8 Browser Innovations by Opera
Even though Opera is the most popular mobile browser in the world, in the desktop market Opera is the most under-rated browser despite having created many innovative features. Which were later copied by other browsers.
Its hard to understand why Opera has only ~2.2% browser market share while IE6 still boasts a whopping ~14.5% market share. Maybe the Opera developers were so busy developing solid browser features that they forgot that they need to do some promotions in order for people to use it. In contrast IE developers were so busy shoving their crap browser down people’s throat they forgot to make a half decent browser. Whatever is the case, the internet is a better place today thanks to some of the innovations that started from the Opera camp.
1) Speed Dial: First introduced by opera in 2007, copied by Chrome since the beginning, added to Safari 4 since beta and can be added to Firefox in the form of an extension.
2) Tabbed Browsing: There are some disagreements about who introduced tabbed browsing. The first version of Opera in 1994 (named MultiTorg Opera) introduced MDI tab where each tabs could be resized, tiled, cascaded and moved. But Netcaptor in 1997 was the first browser that offered the current form of simple fixed tabs that we are used in browsers (but at the bottom). Tabs on top of the browser (unlike Netcaptor) was also introduced by Opera in 2000.
