History in detail

Today a small holiday is celebrated in our country - the birthday of the founder of radio Alexander Stepanovich Popov. Despite the unconditional historical value of the invention of technical means for transmitting and receiving radio waves, for me personally this fact is always a bit sad due to one unpleasant dispute about who forever is the “father of the radio”. For those who are not very familiar with the history of the issue, I will explain. In the mid-1890s, existing samples of equipment capable of transmitting and receiving radio waves were almost simultaneously demonstrated by Russian scientist Alexander Stepanovich Popov and Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi. According to some historical data, Popov made the transfer of radio waves at a distance in 1895, and Marconi in 1897 received a patent in England for his invention, and only after that he allowed the wide scientific public to the devices he had created. The Russian scientist was far from the idea of ​​monetizing his developments, and therefore limited himself to only a small message in scientific circles and print publication, and the enterprising Italian organized the quite successful commercial company Marconi Wirelles Telegraph Company and received quite good dividends from the patented demanded technology.

The situation was not very smooth: using different criteria for choosing the “father of radio” (historical or legal), you can get completely different results. And the situation becomes quite comical when other countries are also beginning to nominate their candidates for this honorable role: Nikola Tesla invented radio for Americans, and the same England will remember Oliver Joseph Lodge with a kind word when Germany mentions, it’s customary to give similar laurels to Germany , and the French have no doubt that the radio was invented by Edouard Branly. For the sake of justice, it’s necessary to say that all these worthy people made their own contribution to the development of this technology, but such is human nature: you always want to know who was the very one whom a brilliant thought visited before others and what nation should thank the world for another a milestone in scientific and technical progress. So historians are arguing for more than a hundred years, and all this time in various countries they annually honor their “father of radio”.

The story told above is very similar to the situation that has recently developed in the browser market. Referring to the same function, various development companies happily report that they are innovators and pioneers, offering original innovations to their users for the first time. Practically all the major market players were noticed during this exercise, and although from the marketing point of view their actions are quite understandable, I would like to somehow avoid misunderstandings similar to those that follow the story of the appearance of the radio. However, it is a little easier for us: in the Internet era, it is customary to publish on official websites press releases and lists of changes made in the next version of the browser. This allows us to determine, with an accuracy of one day, which of the developers really became a pioneer, and who adopted a good idea and offered users their own implementation.
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Not so long ago, a new page appeared in the documentation section on the Opera Software website, quietly and without much publicity, which will be useful to anyone interested in the history of browser building. On it you can find almost the entire fifteen-year chronology of the creation of the Opera browser, starting with the little-studied general public (due to the closeness of the release) version of Opera-1.0 and ending with the current alpha version of Opera-10. The tables contain data such as the release date, the version of the browser kernel and the JavaScript interpreter used, and also, most interestingly, a list of all the major innovations that have appeared in this version of Opera. And here, perhaps, for someone prepared real surprises. The fact is that many things in browsers have become so familiar and accepted that very few people remember when they first became available.

For example, from this document you can find out that the full scaling of web pages, which changes the size of not only the font, but also the images, first appeared on December 1, 1996 in the Opera-2.12 browser. And users of the Norwegian browser started opening several pages in one window as tabs on June 28, 2000 after the appearance of Opera-4.0. The search field was first placed on the toolbar in December 2000 (Opera-5.0), and in just four months the world learned about mouse gestures (April 2000, Opera-5.10). In general, despite the brevity of information, it is quite enough to feel how year after year browser technologies have been enriched with new functions and technologies, qualitatively changing our ideas about working on the Internet. Starting with Opera-5.0, there are links to detailed lists of changes, but for earlier releases, you can only view selected pages saved by the amazing web archive WayBack Machine . By the way, the image placed at the beginning of the article was taken from there - this is how the official website of Opera Software looked back in 1999.

Go to the Opera browser history page