On October 10, 1997, they launched 'Project Magic', an effort to determine who would be willing to purchase a copy of their browser in their native OS, and to properly distribute funds to develop or outsource for such operating systems. ĭue to popular demand, Opera Software showed interest in programming its browser for alternative operating systems such as Apple Macintosh, QNX and BeOS.
Version 2.0, the first public release of Opera, was released as shareware in 1996. See also: Features of the Opera web browser Version 2 Opera 15 saw the browser being fully rewritten, with this and subsequent releases being based on Blink and Chromium. In February 2013, Opera Software announced that their in-house rendering engine, Presto, would be phased out in favour of WebKit. Until version 2.0, the Opera browser was called MultiTorg Opera (version 1.0) and had only a limited internal release-although it was demonstrated publicly at the Third International Opera has undergone extensive changes and improvements, and introduced notable features such as Speed Dial. In 1995, the project branched out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA, with the first publicly available version released in 1996. The history of the Opera web browser began in 1994 when it was started as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company.
