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...