My Opera

» see my.opera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

opera was the third-place browser i kept hearing about but did not use. internet explorer 6 came preloaded on the family ttnet machine in the early 2000s, firefox arrived in 2004 and stuck, and opera was always the browser my hardware-forum acquaintances talked about as if it had a secret feature set. my opera, the side-community for opera users, lived adjacent to that conversation. i never made an account there.

the community launched in august 2001 as a support forum and grew through the mid-2000s into a small social platform. by 2006 every user could run their own blog on the site under a my.opera.com subdomain. by 2008 there were photo albums and feature groups that resembled small interest communities. by april 2011 opera had bolted on a free webmail product called my opera mail. for the diehards this was a self-contained little corner of the web sitting under one opera sign-on.

at its peak it functioned the way every browser-maker community probably wishes its own had. opera ran the infrastructure, the blogs were searchable, the forums were active enough to surface real bugs, and the small culture had an identity distinct from the browser itself. it lived for thirteen years and then opera software made the math call that this was no longer a thing the company wanted to fund.

~ the dossier ~

~ the postmortem ~

on october 31 2013 opera software announced that my opera would shut down. the company gave users a four-month wind-down window to back up their blogs and photos and to find new homes for their data. the blog export format was made compatible with wordpress and movable type and several other weblog hosts so people could carry their archive to whatever platform they preferred.

the announced shutdown date was march 1 2014. the actual final pull happened on march 3 2014. opera's stated reasoning leaned on two facts: alternative social media and blogging services offered more and better features by that point, and the resources required to keep my opera operational no longer matched what opera software wanted to spend. the same year opera was deep in its own browser rewrite away from the presto engine onto blink, so the company's strategic focus had clearly narrowed back to the browser core.

~ the long tail ~

most of the diehards did not migrate to a single successor. blogs scattered across wordpress and tumblr. forums emptied into reddit and into the new opera support pages. mail accounts had to be exported by march or the messages went away with the rest of the infrastructure. the four-month export window was generous by industry standards but the user base was small enough that most of the artifacts simply did not survive the move.

opera software itself kept shrinking the surface it owned through the 2010s. opera unite and opera link both retired or spun out across the same window, and opera mail desktop got handed off to a separate maintainer. by the time my opera shut down the company had effectively decided it was a browser vendor and nothing else.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »