I used to be a pretty big fan of the Opera browser. It never got much market share, but it was feature-rich, had a highly customizable interface, session management, and was developed in the direction the community wanted rather than what Opera Software ASA wanted, and the dev team at Opera was very willing to listen to this feedback. It was awesome.

Then Opera 15 came out. It was missing a lot of features that made Opera Opera. No tab stacking, no private tabs, no built-in email or IRC client, no session management, no customizable interface and it was developed in the direction Opera Software ASA, who got a new development team mostly based in Poland, wanted. It didn't even have bookmarks at first, which is just silly. I've been waiting since then for Opera to restore features to their browser, but it's been years. Instead they've been adding useless things like... bookmark sharing. And Discover, some news aggregation thing on the New Tab/Speed Dial page. Really, the only thing that made it Opera was the inclusion of a speed dial function - it was Opera in name only, otherwise. The shutdown of My Opera in 2014 only solidified this, as what made Opera unique was not just its features, but also the community. Removing that was just the final nail in the coffin.

So now Jon S. von Tetzchner, the old CEO and co-founder of Opera, has returned to the browser world. He has unveiled a new browser also based on Chrome, but called Vivaldi. It aims to pick up where Opera 12.x left off, and be a true successor to the browser. I've been typing this in Vivaldi, actually. It's only a technical preview right now, has no private browsing, proper extension support or the customizable interface and is really glitchy, but I already feel at home in this browser. I'll be keeping my eye on it, and when it becomes feature-rich enough and bugs get fixed I'll replace Chrome with Vivaldi. I haven't been this excited about a new browser in years.

Opera is dead, long live Vivaldi.