Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertising to
But it was still fast and didn’t gobble up RAM so much (well other than memory leaks, but none of the competitors were free of those either and IE crashing would also crash the desktop because it was the same instance of the same app for some reason).
To be fair, Opera in the 2000’s was craming every single feature they could think about in their browser.
So sure, they got some interesting features before the others but they also had hundreds of useless features cluttering the UI.
But it was still fast and didn’t gobble up RAM so much (well other than memory leaks, but none of the competitors were free of those either and IE crashing would also crash the desktop because it was the same instance of the same app for some reason).