Opera (Presto era)

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

~ the obit ~

opera was the third-place browser i kept hearing about but did not use. in the early 2000s i was on internet explorer 6 because that was what came with windows on a 33.6k modem in turkey, then on firefox 1.0 around 2004 when extensions started looking like a reason to switch. opera always had a small loud constituency of power users who insisted it was faster, had better tabs, had mouse gestures, had a built-in mail client. i would download it every couple of years, try it for a week, go back to firefox or chrome. presto was the engine underneath all of that for the whole period i was paying attention.

the engine launched with opera 7 on january 28, '03. it was written in c++ by a small team in oslo and was the third major rendering engine in the world after gecko and trident. khtml existed in konqueror but had not yet become webkit. for the next ten years presto was the way opera could ship features the bigger browsers were not shipping. tabbed browsing, session restore, integrated bittorrent, opera turbo for slow connections, a sidebar with mail and chat. some of those features eventually showed up everywhere else with no credit going back to oslo.

the killing blow was the v8 era. when google shipped chrome in september '08 with a javascript engine that compiled to native code, the performance gap opened up fast. mozilla answered with tracemonkey then jagermonkey. apple had nitro. opera tried to keep up with carakan, which shipped in opera 10.50 in '10 and was a real piece of engineering, but the headcount required to maintain a fourth competitive engine was not something opera software could justify against revenue from a browser with single-digit market share. on february 12, '13 the company announced that opera 15 would ship on webkit. by the time it shipped in july '13, webkit had already split and opera was actually on blink, google's fork.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the presto-era opera ui was an experiment that the blink-era opera quietly walked away from. opera 12 had a sidebar with mail, irc, chat, contacts, a download manager that looked like a desktop application from 1998. opera 15 looked like chrome. the mail client got spun off into opera mail. the rss reader and the integrated bittorrent client were just deleted. people who had used opera since the '03 era as a maximalist do-everything browser found that the modern opera was a chrome reskin with a sidebar.

the engineers who had built presto were partly absorbed into the blink team and partly left to start vivaldi in '13, which was specifically marketed as the spiritual successor to the power-user opera. vivaldi shipped on blink too because nobody can afford to write a new engine anymore, but the ui carried forward the same sidebar mentality.

~ the long tail ~

presto did not entirely die in '13. opera mini, the mobile browser that rendered pages on opera's servers and shipped a compressed bitmap to the phone, kept using presto on the server side for years afterward because the engine had been optimized for that exact job. the last presto build with a version number was 2.12.423 in march '15. by the late teens even opera mini was running on chromium on most devices, and presto's last server installation was eventually retired with no announcement.

the engine never had a github repo and nobody open-sourced it. presto exists now only as the code that runs old archived opera builds on archive.org and the wikipedia article that lists its features in past tense.

credit to a reader on submit.cgi.

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