Today I saw Vivaldi in my newsfeed. Some Linux fanpage linked to it with the comment that was something along “A new player on the browsers’ market“. Since I can pride myself on trying every single browser that was produced for Windows 7, I clicked on the link, having my curiosity woken up. And when I saw that Vivaldi wants to be a continuer of early Opera versions, suddenly my memories flooded me…
Suddenly I was 9 years old again, looking something like on that picture above, and exploring the web. I don’t remember when exactly I started using Opera. But I remember that I fell in love with some of its community features like chat and blogs, and all the community stuff. I started spending a lot of time at Opera IRC channels. Back then my English wasn’t very good so usually a dictionary was opened in another window. I was improving my English level and meeting new people at once. I remember being so much excited I could talk to a person from Finland in English and telling my parents about that. Nowadays it’s no wonder but yeah, for a 9-year-old that was a really important thing.
I remember playing trivia in Matrix room and I remember talking with my broken English to people at Mel’s Tea Room. This room was so cool, and its owner was such a nice person. Unfortunately, when I came back there a few years later, I found out there’s usually almost nobody except two people. The magic of channel disappeared but I have never forgotten it, as I haven’t forgotten Opera’s community tab as well. I liked reading featured posts, I even posted a few of myself, even though my English still wasn’t that good — but yeah, I liked this community thing.
And then Opera announced the end of My Opera. I guess there were many reasons to make such a decision. In Poland a new social site was up — NaszaKlasa.pl — and it was gathering millions of people, meanwhile in the world Facebook has started gaining a lot of attention. Eventually it came to Poland as well, eliminating a lot of social sites here. In such situation there’s not much point in running the community and I guess it was better for Opera team to focus on another things… For example getting up to date with recent trends in browsing, like presented on screen below.
Yeah, Opera started being very similar to Firefox, Chrome and other browsers. Eventually even Internet Explorer got caught up with that trend. This was the end of Opera I remembered. But let’s remember there were a lot of reasons for that…
I wonder what happens now. Vivaldi is here, yeah. It’s maybe not really finished (well, it’s a technical preview) and I can see that, since the blog page keeps being smaller or bigger because unknowingly I’m constantly launching some sort of key combination that makes it either bigger or smaller, and it’s kinda annoying but I understand these are only beginnings.
I guess that the guys working on Vivaldi have some concepts about that, since they’ve been working in Opera (from what I understood), but I wonder how do they want to keep the social side of the browser with Facebook present on the market. I mean, there was Instagram. It was bought by Facebook. There was Whatsapp. Guess what happened to it? Bought by Facebook, yeah. Foursquare refused to be bought by Facebook and now is barely managing on its own. The world is owned by big corporations right now — Google, Amazon, Facebook. I’m just wondering what will happen. I mean, there’s a trend of running away from Facebook but nobody really runs away without coming back to it.
People may run away to Vivaldi’s Community but how will Facebook react to that? If it will be small, probably there will be no reaction, but what if it grows and refuses to be bought by it? I sure hope you have some great ideas for building the community, guys. Else we’re gonna post a few things on our blogs and then they’re gonna be closed, like it happened with Opera blogs. So much interesting content went down…
These are hard times, so some thought is needed about that. But anyway, good luck in building the browser and the community. I’m sure a lot of old-Opera guys (and it happened again, I pressed the “-” key and the page got bigger… but hey, that’s the progress — now I know what sort of key combination launches it, haha) will like it a lot. But for how long?
I can relate to the feeling of nostalgia but it’s not always good. For example, in Poland a lot of business starts being built up on this feeling. There was a newspaper from old times, relaunched now with the support of people. There were a lot of things relaunched just because they were from “old times”. And they weren’t always that good. And I sure hope that Vivaldi is a different thing.
