I definitely remember using Opera back in the day. It was a genuinely exciting thing, browsers in the late 2000s! Each one was different and trying to cater to a different corner of the market. Firefox was the heavy-duty rocket launcher with an extension for every need. Chrome was a lightweight, speedy, standards-compliant up-and-comer. Opera was all about customizability. Even Internet Explorer 9 and beyond really improved its lot and brought a good default browser back to Windows. (These days, I actually use Vivaldi, the browser some former Opera people built to return the customizable spirit back to browsing.)
Opera had a pretty novel idea in the middle of all the racing to the bottom happening in the 90s: make a browser worth paying for. Opera was so proud of their browser--small, customizable, accessible to the disabled, and standards-compliant at a time when Microsoft would've preferred you use ActiveX and Netscape's idea for stylesheets involved JavaScript--they charged $35 for registration, with discounts for bulk order and educational purchasing. They weren't in it to make the most popular browser, but one that listened to its userbase in exchange for that userbase's funds. Opera would later switch to an ad-based model, its Presto engine dominant on mobile devices of its day, and is now just another free Chrome clone, but Protoweb's installers are all from that original shareware era of Opera.
I actually came back to this restoration to find I'd done most of it already. I started this one back in 2024 (thanks to trey26 in the Discord for the suggestion), but gave up on it for a couple reasons, not least of which was the lack of early Opera versions floating around online. I managed to scrape together the English 32-bit version and a German 32-bit copy of 3.23, but there were also French and Italian versions and 16-bit variants of all the above, plus the mirror still had 2.12 available in 16- and 32-bit English, German, American and European Spanish, Swedish, and two flavors of Norwegian (where Opera was based out of). I felt without all the rainbow of versions Opera was offered in, the site would be only half-complete.
At the eleventh hour, however, a mere nine months before I restarted work on this restoration, someone with a pretty funny domain name (fair warning, other parts of the site are NSFW) put up an extensive archive of Operas for OS/2, QNX, Linux, Mac, J2ME, various makes and models of 2000s phones and PDAs for Opera Mini, and of course, Windows. All the versions I needed were in this archive. I can't stress it enough--whoever runs this site made this restoration possible. As such, if you happen to be a multilingual sort, direct from Protoweb, you can try Opera in your language, perhaps even hooking your copy back up to Protoweb for some premium browsing as it was in 1998. Enjoy!