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.