summary: People in Belarus saved money when they used Opera's features to "strip out images and other bandwidth-gobbling web extras" due to the way the state telco billed them.
Actually, Opera can use a (Opera operated) proxy to scale the images down, compress html, css and js. This feature is called "Opera Turbo", I think, and is unique to Opera (browser and company) - at least as a built in from the start.
The second reason is Opera Mini, which can run on "dumbphones" and is a fast, modern browser, which can use "Opera Turbo" too. People there didn't have access to newer hardware, stuck with "dumbphones" were essentially abandoned by everyone else - only Opera was there for them.
Third reason was Opera's good support for cryptography, which is nice to have when you know every byte you send is archived and can (and will be) used against you if you happen to become inconvenient.
So, to summarize: your summary is inaccurate, misleading and not necessary.
For me the crucial difference is that Opera could toggle between loading images/cached images with a single keypress: 'i'. These days you have to press Shift-i. Toggling CSS on/off is Shift-g. Having this so easily accessible makes a big difference. I don't know how to do this in Chrome. Looking quickly through the menu, I can't even find the options for this.
1. Opera has also option to show only cached images and option to load selected image.
2. Chrome has not option to disable images.
It did have a hard time recovering from the early backlash against it for not being open-source, belying the involvement and contributions of Opera engineers to the open standards web.
So I think it showed the ads for about 6 years? Just curious.
> Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. Version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it.[25] Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine).
So 2000 through 2005.
This seems to be borne out by the more specialized History of the Opera web browser page:
> Opera 5, released on December 6, 2000, was the first version which was ad-sponsored instead of having a trial period.
[snip]
> Version 8.5 was released on September 20, 2005, Opera announced that their browser would be available free of charge and without advertisements from then onwards, although the company still sells support contracts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_browse...
> Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google
is suspicious - I remember that when Opera was showing ads it had an ad bar above (or below) address bar. So maybe I got served ads but didn't consider them as such.
Or maybe I just idealize my youth :)
Right, I forgot. One question: isn't loading of selected things used for any element, not just images? So I could disable loading of header div and such?