Out of curiosity, here's Opera's homepage from 10 Jan 1998:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980110221024/http://operasoftwa... (via the Wayback Machine)

Edit: Hacker News in Opera 3.0: http://imgur.com/FPYc.png

It actually did an okay job.

"Lastly, Opera isn't for free - and never will."

That's one of the coolest websites I've seen in a while I remember doing something similar in middle school.

But it goes away after a cookie.

I saw a different page and started to wonder if they were doing AB testing :).

I like that the click through is to /?mode=forreals

I came to post the same thing about middle school. I'm sure they had us working in MS Frontpage. The bad old days, but I was fascinated.

I like that the computer depicted in the animated gifs looks like it's from 15 years ago.

I'd wager the .gif is that old. Running strings(1) on it turned up 'NETSCAPE2.0'.

Some of the nostalgic things about the "old web" have modern incantations, if you look for them. For instance, the awesome spinning "construction" icons have been replaced by "Beta" tags.

Yep, it says so in Painting The Web, a fine book on graphics design for the left-brained neanderthal :-P

Opera is a classy browser. It's fast, efficient, and has a lovely interface. I love it and I really wish it was more popular.

Happy Birthday Opera! Here's hoping you get more love this year - you deserve it! http://www.opera.com/portal/15/

Are you using Opera on a PC, Linuxbox or Mac?

I've use Opera recently on my Mac and find it nowhere close to Safari or Firefox in terms of elegance and feature set. Gestures won't work via the trackpad and Google Docs won't load. Clunky.

I use it on a PC. I can't speak for the Mac but it works beautifully on a my WinXP box.

Plus I am heavily keyboard driven, and Opera is the only browser I know that can be used without the mouse (at all!). Navigating links is especially cool!

I use it on my mbp. I agree the feature set is inferior, but its the only browser that can handle the 50+ tabs i like to have open at once. ff3 eats up cpu and overheats things.

hmm... I usually have 300+ tabs open (6-8 windows, 2-3 processes) with FF3 with no slowdown... (XP/C2D/4G)

I was use it when I'm away from the laptop charger. All other browsers drain it out in less than an hour. With Opera I can squeeze a good 4 hours out of it. (I also use a lightweight win32 editor called editeur that does syntax highlighting instead of emacs for all my "write first, see it run later" type code.)

I use it on Linux, Windows, and my Blackberry, actually. I simply love it, though there are the occasional rough spots - like Google Docs or Gmail not loading. Thankfully, I don't make extensive use of them anyhow, so I'm solid.