Users in Europe/UK had to pay per-minute telco charges on top of the cost for the dial-up service (which itself was time-limited). Pretty much everywhere else in Canada and the US had free local-calling, so you only had the extra-fee of the dial-up service (which was usually time limited). One of the services I used (in Canada, early 90's), gave free time on off-peak hours 10pm-8am for ~$25.

Most of the people I knew from Finland, UK, Norway, were pretty jealous of our unlimited phone service.

Aye. I got a 17" HP Pavilon, AMD A8-5550M Radeon HD, 2.1Ghz with 8GB Ram (single-stick, 2 slots) for $450 (@Office Depot). I'll add another 8GB of RAM and an SSD this year (into the DVD slot). While it certainly wont win any races, or run recent Triple-A PC games... then again who wants to run recent Triple-A games ?? ;-)

I have little to no interest in Opera 15+, but they continually contribute to the Chromium/Blink codebase, which can be easily seen in the Opera 15+ changelogs.

As far as Firefox being state of the art, give me a fucking break. They've been working on multi-threaded FF (Electrolysis) for going on 6 years now, and every time it gets force-enabled in FF Nightly it breaks _EVERYTHING_:

UserCSS, broken
UserScript (Greasemonkey), broken
LastPass, broken
TreeStyleTabs, mostly broken
RequestPolicy - and every other extension of its ilk, completely borked.

The only thing it appears to do, is make it "seem like" FF is responsive, except it still takes just as long to load a large session. Except all the tabs just say "New Tab" for ages, until they actually get their title.
Now the one thing that e10s (Electrolysis) CAN do, is close a window without locking up every FF window for an extended period of time.

So FF seems like it is responsive, but that's just a sham. It just isn't "not responding" during the time while it loads a large session. I have tabs loaded in the background, so only the single tab in a given window needs to actually be loaded, yet it still takes 5-10 minutes to load a large session (restore their title, favicon, and tab position). WTF.

Mozilla expenses for software development in 2012 was almost $150,000,000. --- does that sound like "small development team" to you?

You mean, Windows, Mac and Linux, BSD, and OS/2? Because Opera 5 supported all of those, and was 2.2MB download then, when Netscape Communicator was a 25MB download.
Opera Archive, v3.x thru v12.x

[DIR] Meego/ 01-Nov-2011 12:46
[DIR] WeTab/ 21-Mar-2011 14:26
[DIR] Win7/ 21-Mar-2011 14:23
[DIR] android/ 14-Feb-2011 06:18
[DIR] beos/ 27-Feb-2004 14:12
[DIR] cdk/ 11-May-2011 09:13
[DIR] custom/ 20-Oct-2010 15:16
[DIR] emulators/ 10-Aug-2012 12:31
[DIR] epoc/ 04-Jul-2001 03:34
[DIR] extras/ 28-Oct-2002 13:21
[DIR] info/ 14-Jan-2002 22:00
[DIR] linux/ 15-May-2014 08:56
[DIR] mac/ 15-May-2014 09:00
[DIR] nokia/ 24-Jun-2003 10:50
[DIR] os2/ 21-Oct-2002 13:01
[DIR] panasonic/ 22-Mar-2004 14:13
[DIR] psion/ 14-Feb-2003 12:21
[DIR] qnx/ 08-Nov-2002 10:27
[DIR] samsung/ 22-Mar-2004 14:13
[DIR] sdlbream/ 29-Oct-2012 16:41
[DIR] sendo/ 09-Sep-2004 10:51
[DIR] series60/ 15-Jun-2009 07:01
[DIR] siemens/ 23-Sep-2003 09:15
[DIR] sonyericsson/ 07-Jun-2004 09:28
[DIR] source/ 03-Sep-2013 13:18
[DIR] symbian/ 20-Oct-2008 07:29
[DIR] tvemulator/ 14-Dec-2011 22:04
[DIR] unix/ 06-Feb-2013 09:37
[DIR] win/ 15-May-2014 08:57
[DIR] winmobile/ 15-Mar-2010 20:24
[DIR] zinfo/ 31-Aug-2009 13:20

Every time I've tried the "HTML5 video" on YouTube, it would:
1) lose sync, or just stop loading,
2) wouldn't let you pause/resume, and
3) didn't properly cache so you could "rewind" without streaming (download the same bits) again.

Or is YouTube yet another site that's now "Best Viewed in Chrome" (TM) ?

A goddamned side panel. So how was that too difficult eh Opera?
Bookmarks are more functional than Opera 20-whatever. Side tabs are too big, but that will be fixed. Email client to come.

