Opera was one of the earliest commercial Web browsers, having been launched in 1995. That’s the same year Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, and less than 12 months after Netscape launched Navigator, which is widely regarded as the browser that popularized the Web.

From the very beginning, Opera was a different type of Web browser. Specifically, even though it helped users access the same World Wide Web as every other browser, the Opera browser was built entirely on its own codebase. That might not sound like a big deal if you don't know much about browser architecture, but, for Jon von Tetzchner and the Opera team, it was a huge competitive advantage that allowed Opera to exist on devices that couldn't support any other browsers. This made Opera, for a time, the most popular web browser in the world.

Unfortunately for Jon, some bad investors pushed the company in the wrong direction, and he was powerless to stop it. The only thing he could do was build another browser. So, 20 years after launching Opera, he launched Vivaldi to compete with his old company and win back the trust of the loyal users Opera had lost.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.