It's odd; my first guess was Opera 1.0 release date, but that's in April. When it comes to arbitrary dates to use as the commit date, I have no idea why that was chosen. Maybe it'd make sense to someone with the actual VCS history!
There are only a handful of actual commits on the repo: two from 1995, and the rest from 4 days ago. It would seem that someone had a tarball of the source and specifically choose to backdate the commit, for whatever reason.
While I doubt this could be spun into a usable browser - legal issues aside, a lot has changed on the modern web, and the opera devs probably abandoned the old engine for a reason - I still greatly enjoy this leak. Even just out of defiance. I am a very defiant person ;-). I also long for the days where a browser fit on a floppy, and a small team could implement one from scratch.
They didnt abandon old codebase because it was bad (it was leaner and faster than anything before and after :( ). They did it for economic reasons - taking advantage of all the google work on the blink means Opera "browser development" is currently nothing more than customizing a skin.
If it's the complete browser, then it is perfectly usable. I am using it to make this post, i am using it as my mail client, and i use it as my primary browser, only shelling out to chrome for websites that drank too much of the js cool aid.
As often with proprietary source code, it may include some third-party code or libraries that they have no right to redistribute, for example.
To "free" a repository, you must first audit the code for 3rd-party code and check the legal status of this code, and you may need to replace it with a free replacement, and find a license compatible with all the code. That may represent a significant effort, with associated costs...
You'd have to make completely sure there is no 3rd-party code in there you don't have a license for to redistribute. So usually, especially for old codebases, it's not that easy to simply open-source them, mostly for legal reasons.
CEO is still the same. Presto developers have been laid off.
I don't know, its hard to describe how much Opera-when-they-still-made-their-rendering-engine-inhouse is or is not Opera-using-webkit-and-bought-by-Chinese.
Well, it's subjective of course, maybe I should have said "the things I liked about Opera". Those "dry" configuration dialogs that always seemed to go that extra mile, for example. I doubt Vivaldi is ever going to reach that level again, and their other offerings aren't even trying.
they would risk competitor using 1/4 memory, loading instantly, and with zero UI latency(load 40 tabs in anything Chromelike and then try fullscreening YT video- takes almost one second).
I'm like 80% sure my Mazda head-unit uses a heavily bastardized version of presto as its rendering engine and most of the UI is written in html/js/css.
Yeah. Except all of those patches are provided on 4chan with English (language of my potential enemy, i guess. oh wait, no, because i'm not an ignorant cunt like you) instructions.
Or, you could've just asked.
So much salty hate for Opera in this thread! Personally, I think it's current incarnation is pretty awesome. I'm a bit uneasy about the Chinese company that bought it, and I'm keeping my eyes open for bad behavior, but right now I love the direction that the actual browser has taken.
Old-school Opera fans say that it's just Chrome with a power-user skin slapped on top. Well... yeah, exactly! It has none of the compatibility issues that dogged old-school Opera for years, but it's a million times better than plain Chrome. Plus, the bookmarks and settings sync service doesn't flake out once a month like Google's and Firefox's does. Easy sync between desktop and mobile, and Opera is by far the most performant mobile browser.
I totally get that there's a hardcore audience who liked the old built-in desktop email client, or some of the UI quirks that differ from Chrome or Firefox. However, surely you have accept that these are fringe minority preferences (even Mozilla spun off its integrated email client, and keeps talking about dropping support altogether). Besides, if you really want those things then Vivaldi is re-implementing them anyway.
I'm posting this from chropera as we speak, and I used presto for a decade before that.
While your points are spot on, there's one thing about Presto - performance, or more specifically resource usage. Modern layouting engines are simply not careful, because apparently all their devs have 32GB RAM and 8 cores, so users have to as well.
The problem is the argument "people generally don't have 50 tabs open, so why bother". Well, it bothers people who could comfortably do so in presto, it's not just nostalgia goggles.
As for vivaldi, I really tried to like it, putting up with its numerous subtle bugs. Then I deobfuscated its source code one day and realized if it ever becomes stable, it will be the day when a large scale nodejs project managed to do so. For some reason (cheap labor?) they decided Java or Typescript isn't the route.
The reasons why Presto coped with less memory are complex and not really down to carefulness (there's plenty of resources put into memory consumption in both Blink and EdgeHTML), but reasons of architectural decisions that led to comparatively poor performance (JS-heavy stuff especially!) and site compatibility bugs (using different types for things that are web observable, especially), and some that led to comparative instability (heck, Chrome esp. has UI lagginess with large numbers of tabs due to IPC, but gains stability and the ability for multiple tabs to be doing stuff at once as a result).
