In a tech world where most browsers feel interchangeable, Opera turning 30 is a bit like discovering your favourite indie band is still touring — older, weirder, and still quietly shaping the scene behind the headliners. It’s not the default on anyone’s new laptop or phone, and yet, over three decades, millions of people have gone out of their way to install it, tweak it, and make it their main window to the web.

Opera’s 30th birthday isn’t just a software milestone; it’s a reminder of how the internet — and the way we move through it — has changed from screeching modems and floppy disks to AI sidebars and on‑device large language models. And to mark the occasion, the company isn’t just patting itself on the back with a press release; it’s literally asking the internet to remember itself, with a nostalgia‑driven project called Web Rewind and a very real prize: a trip to CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

Opera’s origin story reads like classic 90s hacker lore: two developers, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy, started building a browser as an internal project at Norwegian telecom giant Telenor in 1994. They spun that effort out into an independent company, Opera Software, in 1995, turning what was essentially a skunkworks experiment into a commercial browser called MultiTorg Opera. This was the era when you didn’t “download a browser” — you got it on physical media, paid for it after a trial, and hoped it ran on your operating system. The public release of Opera came in 1996, a tiny, performance‑obsessed alternative meant to be fast and efficient at a time when bandwidth was scarce and computers were anything but powerful.

From there, Opera grew up in the shadow of giants. Internet Explorer came bundled with Windows, Netscape dominated early web culture, and later Chrome bulldozed its way to majority market share. Opera, by contrast, was the scrappy outsider: a small Norwegian browser that survived on being lighter, quicker, and more inventive than the default options. If you were the kind of person who cared about memory usage before it was cool, or you ran older hardware, Opera was the browser you told your friends about in forums and IRC channels. It was never the loudest, but it was frequently the one trying new ideas first — sometimes years before anyone else thought they were essential.

That’s one of the more underrated truths about Opera at 30: a surprising number of features you now take for granted were either pioneered or popularised by this “alternative” browser. Tabbed browsing, which now feels as fundamental as the address bar, was something Opera pushed early, turning the messy chaos of separate windows into a single manageable strip. Speed Dial — those visual tiles on a new tab page that give you quick access to favourite sites — was introduced by Opera long before similar ideas appeared elsewhere. Built‑in ad blocking, integrated VPN, and a sidebar of panels for messaging and tools were also among the features Opera leaned into early as part of its push to make the browser feel like an all‑in‑one hub rather than just a window. In an industry where the market leaders often get credit, Opera’s track record is that of a quiet R&D lab for the modern browser.

Thirty years on, Opera is keenly aware of how much of life has run through a browser window, and that’s the spirit behind Web Rewind, its anniversary project. Instead of making the story purely about itself, the company created an interactive “internet memory lane” at web‑rewind.com, a sort of playable archive of the last three decades of web culture. You land on a minimal interface, press and hold the space bar, and the site tosses you digital artifacts: modem dial‑up sounds, “you’ve got mail” moments, memes, early social networks, and the trends that defined specific eras of being online. It functions like a tactile nostalgia generator — you don’t just scroll; you poke at old internet memories and let them surface in no particular order. If you want to jump straight to a specific year, there’s a Rewind control that lets you skip through the decades like flicking through a playlist of web history.

But Web Rewind is not just a museum; Opera wants your own stories stitched into that collective memory. The company is inviting people to submit their funniest, strangest, or most iconic web experiences — the kind of micro‑moments that don’t fit into corporate timelines but absolutely shaped how the internet felt to use. Think of your first time hammering out a custom MySpace profile, those MSN Messenger “nudges” that were basically the original notification spam, or late‑night sessions on Flash game sites like Miniclip that turned school computer labs into makeshift arcades. Opera’s blog post announcing the project gives a very relatable example: a primary school kid in the early 2000s discovering browsers for the first time and being blown away by the ability to jump to any website — and especially by free browser games that seemed to go on forever. It’s small, almost mundane, but it captures what the early web felt like for many people: half magic trick, half chaos.

