Also, in my web-travels, I was looking up browser benchmarks.
The 2019 (sadly, early 2019 but still relevant) winner for top browser was Opera by PCWorld.com. They did a ton of testing and benchmarking and Opera came out on top.
It has been a long, long time since I've seen Opera at the top. People forget the legacy and the heyday of Opera, when Opera was truly king. Once in a while, in the years since, it may make its way up to the top - but it's even sometimes completely ignored in the browser shootout tests, not even getting mentioned.
I just read this and immediately thought of you, as I recall you telling me that you too were an Opera user. (Technically, I'm using Firefox at the moment - but I do have an Opera instance opened!)
I am in fact an opera user, they just released a new browser I'll get a minute to check out at some point. Its the best browser if you ask me I can't recall why I started using it even anymore but its my go too.
I 'member.
I have used it, off and on, since the days when I paid for it. Yup, all those years ago, it was not free. You could use a trial version, or you could suffer though ads (eventually). You could also crack it, as keygens were available, but I felt obligated to pay for it 'cause it was pretty good.
Opera was the first, for many things. So, I continue to install it and use it. I didn't like the early transitional versions of Opera when they were moving to the Chromium codebase, but sometime around version 21 to 23 they managed to make it usable again.
I had no idea it was a paid browser back in the day. TIL
(post is archived)