Opera publishes version history, rewrites history

March 13, 2009 · by Haavard

A document detailing the history of the desktop version of Opera has been published. Ever wonder when a feature was first introduced or when a specific version was released? Look it up here!

If anyone spots any errors or omissions, let us know.

It should be noted that in the process of publishing this document, Opera Software has also rewritten history...

Update: An updated document has now been published. It contains more information, and also clarifies the situation with the "Elektra" name.

The document refers to "Elektra" as a rendering engine, and also claims that Opera 5 and 6 were called "Elektra". This was not really the case. "Elektra" was the codename for the 4.0 release of Opera - the whole browser, just like "Merlin" was 9.0-9.2, "Kestrel" was 9.5-9.6, and "Peregrine" is Opera 10.

But nowadays, browser engines are supposed to have names, and people started referring to the engine in Opera 4 and then 5 and 6 (even though I'm not even sure if they had a separate "engine"). I'm not sure exactly when this started, but I have a suspicion that it was incorrectly introduced into Wikipedia, and started spreading from there. Wikipedia changed history, and the world followed

Since the popular belief now is that Elektra was just a rendering engine, and Opera 5 and 6 were built on the Elektra (Opera 4.0) foundation, Opera Software decided to go with the flow and make it easy to refer to the "engine" (i.e. rendering capabilities (thanks, Snorre

)). Each version has a version number for reference anyway.

While Opera Software has officially "rewritten" history, I hope this little piece of information is not completely lost. It might be of some remote interest to "Opera-philes" at least

Readers' comments 10

Left under the original article, as archived.

FavFriday, March 13, 2009 10:53:26 AM
Ic, that's strange, I've published opera's "history" article today as well :-)
malsumisFriday, March 13, 2009 12:08:26 PM
so awesome
Charles SchlossFriday, March 13, 2009 3:47:51 PM
FataLFriday, March 13, 2009 4:40:38 PM
Awesome info! Thanks!
HaavardFriday, March 13, 2009 5:42:27 PM
There's an update for the history document coming up which might actually clarify things a bit, in an official manner.
HaavardMonday, March 16, 2009 9:15:03 AM
ra_mon: Thanks for the suggestions. I'll have someone look into it.
tylerTuesday, March 17, 2009 11:37:39 AM
quite interesting... looking forward to read more and above all, a correction of this mis-information in the history document.
HaavardFriday, March 27, 2009 12:34:59 PM
The document has been updated with more information and a clarification on Elektra:

http://www.opera.com/docs/history/
QasimMonday, April 20, 2009 4:22:02 PM
Opera Mobile is also an Opera product that's been around for over a decade. It would be neat to see a verion history of that.

Would be cool to see some historical Opera Mini stuff too!
HaavardMonday, April 20, 2009 9:00:32 PM
The content blocker is not the same as the URL filter. The latter is an actual user interface. The URL filtering file should probably be added if it isn't listed, though.