My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.
Opera didn’t use chromium back then.
Chrome was kind of late to the web browsers market.
Opera was initially released on 10 April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers still actively developed. It was commercial software for its first ten years and had its own proprietary layout engine, Presto. In 2013, it switched from the Presto engine to Chromium.
Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.
Pop-ups but not ads. They have moved to restrict what adblockers can block with newer versions of chromium.
Google has probably done more than any other major web company to ensure that ads aren’t allowed to harm users — whether through unsolicited pop-ups, malware, or other attacks.
Malware ads used to be commonplace on ad networks; with “legitimate” websites like CNN.com showing ads (served via a third-party ad network) that attacked security holes in Windows users’ browsers.
Ask anyone who worked in IT in the early 2000s. Web ads used to be a shitpit. Now they’re annoying at most.