This was the entrypoint to Firefox for millions of people.

Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how you browse the web!

Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

I believe opera had tabs for a while before Firefox. It was one of the main reasons I think I used opera for a good long while.

You are correct - Opera had tabs way before Firefox, and Opera had a full mail client as well without feeling bloated or slow.

The free version of Opera also had ads at the time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Opera_6...

I strongly believe that if Opera had had a cool name, it would have been a real contender. People don't like operas, they're boring and stodgy.

Opera was a paid option. It was doomed from the start.

I paid for Opera (twice) because it was clearly the superior product. People spend money on a better machine, so why not on a clearly better browser? (At that time).

And although browsers are no longer distinctly better than each other, I still donate to Mozilla.

Because you can’t buy a free machine. But you can download a free browser.

IIRC the rendering engine wasn’t that great either at that time.

Opera Presto was the fastest browser (and js engine) in the world at its prime.

Opera was the best

Still remember the mouse gestures to zip around the pages.

What a fun time.

You don't need to feel deprived.

https://github.com/marklieberman/foxygestures

https://otter-browser.org/ (Tools → Preferences… → Advanced → Mouse → [X] Enable mouse gestures)

I was thinking more what the result looked like.

Website often broke in Opera due to being written for "IE" standard.

Not really, I was an Opera user when Firefox 0.8 came out... Switched pretty much permanently, Opera also had mouse gestures which I was actively using and still use with a Firefox extension...

Opera had no real tabs at that time. It was still MDI with a button-bar for fast access. Was'nt the browser doing this at the time, and it was'nt as good as Mozillas Tab-addon, which later was built into first firefox-versions.

Opera added true tabs some versions later, while still hanging someway on the MDI-tradition.

To me, the value proposition is still tabs. I have hundreds open at a time. Once or twice a month I will cleanup hundreds of windows and tabs. I've created habits to open up most everything in new tabs and new "projects" in new windows.

I think I do this as a self-remedy for my ADHD, I am likely to allow an interruption to disrupt me but I do need to close the loop on whatever I was working on before an interruption. A window or set of open tabs is enough of a reminder to help me close the loop.

I've long opened everything in a new tab, but would you believe I just realised I need to consciously make the effort to open new "projects" in new windows 2 hours before reading this post? I think the difficulty is working out when that line of a tangent has been crossed.

Tree-style tabs [0] in Firefox help to keep a train of "research" together.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use a vertical tab extension, and with that I regularly get to > 1k tabs.

Different strokes for different folks but what on earth do you people do on 1000 or even 100 tabs? I have a handful of sites I regularly go to and maybe 50 that I visit more than occasionally. They’re all bookmarked. When I’m done browsing I close the window. What state are you preserving keeping everything open in a tab?

For instance, i go to frontpage of HN and open in new tabs the stories and comments that interest me. Its not uncommon for 15 stories with 15 comments sections (thats 30 tabs already),

Then I sometimes, open links from comments, or Wikipedia etc.

Today i have more than 50 tabs open just starting from HN.

Some stories when i read I close, but sometimes when I think i need to reread or save for later.

After the week i usually have around 150+ tabs that i have left for later, I do the triage and I either save to my notes (like interesting, os dev articles, or rust or postgre optimization tips ...) or close.

And thats just for HN.

Often it will be documentation + stack overflow results. It can be handy to just leave that stuff open, because then you can find it easily. I do purge all tabs every now and again, but when there's no downside to leaving them open, they can build up for a month or so.

What are those 50 sites you visit? I have like 4 which I visit on a daily basis (reddit/4chan/hckrnews/youtube)

Phoenix/Firebird was sold first through its incredible speed, compared to IE, plus popup blocking. The tabs were a nice bonus but the other two were the features that got all of us pushing the browser on every friend and relative who'd let us, even if they'd never use/understand tabbed browsing (some don't, to this day).

Extensions were the other 10x thing with Firefox. Even now browsing the web without them is torture.

> Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy...

...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN almost entirely worthless from a privacy perspective. At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.

> At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.

In fairness, that is a nontrivial privacy win for a decent number of people.

That's not totally fair. They also hide your IP from sites you access. So if somebody sent me a link to an IP logger and I clicked it, they would not know what city or state I actually live in, for example.

True. You're definitely right there.

Which is just another reason why it is so awfully frustrating flr me that they won't fix their extension apis:

I fully believe the extensions were really a huge part of Firefox' moat.

In that case, Opera Browser in 2001 was the first tabbed browser I used. Long before Chrome.

I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.

Good to see someone else remembering the mouse gestures. It was what hooked me, together with being a fast browser at the time.

On a sidenote, I stopped using Opera when they included a torrent-client in their webbrowser. The amount of bloat was staggering.

I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper

Wasn't Avant a reference browser to check standards compliance? I recall toying with it. Then switched to a Firefox plugin which used an HTML linter.

I was a teen so I'm not sure what it was. It just had the magic of tabs. Haha

I was thinking of Amaya. Avant is unrelated.

And Maxthon!