I am thoroughly stoked! I saw mention of a browser about a year ago, but never heard anything since and never thought much more about it.

Back in the olden days, that was one of the first things we did to a Diku-Mud code-base: add reusable memory pools (plus debugging output for failed in-game scripts - which eventually was replaced with a more robust scripting language - for in-game events/actions, that didn't rely on void pointers for everything).

The stability difference was like night and day.

Opera 12, is a 12MB download...__12__

Once more, __12__. Nearly 1/5th the size of Mozilla's Firefox, about 1/3rd the size of Google's Chrome.
Unfortunately, the dev's completely hosed the JS engine in Opera 12 (compared to pretty much any prior Opera version). Opera 12 is also the least stable of any Opera release to date, including the clusterfuck of Opera 10.11 - 10.6 --- it wasn't until nearly the final release of Opera 10.64 that you could give up Opera 10.10 without suffering major regressions.

At the very least Opera could of switched the rendering engine/JS for __web-content__, and kept Presto-and-co to render/deal with Opera's GUI. Maybe that wasn't possible? Seems like they were a bunch of bright folks, they could of figured out a shim to get Karaken (JS) to "talk" to V8 as needed.

Christ it took the Opera Dev's 18+ months to get functional bookmarks (and its still crippled compared to Opera 12). I sure as hell don't have any faith in that AD-company (FYI that's what Opera ASA is). When they switched to Blink, they gutted their official company vision too. I forget the comments thread where the two Mission Statements were compared, but the new one is laughable at best.

Thats pretty close, shape-wise to the MouseMan, which was one of my first mice.

When the MouseMan died I went to some cheapy compaq mouse, got carpal tunnel in my right hand. After realizing the cause, settled on the MX518 as others have mentioned (no carpal tunnel since). I primarily use a G500 now, but that has a horrible cable (on my second one in a little over a year). Logitech doesn't even manufacture the G500 any more; it's not listed on their site, AND doesn't have a single mouse with a similar button layout. The G502 is the closest, but is missing the top button (above the scroll wheel). I use that with AHK for various tasks (browser -> Ctrl+W)

The Logitech G700s should of been good, but the top button layout is horrible, it's nearly impossible to press the top-middle button without pushing down the scroll-wheel free-roll button. The top-left buttons require too much force, and aren't easy to choose between. The 4 thumb buttons generally aren't distinctive enough to use as Ctrl, Shift (plus 2 other functions) and accurately press the one you intended (unlike the G500's 2 thumb buttons).

I think that one is a toss-up, depending on what aspects you liked?

I enjoyed the actual "acting" in Enterprise. Both shows (Enterprise & Voyager) relied far too heavily on "temporal anomolies" (the core basis of each were pretty much centered on them). The difference?

Voyager's plots (and there were a lot) that dealt with "temporal anomolies" used the sitcom-effect, "whatever awesome or terrible event that occurs at the beginning is obviated by the end of the show" -- due to it being a "temporal anomoly".

Enterprise's plots that delved into Time Travel were used as an actual plot-device instead of a throw-away story.

Maybe he meant: TOS > DS9 > TNG > anything else > anything else > anything else > Voyager

As an owner of a Samsung Monitor I can confirm. No physical buttons, touch - that may or may not function when "touched" and the actual control of the OSD feels like it was designed with Asian literacy in mind (RTL). You will almost always press the wrong "buttons" in the wrong sequence, and even if you pressed the right "button", since it may or may not work - you'll probably press the wrong one next.

Opera 12 followed that ideology.

Opera1217_en_Setup.exe ---------- 10,046 KB
Opera1217_en_Setup_x64.exe --- 11,327 KB
--- Then a few versions back, it wasn't much larger either, and basically had a WebServer built-in.

For some unknown reason Chrome/Blink requires ~35MB, and FireFox ~50MB.

When I first started using Opera in the late 90's, it was ~3.5MB, Mozilla with a Mail Client was over 25MB.

These AMD-based boxes are a steal compared to the "barebones" NUC's that Intel is pushing. Although HP showed off a half-decent Intel based micro PC at CES (value/$) --- when it comes to on-board GPU you are almost always better off with an AMD solution.

I asked a few months back now, about the possibility of BSD on Digital Ocean due to all of the SystemD shenanigans of late. Got an email notification today that FreeBSD droplets are now available on Digital Ocean. It will be interesting to see if other VPS/Linux providers follow suit.

CB.