There is, of course, a big hook: the best three submissions to Web Rewind will win a trip to CERN in Switzerland, the birthplace of the World Wide Web. CERN is most famous today for the Large Hadron Collider, the giant underground ring smashing particles together at near light speed, but for the web’s story, it’s sacred ground for a different reason. In the early 90s, scientists at CERN needed a way to share documents across different computers and operating systems, and that problem led to the creation of the World Wide Web as a standard way to publish and access hyperlinked information. Opera is framing the competition as a chance to “step in their steps”: your personal meme‑ridden, Comic‑Sans‑filled web memory could be your ticket to visit the same institution where the modern internet’s core concept was first deployed. Entries are open until March 27, 2026, with the trip expected to take place before June 30, 2026 — a neat full‑circle moment for anyone who grew up online and never really thought about the physical places that made “the web” possible.

Submitting a memory is deliberately lightweight: you get up to 500 characters to describe your chosen moment, plus the option to attach images or video up to 10MB if you have screenshots, old photos, or clips that bring it to life. The only catch is that the entry needs to capture something that truly “transcended the web” — those moments or platforms that jumped from screens into culture. That might be a viral meme that defined a summer, a browser you have oddly fond feelings for (Opera is gently nudging you here), a community that changed your real‑world trajectory, or a random online interaction that stuck with you for reasons you still can’t fully explain. In Opera’s framing, the web isn’t just defined by big corporate milestones; it’s a patchwork of individual micro‑stories, stitched together over billions of small interactions. Web Rewind is basically Opera’s attempt to curate that patchwork into something simultaneously personal and archival.

Underneath the nostalgia, Opera has quietly been rebuilding itself for the AI era — and that context makes the 30th anniversary more than just backward‑looking. Its flagship browser, now called Opera One, is designed less like a static window and more like a workspace with features like Tab Islands, which automatically cluster related tabs into little groups so your 40‑tab chaos looks vaguely intentional. The company has also been leaning heavily into built‑in AI via its Aria assistant, which sits inside the browser and can summarise pages, answer questions, and now even generate and understand images, speak responses, and provide chat summaries with linked sources. In 2024, Opera took a bigger step by adding support for on‑device AI, letting users run local large language models directly inside Opera One and Opera GX rather than always sending data to remote servers. That mix of features effectively turns the browser into a productivity and creativity layer, not just a viewer — the kind of move that makes more sense when you remember this is a company that’s always tried to stay one step ahead of where browsing is heading.

Opera’s experiments haven’t been limited to AI, either; over the years, it has repeatedly tried to reshape what a browser can be for different types of users. Opera GX, billed as a browser “for gamers,” leans into customisation, resource controls, and integrated AI features that reflect how people juggle games, streams, and chats all at once. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Opera Air, a more lightweight build focused on mindfulness, reduced clutter, and helping people step away from the constant notification pressure of the modern web. Opera also took an early swing at Web3 with a dedicated Crypto Browser and an integrated non‑custodial wallet, later folding those crypto features back into the main browser and rebranding it as Opera Wallet. It’s a pattern you can trace throughout its history: launch something niche, see how people use it, and then either spin it out, fold it back in, or quietly retire it — a long‑running lab experiment dressed up as a consumer browser.

Even if its user numbers don’t rival Chrome’s, Opera at 30 is still very much alive and evolving. The company reports strong growth in Western markets and rising profitability, powered by its mix of Opera One and Opera GX on desktops and mobile devices. It has leaned into its identity as both a browser maker and an “agentic AI company,” positioning Aria and its AI Feature Drops program as differentiators in a market where everyone is racing to attach AI to the address bar. You can see this strategy on display at events like Opera Browser Days, where the company recently used its 30‑year anniversary as a backdrop to show off its more experimental ideas about what browsing with AI could feel like. It’s a far cry from the days when the question was simply whether your browser could load a site quickly; now it’s about how much of your digital life you’re willing to route through one application — and whether you trust that app to stay one step ahead without drowning you in features.

There’s something fitting about Opera celebrating its 30th by turning the spotlight back on the web itself rather than just on its own changelog. In an era of walled gardens, closed feeds, and algorithmic timelines, Web Rewind is a small but pointed reminder that the open web was, and still is, built from shared experiences: clumsy HTML profiles, late‑night message boards, fan fiction forums, LAN party coordination threads, and ancient email chains written in Comic Sans. For many people, those moments are inseparable from the tools they used to get there — and Opera, for a certain generation of users, is one of those tools. Thirty years on, it’s still quietly pushing new ideas into the browser mainstream while asking you to remember what the web used to feel like, one weird, wonderful memory at a time.