Vivaldi is mostly formed of ex-Opera employees (esp. early, long-term ones!), and I expect they're getting comparable salaries to when they left Opera, at least (i.e., a bit below market average for the cities they're in). Why are they using JS? I can't really tell, beyond a desire to use web-technology as much as possible; I'd totally agree TypeScript or Flow would be better!
> using different types for things that are web observable, especially
Can you be more specific?
> has UI lagginess with large numbers of tabs due to IPC
The IPC lock contention is part of the issue (as well as tab per process model), but those can be all worked around (sorta, well, chromium got rid of no-sandbox ifdefs a year ago...).
> Vivaldi is mostly formed of ex-Opera employees
Morten Stenshorn, Dave Rune, Rafal Chlodnicki, Sigbjorn Finne - more than half of names in there! - are the names signed under layout engine and ES engine in the leaked tree. Same people you can find on https://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/
How many people I could track down who worked on opera 12 and now vivaldi? None.
I'm willing to counter-speculate: Whatever made original presto great was not because of their cofounder and CEO, but the people who actually wrote the code.
Sure: often using shorts where other browsers used ints, using floats where others used doubles, or even using ints where others used doubles (back when much of that code was written, Presto was far more concerned about performance on devices without FPUs than other browsers). All of this could easily be observed through layout and scripting, and much of it led to many of the hardest to tackle site compatibility bugs that were ultimately never fully fixed (and most never had any fix shipped). `z-index` was a pain point, as was the use of ints for all percentages in CSS.
> How many people I could track down who worked on opera 12 and now vivaldi? None.
Almost all those who are listed at https://vivaldi.com/team/ worked on either Presto-based Opera Desktop or Presto itself (which were, post Presto being a thing, distinct teams). Heck, Yngve was literally the first person aside from their founders to work on Opera, and owned the much of the network code in Presto till near the end; Petter I think was the only other person to have worked for over 20 years at Opera, having worked on the Desktop browser for the majority (all?) of the time.
If my memory is correct, the names in the source-tree were module owners and module QA, which amounts to a fraction of the number of people involved (esp. historically: those who had moved on to other things or whatever you're unlikely to find by name in the source tree). At any given point there was maybe a quarter of the current team with names anywhere in the source tree… and that's only considering Presto. Desktop had an even smaller ratio, as far as I'm aware.
If you looked in the ES engine, I'm pretty sure my name should be there as the module QA (though I'm not sure this will be true at the point desktop 12.1x forked). So, uh, I might know the people involved and know their employment history… Very few people from the old Core department (that worked on Presto) remain at Opera, maybe 20% at absolute most, and AFAIK mostly left voluntarily.
As for those you listed, half of them joined relatively late on, and not that long before the move to WebKit (announced Feb 2013). And Dave Rune isn't a person, I presume you're potentially mixing Dave Vest and Rune Lillesveen?
One hour after you've posted this comment, I went through every single comment in the thread and found 1 (one) negative comment about Opera. Considering that, wouldn't you say it's fair to say that your comment is bait?
This probably should have been a reply underneath "akmittal"'s top-level comment, since I'm referring to two or three replies he received.
His comment was one of the first things posted. So at the time of MY comment, that was very much the tone of this thread.
The direction of the conversation has changed since then, which probably explains why my comment has gone from 15 upvotes to zero. However, it was clearly not bait at the time.
[1] "'They' are not even 'they' anymore. At this point, Opera is pretty much just a brand name making a mockery of the former program."
[2] "That the fork will outcompete current Blink-based Opera?"
[3] "they would risk competitor using 1/4 memory, loading instantly, and with zero UI latency(load 40 tabs in anything Chromelike and then try fullscreening YT video- takes almost one second)."
Again, at the time of my comment there were only 7 or 8 in the thread altogether. So... "so much", then.
If you wish, you could quibble over whether these are sufficiently "salty". I don't care if our opinions differ. Regardless, you're implying that a positive counterpoint to negativity over Opera is out of place here, and that's nonsense.
Maybe this is not the right point to ask this but are there any (even) bigger leaks of close-source software that have appeared? I always wondered what would happen if parts of Windows or Google search engine became public.
Usually it's old software that gets leaked. Windows NT4 source code has leaked before, amongst others. It doesn't have much of an impact at that point, except for enthousiasts.
Not sure if "appeared" is the right word in this case, but around 2004 there was a group/individual announcing Cisco Pix source for sale in a random "alt.gap.international.sales" (heh) newsgroup post. They also offered Napster source among other, less important, things. It was all over the tech news at the time.
If opera did a good job syncing extensions, I would switch right away.
