Opera back in 2000s.
Compressing webpages, built in mail, built in BitTorrent client, tab stacking, “fit to width” which would remove horizontal scrollbars, page tiling, mouse gestures, rocker gestures, I think it even had a calendar.
It’s a shame the direction Opera took after Jon left, but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
Opera also invented the browser Speed Dial, which was super handy back in the day.
But most importantly, Opera invented tabs, or at least the concept of tabbed browsing. I recall using Opera on Windows 3.11 and for the longest time, even during the Win 9x era, no other app used tabs.
In addition to mouse gestures, they had customisable keyboard shortcuts for practically every browser feature, again, something which very few apps bothered with.
The page compression built into Opera Mini was a life saver on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices back in the 2G/GPRS era. Opera Mini loaded pages blindingly quick and there was nothing else like it on the market, even leading up to early Android days.
but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
Too bad he made the unfortunate decision of going with the Chromium engine instead of Gecko, or even making their own engine. I would’ve loved to use Vivalidi if it weren’t for that fact.
Opera didn’t actually invent browser tabs. That’s a common misconception.
Tabs was first invented for the browser InternetWorks
Opera also invented full page zooming. Originally, browser zoom would only increase text size - everything else (including images, the actual page layout, etc) would remain the same size. Opera was the first browser to instead zoom into the entire page.
It also had a lot of features that either require extensions or don’t even exist these days. Things like being able to disable JavaScript or change the User-agent per-site, basic content blocking before ad blockers existed (like modern-day ad blockers but you’d manually build your own list of things to block by going into content blocking mode and clicking on them), an option to only show cached images (useful on slow dial up connections), a fully customizable UI (literally every toolbar, button, and status bar segment could be moved around), and many more.
It was truly a web browser for the future, far far ahead of its time. I miss those days.
Flash and Java, honestly, albeit in different ways. Both saw the web as a platform above all platforms.
Flash was the only way for browsers to do anything high-performance or good-looking from like 1997 to 2010. Any idiot could slap together a cool spinning animation with gradient-colored vector graphics. There were countless genuinely-free games, apparently made for the fun of making them, and even more interactive animations, apparently made to be as offensive as humanly possible.
Java was the big-grey-rectangle alternative, where you knew your browser was about to spend five entire minutes loading something, just to demonstrate a bouncing ball experiment or whatever. But: it was a real general-purpose executable format, with no installation or setup. You stuck a program on a page and it worked right there on the page. Eventually. And once it loaded it’d hitch and jerk constantly, because garbage-collection was always a terrible idea. But sometimes you’d find a page that’d hitch and jerk through playing Quake 2 in your goddamn web browser.
What ultimately killed them was that Adobe is among the worst software companies in the world and Oracle is number one. Flash was a security nightmare. It was hacked together for impressive functionality, and then repackaged for ease of use, so it was about as exploit-hardened as a wet paper towel. The fact it ran poorly on phones (and Steve Jobs was a dick) was just the excuse to stop tolerating its endless vulnerabilities. Java meanwhile was an okay format owned by the devil. It served kinda the same role as WebAssembly does now, except absolutely no-one wanted to put up with licensing it, because Oracle likes to sue its competitors and fuckin’ loves to sue its customers. The company name is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. And if two devices running Java connect via wifi, he expects the air in-between them to be properly licensed. If the free software movement had not been founded to say “fuck printers,” it would have sprung into being in order to say “fuck Oracle.”
Anyway.
Google Chrome, intolerable leash that it now is, made Javascript usefully fast in 2008. Prior to that it was interpreted. Javascript calculators in the AOL days could lag. Mozilla responded with asm.js, inviting the language itself to be performant. Nowadays just about anything could be WASM + WebGPU, and quite frankly most things should be. But for some stupid reason even the chat programs written in Javascript bundle their own browser.
IMO there’s still nothing that’s quite as good as Flash. Efficient vector animations that perform consistently across all major browsers are still unusually hard for non-developers. There are some solutions, but they usually aren’t as designer or animator-friendly and require a huge JavaScript library to be loaded. The barrier to entry for non-developers (or inexperienced developers) creating games that run well cross-browser is still quite high too.
I remember creating a Flash-based chat system back in the day. Before WebSockets and Server Sent Events, Flash was the only way to get bidirectional sockets in a web browser, other than Java applets of course (which were pretty locked down by that point).
Ruffle is obviously as good as Flash, by emulating Flash - but yeah, the creative environment is missing. We need some .io page that clones the old way of churning out 2D games and animations.
We’re in a stupid period of computing where a legitimate way to get games on smartphones and computers is to publish software for DOS because everything has some kind of emulator for that archaic platform.
I’ve heard it phrased as “the only stable API for Linux games is Win32.”
Somewhere I have a boxed copy of Hexen for Linux and I doubt it will run on Void (holding with kernel 6.6.6)
VLC, when codec were thé worst.
