Opera Link

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

~ the last words ~

On 12 June 2008 Opera shipped version 9.5, codenamed Kestrel, and the announcement led with a service rather than with a rendering improvement. Opera Link kept your bookmarks and your Speed Dial identical across every copy of Opera you were signed into, including Opera Mini on a phone. The press release called it a desktop debut, which is the tell. The syncing had been running on the mobile side before the desktop browser was given it.

There was also a web page at link.opera.com. You could sign in from a machine that was not yours, in a browser that was not Opera, and read your own bookmarks out of it. Notes and typed history were added to the set later. A public OAuth API let other software read the same data, which is a level of openness browser vendors stopped offering almost immediately afterward.

In 2008 that combination was rare. Chrome arrived that September with no sync in it at all. Firefox was still calling its version Weave and shipping it as an add-on, and most people who wanted their bookmarks in two places were using Xmarks or emailing a file to themselves. Opera had the smallest desktop share of the four and the most finished answer to the problem.

My own browser history runs Internet Explorer 6 and then Firefox, on machines in Turkey that were synced with nothing, and Opera sat next to both for a decade without ever being installed. The place Opera did reach me was the phone. Opera Mini squeezed pages through a server before sending them down, which on a Turkish mobile connection in 2008 was the difference between a page loading and a page giving up. So I knew the browser through the thing on the handset, and a service whose whole purpose was joining that handset to a desktop copy I did not run was built for somebody else.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

The unit of sync was small, and the service was old fashioned about it. Bookmarks and Speed Dial entries went up to Opera's servers as structured items rather than as one opaque profile blob. That is the reason the web interface could exist at all. A profile blob is readable only by the program that wrote it, while a list of bookmarks with titles and folders is readable by anything you point at it.

It was also tied to Presto, the rendering engine Opera wrote in house. When Opera abandoned Presto in 2013 and rebuilt the desktop browser on Chromium, the new browser arrived with a new sync service written against a new backend. From that point the company was running two of them for one feature, and one of the two belonged to a browser it had stopped developing.

~ the day it died ~

The warning went up in the autumn of 2015 in a forum thread whose title carried the deadline in it. The explanation was not dressed up at all: a small team could not maintain two syncing services with different codebases, so it would keep the one attached to the browser that still shipped. On 14 December 2015 at 09:39 a post appeared saying that Opera Link and its public OAuth API had been closed that day. link.opera.com stopped answering.

Users were told to open a current Opera or Opera Mini and sign in with the same Opera Link username and password, which would start syncing against the new service straight away. That worked for anyone who had moved across. Anyone still running the Presto browser, which was a real and stubborn population, got nothing, because no version of it could speak to the new backend. The old browser kept rendering pages for years afterward, minus the one feature that had made it feel like it came from the future.

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