Opera Neon is an awesome experiment. There are a few things I don't like, like no full path in the address bar, and no shortcut to switch tabs (I might have missed it, though), but how often do browser innovate the way Opera Neon has?
I've actually been testing Opera on my 2015 MBP because Chrome was draining my battery in about 2 hours and Safari doesn't work for me for a variety of reasons. I've found Opera to be the most power-efficient browser short of Safari, and miles ahead of Chrome and Firefox - but I'm curious if others have this same experience.
The answer is - it's sorta comparing apples and oranges - libraries, or general C++ inlining cruft can inflate the binary size a lot indeed.
A much fairer comparison is to compare source side by side. Chromium source is about 4x larger than operas, when not counting any 3rd party dependencies.
Or even better, compile times. Chromium build (or firefox) is half a day job on mid-range laptop (especially with 4/8G memory).
Opera builds in about 20 minutes. I was also pleasently surprised the codebase is not particularly bitrotten, and both VS2015 and modern gcc could cope with it.
Opera used a relatively small subset of C++ for compatibility with some diabolical compilers for embedded devices, so in a sense it's less surprising that modern compilers had no problem: there's very little complex going on.
My (non-expert) understanding is that, in general, the source code is going to be much more verbose than the machine-code output of a compiler.
Considering that source code is written in a human-readable language and syntax, and machine code only needs to contain enough information for a CPU to decode, it would seem to follow that the source code should be a less efficient method for describing the program.
Back in the days when I recompiled Chrome for the Pi 1/2, I used a qemu-chroot environment prepared with debootstrap for building. About 10x faster than the "real" Pi, guess it's still way faster than a Pi 3.
Unlikely, given you just commented on it. It may have received flags from users, which will cause it to go down in the rankings, even prior to receiving a '[flagged]' tag.
89 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadThere is mirror at https://bitbucket.org/prestocore-fan/presto/
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:C34ZPHM4A27XDGR5QYMZHPIBNYJ5A6EAC34ZPHM4A27XDGR5QYMZHPIBNYJ5A6EA
Will pretty soon add a email client to their browser.
I don't know, its hard to describe how much Opera-when-they-still-made-their-rendering-engine-inhouse is or is not Opera-using-webkit-and-bought-by-Chinese.
I'm like 80% sure my Mazda head-unit uses a heavily bastardized version of presto as its rendering engine and most of the UI is written in html/js/css.
Opera Mini still uses Presto, and there are some TVs which in principle are still supported that use Presto.
I guess I was partially right though, as I do remember the original Wii using Opera for the Internet Channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Channel
This isn't a game of capture the flag. People who leak a film before it is released haven't removed the copyright of the film from the movie studio.
"Patch to support VP9: https://paste.fedoraproject.org/528850/14846609 First, you need to update the firmware to 1.3.0 libvpx"
Old-school Opera fans say that it's just Chrome with a power-user skin slapped on top. Well... yeah, exactly! It has none of the compatibility issues that dogged old-school Opera for years, but it's a million times better than plain Chrome. Plus, the bookmarks and settings sync service doesn't flake out once a month like Google's and Firefox's does. Easy sync between desktop and mobile, and Opera is by far the most performant mobile browser.
I totally get that there's a hardcore audience who liked the old built-in desktop email client, or some of the UI quirks that differ from Chrome or Firefox. However, surely you have accept that these are fringe minority preferences (even Mozilla spun off its integrated email client, and keeps talking about dropping support altogether). Besides, if you really want those things then Vivaldi is re-implementing them anyway.
While your points are spot on, there's one thing about Presto - performance, or more specifically resource usage. Modern layouting engines are simply not careful, because apparently all their devs have 32GB RAM and 8 cores, so users have to as well.
The problem is the argument "people generally don't have 50 tabs open, so why bother". Well, it bothers people who could comfortably do so in presto, it's not just nostalgia goggles.
As for vivaldi, I really tried to like it, putting up with its numerous subtle bugs. Then I deobfuscated its source code one day and realized if it ever becomes stable, it will be the day when a large scale nodejs project managed to do so. For some reason (cheap labor?) they decided Java or Typescript isn't the route.
Vivaldi is mostly formed of ex-Opera employees (esp. early, long-term ones!), and I expect they're getting comparable salaries to when they left Opera, at least (i.e., a bit below market average for the cities they're in). Why are they using JS? I can't really tell, beyond a desire to use web-technology as much as possible; I'd totally agree TypeScript or Flow would be better!
Can you be more specific?
> has UI lagginess with large numbers of tabs due to IPC
The IPC lock contention is part of the issue (as well as tab per process model), but those can be all worked around (sorta, well, chromium got rid of no-sandbox ifdefs a year ago...).