Words cannot convey how sketchy the MP4 codec scene was, pirating media in the Windows XP era. Every month you’d have to find some DivX CCCP K-Lite [cracked].7zip.exe and roll the fuckin’ dice.
We were very proficient at reinstalling our operating systems.
omg, klite code pack with media player classic. You took me back
Media Player Classic still rules. Feature-rich with zero bullshit.
I’ve been using PotPlayer for a few years now, didn’t even know MPC was still around
I definitely don’t miss having to install codec packs.
Absolutely VLC, VLC was excellent at what it does before codec issues were even that widespread.
wouldnt this one really just be ffmpeg?
VLC does use ffmpeg (or more specifically, libavcodec) for some of its codecs, but it uses a bunch of other libraries as well, including VLC specific ones.
Do websites count? Vine fizzled out but it would have been a huge success with today’s TikTok crowd.
It had today’s tiktok crowd. It was a huge hit. The only reason it failed is because of monetisation.
Only reason YouTube is popular. No competitor can match it in those terms.
Saying Vine was ahead of its time is like saying Digg or MySpace was ahead of its time. No it was at the precipice and just horribly failed to manage its growth and responding to competitors
It was a huge hit.
It had 200 million monthly active users at peak, which is a decent number but still smaller than every other major social network. I don’t think that’s entirely due to monetization. I think one of the factors is that a lot of people still had small data caps at the time it initially launched (2013), which is not really conducive to spontaneously consuming and uploading video from mobile phones.
Data caps may have played a part, but it would’ve been insignificant. They were 6s videos after all, and the average American was already using over 1GB of data even back then. Instagram had about the same amount of users at the time. And their willingness to give their users more flexibility than vine was by giving users 15s videos and the ability to monetise was all it took. It wasn’t helped by twitter giving zero shits about vine. Which kinda makes sense, they had their own video thing going.
The Source game engine was completely unmatched in its time.
UNIX systems in the 1960s. They are still in use to this day and modified ones run our phones, Steam Decks and space craft!
This is a matter of interpretation, I’ll wager, but to me, “before its time” implies something that came about too early, before the world was ready for it. I’d argue that Unix was of its time, since it was the operating system that went on to widespread success. That is to say, I think that it’s Multics that was before its time. It was derided at the time for being too large and complex (2MB of memory—outrageous!!), and the creators of Unix were Multics programmers who borrowed many of its concepts to make a smaller, less resource-intensive OS that ran better on the computers of the day.
I mean, most of us were stuck using inferior operating systems until Linux and OS X became mainstream versions of it we could use. It’s not like everyone got to use UNIX from day one.
The fact he called the language HolyC is brilliant. He might be crazy, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a genius.
Battlefield heroes. Somehow it couldn’t pay the bills while that style of game is insanely popular now.
Okay this took me back a lot. The nostalgia hits hard.
There’s a version of the game that’s kept online by fans and still playable
Google glasses, I think it’s death was mainly because it looks nerdy aside of course the huge privacy concerns. Which honestly don’t exist now. Look at twitch streamers streaming everywhere. People installing cameras at their home and connected to the net for the world to see. Now we are going hard with VR/AR even Apple has a product for it.
The privacy concern is even worse than it was for google glass. 10 years ago, you could rest assured that google wasn’t processing your video feed in a meaningful way because there was simply no way to meaningfully use it. Now, the stream can be analyzed on your phone using an AI for meaningful results, and that data can easily be sold because user telemetry is worth more now than ever before. People are also faster to dismiss privacy concerns, so it’ll be an easier thing to sell to customers.
I think it died because of technical problems more than anything. We didn’t have batteries good enough back then, and the screen wasn’t all that good. It was heavy, it had problems with overheating and it worked for couple of hours tops
There are people who suddenly go offline completely because they have enough. I guess I should too
Lisp Machines and Smalltak. We’re still catching up to a lot of things that were possible with these systems.
Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve… Even when it was Ingres.
Windows Vista
It looked so good, and brought 64-bit computing to the mainstream. Everyone fucking hated it because the computers that they had (which at the time was the majority) absolutely sucked.
Photoshop. Kinda obvious now but at the time it was as revolutionary as it is mundane now.
Dr Sbaitso early TTS and kinda-AI psychologist, with his cantankerous, all-caps responses.
Now that is a name I haven’t heard in a long time! There are videos of Dr. Sbaitso usage on YouTube (of course). Also got this software with a Soundblaster card somewhen in the 90s.
Dr. Sbaitso popped in my head and I had to see if anyone here remembered it. I had the privilege of being able to use it when it came out. Fun times!
You can still use it through the Classic Reloaded site!
Kai’s Power Tools in 1992 . The interface was so next level it felt out of place and the more you used it features would get unlocked and more advanced. https://winworldpc.com/product/kais-power-tools/20
I remember using an app called Kai’s Power Goo, which is assume is made by the same person.
Pretty bold assumption
