Seriously, Opera was customizable enough that the way I used it back then was completely indistinguishable from modern tabs. And quite frankly, the ability to occasionally use grid view made it far superior for my common edge cases.
Opera's omnibar style implementation is still better than Chrome's (though I stopped using Opera when I switched to OSX, and also webkit still has the best console), and is more useful when trying to re-access history (w/ full text search) and bookmarked sites because they don't gimp the user in an attempt to shunt them to running a search.
Also, while buggy, their text only E-mail client M2 was gmail before gmail existed, in fact the ad-hoc search filters were arguably better. Back when people were jumping on the file/pile train for the first time M2 had already been running it for years.
Opera's omnibar style implementation is still better than Chrome's (though I stopped using Opera when I switched to OSX, and also webkit still has the best console), and is more useful when trying to re-access history (w/ full text search) and bookmarked sites because they don't gimp the user in an attempt to shunt them to running a search.
Also, while buggy, their text only E-mail client M2 was gmail before gmail existed, in fact the ad-hoc search filters were arguably better. Back when people were jumping on the file/pile train for the first time M2 had already been running it for years.