> Vivaldi is mostly formed of ex-Opera employees
Morten Stenshorn, Dave Rune, Rafal Chlodnicki, Sigbjorn Finne - more than half of names in there! - are the names signed under layout engine and ES engine in the leaked tree. Same people you can find on https://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/
How many people I could track down who worked on opera 12 and now vivaldi? None.
I'm willing to counter-speculate: Whatever made original presto great was not because of their cofounder and CEO, but the people who actually wrote the code.
Sure: often using shorts where other browsers used ints, using floats where others used doubles, or even using ints where others used doubles (back when much of that code was written, Presto was far more concerned about performance on devices without FPUs than other browsers). All of this could easily be observed through layout and scripting, and much of it led to many of the hardest to tackle site compatibility bugs that were ultimately never fully fixed (and most never had any fix shipped). `z-index` was a pain point, as was the use of ints for all percentages in CSS.
> How many people I could track down who worked on opera 12 and now vivaldi? None.
Almost all those who are listed at https://vivaldi.com/team/ worked on either Presto-based Opera Desktop or Presto itself (which were, post Presto being a thing, distinct teams). Heck, Yngve was literally the first person aside from their founders to work on Opera, and owned the much of the network code in Presto till near the end; Petter I think was the only other person to have worked for over 20 years at Opera, having worked on the Desktop browser for the majority (all?) of the time.
If my memory is correct, the names in the source-tree were module owners and module QA, which amounts to a fraction of the number of people involved (esp. historically: those who had moved on to other things or whatever you're unlikely to find by name in the source tree). At any given point there was maybe a quarter of the current team with names anywhere in the source tree… and that's only considering Presto. Desktop had an even smaller ratio, as far as I'm aware.
If you looked in the ES engine, I'm pretty sure my name should be there as the module QA (though I'm not sure this will be true at the point desktop 12.1x forked). So, uh, I might know the people involved and know their employment history… Very few people from the old Core department (that worked on Presto) remain at Opera, maybe 20% at absolute most, and AFAIK mostly left voluntarily.
As for those you listed, half of them joined relatively late on, and not that long before the move to WebKit (announced Feb 2013). And Dave Rune isn't a person, I presume you're potentially mixing Dave Vest and Rune Lillesveen?
His comment was one of the first things posted. So at the time of MY comment, that was very much the tone of this thread.
The direction of the conversation has changed since then, which probably explains why my comment has gone from 15 upvotes to zero. However, it was clearly not bait at the time.
[1] "'They' are not even 'they' anymore. At this point, Opera is pretty much just a brand name making a mockery of the former program."
[2] "That the fork will outcompete current Blink-based Opera?"
[3] "they would risk competitor using 1/4 memory, loading instantly, and with zero UI latency(load 40 tabs in anything Chromelike and then try fullscreening YT video- takes almost one second)."
Again, at the time of my comment there were only 7 or 8 in the thread altogether. So... "so much", then.
If you wish, you could quibble over whether these are sufficiently "salty". I don't care if our opinions differ. Regardless, you're implying that a positive counterpoint to negativity over Opera is out of place here, and that's nonsense.
In the migration to 15 they promised they'd implement most of what Opera 12 had. They didn't even get to 10% or so.
They haven't even implemented the ability to switch tabs by holding the right mouse button and scrolling, one of the most basic things.
Opera Neon is an awesome experiment. There are a few things I don't like, like no full path in the address bar, and no shortcut to switch tabs (I might have missed it, though), but how often do browser innovate the way Opera Neon has?
That's what I call a difference.
I haven't used Opera recently, but AFAIK it was the smallest browser, by far.
A much fairer comparison is to compare source side by side. Chromium source is about 4x larger than operas, when not counting any 3rd party dependencies.
Or even better, compile times. Chromium build (or firefox) is half a day job on mid-range laptop (especially with 4/8G memory).
Opera builds in about 20 minutes. I was also pleasently surprised the codebase is not particularly bitrotten, and both VS2015 and modern gcc could cope with it.
Considering that source code is written in a human-readable language and syntax, and machine code only needs to contain enough information for a CPU to decode, it would seem to follow that the source code should be a less efficient method for describing the program.
> System requirements
> A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.
> At least 100GB of free disk space.
> Still [with an SSD and indexing off], expect build times of 30 minutes to 2 hours when everything has to be recompiled.
As of this comment, it's ranked 308, on page 11:
https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=11
But what if we only distribute the patches? Would there still be legal issues?
Using Opera 12.xx I can download the zip from bitbucket bypassing the captcha
I love the 12-series Opera, hate it when they jump to Chrome-engine, tho understandably T_T