The popular and aggressively named website SlashGeek recently did a feature on Opera where they looked at 5 of the top browser innovations by Opera that has been copied by others that we now take for granted:
1) Browser tabs:
The idea of tabs in browsers was first implemented in Opera before tabs were "cool". Remember having 10-15 browser windows open for each website you visited? That used to be norm until we changed all of that.
2) Speed Dial:
We first released Speed Dial back 2007 with Opera 9.50 beta 1. The final release was in 2008. Speed Dial displays web sites in the form of thumbnails on your startup screen.
Opera's known for being innovative. We were never as innovative as on April 1, 2009, when we invented Face Gestures - a groundbreaking new technology where you can surf the web using nothing but a WebCam and face gestures to control your browser.
You know it's a good joke when people believe in it, and to this day we're still getting requests from users on Face Gestures development. PC World however takes the cake with their Your Browser in Five Years article: "Opera Software's free Opera browser--which pioneered voice and mouse-gesture browsing--also supports face gestures through your Webcam. No wonder that major automakers, including Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, and Mercedes, are experimenting with ways to add browsers to cars and trucks."
We wonder if they ever downloaded and tested Opera before writing the article. Anyway, it's pretty funny. If you have no idea what we're talking about, here's the YouTube video:
Introducing Opera, a super fast lightweight web browser. Opera is an incredible web browser. It has become my favorite for surfing the web. I cannot believe how few people actually know it exists. Especially when so many people surf the web on it every day.
Good to hear that Opera's getting more and more acknowledged.
Initially, a new skin wasn't planned for Opera 10. We were just going to do a 'clean-up' of some elements and focus on UI for new features. However, over time, the new UI elements started jarring with the 9.5 skin, and steadily everything started getting updated. In particular, there were a lot of icons that were just plain fuzzy - they weren't following pixel lines well and the anti-aliasing made them blurry. Almost all the icons have been replaced, and by the time the final release is out they'll all be revised.
Daniel Goldman, who many of you already know as the editor of Opera Watch, and a former “technical evangelist” for Opera, talks about browsing speed on mobile devices in an article by msnbc. While a phone network's speed is a key factor, so is the Web browser that's being used to fetch and render pages:
"Maybe “mobile Web browsing” should be called “mobile Web squinting” considering what it takes to view the Internet using a cell phone. Yet, largely because of Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones such as the BlackBerry and Palm, more users are checking the Internet this way, and the importance of those browsers are growing.
At CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade show this week, expect chatter about the mobile browser “wars,” with Opera Mini, long popular in Europe, likely soon to have more of a presence in the United States, and a test mobile version of another challenger, Firefox, underway."
My Opera
