Opera was the source of browser interface innovation and I wish we could replicate that process. They also invented popup blocking, speed dial (the default blank tab UI now on every browser), actual page zoom (before it was just font size increasing/decreasing), and a bunch of things that failed a like mouse gestures and built-in torrent/feedreader.
One big thing Opera didn't invent was the use of the address bar for more than URLs, so you could search and autocomplete on it. I think some combination of Chrome+Firefox iterated on that concept.
We lost "lightweight and snappy" way back in FF 2.0, and every browser blocks pop-ups now. Today's equivalent would be making ad blocking built-in and on by default, which it isn't. The advertising and constant "we updated!" tabs opening up (yeah, great, I don't give a shit, stop telling me) are at least as annoying as Opera's adbar was, IMO. Hopefully we get a spin-off browser eventually that gets back to FF's roots, and then eventually eats it, like FF did Mozilla Browser.
Well "we updated" mobile firefox to 79, and broke almost all add-ons, forgot the bookmarks, most visited sites, effective homepage and made it crash every hour or so. I can't recall more broken version of Firefox since the times it used to be Mozilla Suite.
This was actually the last straw for me. I had 30 tabs open, and Firefox decided to take an update. Any time I opened a new tab, it demanded I restart my browser, closing everything, and refused to function. That level of interruption was so unacceptable I switched (back) to Chrome.
Nope. There were other browser before that. And Opera did not have Tabs back then. They had MDI with a button-bar for document-access. Mozilla was the first one delivering a real tabbed interface, and was later copied by opera and others.
At the end there was a bunch of features coming from several browsers (but mostly mozilla and opera), which improved each other in tight competition; so it's a bit complicated to say what originated from whom.
Pretty sure it was one of the notable innovations in the original Chrome beta release.
Chrome, of course. It integrated google straight in the URL. To this day, I still don't use URL as a search bar, and press ctrl+K (instead of ctrl+L)...
People forget that Firefox gave the world tabbed browsing. Sure, it was around before, but Firefox was the drive and impetus that moved it from a niche idea to the default option across every browser. That was over a decade ago.
Firefox has the opportunity to execute a vision of modern web-browsing again. And, frankly, we really need it. Tabs use to be the solution; now I measure problem difficulty in terms of tabs I have open ("That was a 10-tab problem"), and find myself closing 15-20 at a time.
Arguably, Pocket is trying to do that, but as a secondary service. It needs to be integrated, and seamless. I want stacks of tabs, tagged tab groups, an Inbox-like interface for my web history, including reminders (rip Inbox Reminders), predictive new-tab screens, cross-device tab sharing. I want to collect and link sites I've seen, and quickly be able to find them again. I want internet history that's a set, not a random list.
Firefox could bring us the next wave of web browsing again. Instead, they're building an app that claims to make web browsing better---by going to a second location.