into their design they will most likely test their site on Google Chrome, Firefox, and IE, as well as the most popular mobile browsers before considering browsers that are catered to ever diminishing numbers of users such as Opera or the various open source browsers etc. It's just a numbers game for web developers.

One thing Opera or any spinoffs of it has going for it is sharing the Chrome engine, that makes rendering compatibility issues less of an issue potentially, but the problem it faces is that power users in particular tend to find power tools and stick to them like glue. We generally don't like to hop from one application to another as we build up years of comfort using one tool and muscle memory etc. Replacing your software with other software is painful, even if the other software is twice as good.

Hard to know in advance how any new browser will fare in the market for any target user, but I think it's a hard market to break into for any new product no matter who the target user is intended to be. They all end up having to contend with the existing momentum of the giants. It's not impossible, but it isn't something that we see happen very often either. Google Chrome's rise from small to big is the last example I can think of in the browser market of this happening, and that's backed by the full financial might of the mighty Google.

I'll certainly try out Vivaldi with an open mind and if it is useful I might end up using it alongside my other umpteen browsers, but I'd fall off my chair if anyone could ever put a browser out that would make me want to ditch Firefox as my primary browser. I'm not opposed to it, just highly skeptical I'll ever see it happen. :)

Funny you'd say that, because I recall tinkering with then new html5 features years ago (notably canvas) and encountering issues with Opera that even the maligned IE (version 9 at the time) didn't have.

I distinctly remember looking at Opera's tiny usage share and wondering if it was worth it to support it.

Had a play with it; Shows promise but it is still a Chrome(ium)-based browser and it shows in the slightly -off behaviour in the UI and resource-heavyness. It'll be interesting to see how they get on.


I just wish Opera would open-source the 12.xx series because that was the best non-noob browser that ever existed. It just needs some tweaking to improve support for non-standard HTML5 extensions (Which is why they switched to WebKit ironically), and fix existing bugs and it would be fine.

Heck, I still use 11.64 on my Linux system due to a bug in the menu and toolbar customization in 12, and most HTML-compliant sites still work in it pretty well.

More complicated sites have trouble (Including GoG increasingly... :( ), so I have Chrome as a one-shot backup browser, but I find using it really frustrating as it's so limited to what I can do in Opera.

It's onle one-shot because it's such a resource hog,

I don't use bookmarks; I use Windows and Tabs and the Search. I have over 300 tabs open right now spread over 12 windows and it's been up since Christmas and my system still runs fine. I can't even open 20 tabs in a single Chrome window before it's eaten up all 8GB of my laptop's memory and flat-lined at least one of the cores. If I had left Chrome running as long as my Opera has, it probably would have mutated and used up all the RAM in the world, ever XD


I've also customized the UI and menus so my Opera looks completely different to the standard Opera 11/12 interface (In fact it looks like Opera 6, which was my fav. UI)
The UI is so customizable that I even have created enable/disable JavaScript, Plugins, Cookies etc. buttons on my toolbar - This is something no other browser can do without installing extensions.
Heck, most browsers don't even have proper toolbars now!
You can't even see the Page Title in most modern browsers and have to play Guess the Icon (If the page even has an icon, otherwise you have to go through every one!)


I'm hoping either Opera are able to fulfill their original promise of a true Opera experience on the Chromium platform, or Vivaldi or Otter are able to reach feature parity with 11/12.

I would PAY MONEY for an updated Opera 12! I actually wish they hadn't gotten in bed with Google and stayed a paid browser back then as I would have gladly continued to pay them to keep the old Opera going! The change to Chrome was a kick in the fork for a lot of us, esp. after all the promises that they were only changing out the rendering engine but the browser itself would be the same. A lot of us saw it coming tho' after they fired a lot of the core programming team.

Free stuff is for noobs; Power users understand and appreciate the costs of well engineered software. Opera was always a niche product with a core of loyal users, we didn't mind paying because we the product was good. If another company could even licence the old browser to continue development, I would totally pay to support that!!!

Personally I thought this thread was going to be about Vivendi getting back into the games publishing biz after the split with Activision!
(It's.. it's not AS funny but it's on topic, at least, so there's that...)

ive been eyeballing pale moon
i am mostly concerned about the add ons
i dont use many ad ons but the ones i use i want to keep using

That would be quite late in Presto's lifetime though, and Opera had likely already started to look for the possibility of sharing engines with someone else so as to not bear the whole burden of keeping it up to date on their own, so they perhaps no longer put much effort in at being first and best. Looking at the List of web browsers I posted earlier, that was at Opera 11 or 11.50, and 12 was the last release to use Presto (the next release was 15, which threw away Presto, the built-in mail client, bookmarks, and most of the settings).
Most of the Firefox addons will work in Pale Moon. Those that are known to not work are listed here.

and seamonkey ones ?

i use seamonkey ( firefox in mozilla drag ) not firefox it self

i only mentioned it twice in the thread anyway ;p

i dont use a whole lot of add ons
just ad block plus
no script
and whatever voodoo is necessary to run BM essentials to make gog more usable ( greasemonkey at the moment )

I thought it was an Italian composer. Or a family of bankers in the Witcher universe. Certainly not a browser, though.

My normal tab count is between 100-300 active tabs, however depending on what I'm working on/researching etc. at any given time it can skyrocket up from there. Up until about 2 weeks ago, for the last few months I had 1600-1900 tabs open in Firefox ongoing. At browser startup it would use about 1.5GB of RAM which is fairly reasonable all things considered, but over time consumption would grow to between 2.9GB and 3.1GB at which point the browser would start to become unstable and cause rendering glitches until it ultimately crashed. The underlying cause of this memory usage and instability is of course Firefox extensions that leak memory and have other problems rather than being a problem in the browser itself, and I use about 45 extensions altogether so I was pretty much stuck with random crashes for a while there without any viable recourse. :) If Mozilla published an official version of 64bit Firefox for windows that was a stable and officially supported release, that would be my chosen path as it would avoid the 3GB memory crash (32bit apps can only use around 3GB of memory) and I'd have been fine as I have 32GB of RAM, but alas the only 64bit Firefox available is unsupported unofficial nightly builds and the like which aren't up my alley.

In the last few weeks I managed to go through all my tabs and do some housecleaning, organize some things into bookmark folders and close out old dead pages etc. I pared myself back down to 150ish tabs. :) Additionally I found a useful extension for helping keep the number of open tabs down - MaxTabs, it lets you set a maximum tab count and prevents you from opening more tabs forcing you to either close tabs or bookmark and close them. That helped a lot in avoiding tab sprawl lately. :)

Both ABP and NS work in PM.
However I would advice you to use Adblcok Edge instead of ABP. ABP whitelists advertisers who pay them. There's an option to disable the whitelist though. For that reason I and many others moved onto ABE, which is based on ABP. You can also use Adblock Lattitude.