Absolutely VLC, VLC was excellent at what it does before codec issues were even that widespread.

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.

wouldnt this one really just be ffmpeg?

I used to work at Sears, and I could never figure out how a company that found its initial success in a catalog business didn’t immediately see the opportunities the internet presented. Now Sears is all but gone, and Bezos gets to go to space with Shatner :(

Man, I remember seeing that BeOS demonstration that had a spinning cube with a different video playing on each face, and being absolutely dumbfounded. Thanks for reminding me of that.

*NeXTSTEP. And the NS object calls are part of the Objective-C programming language it was built with.

that’s why all sorts of system calls start with NS

What do you mean with this?

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 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.

Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.

The fact he called the language HolyC is brilliant. He might be crazy, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a genius.

Wow, that was a wild ride of a story. Very sad though.

The pointing-finger cursor used for navigating stacks was later used in the first web browsers, as the hyperlink cursor.[39]

HyperCard was awesome!

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.

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).

The protocol is fine. Just fine. It lacked authentication and transcoding, builtin thumbnails, content metadata.

Without authentication or transcoding it didn’t have the public umph it needed to get people to spend some decent time/money on graphical interface.

I’ve honestly never seen a GUI client that was even half reasonable to try to find a piece of media. Most of them are just generic file folder layouts. It’s really no great surprise that Plex, Jellyfin and Emby push them out of the environment completely.

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