Opera (web browser) layout engine of its competitor Google Chrome. Features of the Opera web browser include private browsing, tabbed browsing, download manager, mouse gestures and browser extensions. Opera began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, it branched out into a separate company named Opera Software. Opera was first released publicly in 1996 with version 2.10, which only ran on Microsoft Windows. In an attempt to capitalize on the emerging market for Internet-connected handheld devices, a project to port Opera to mobile device platforms was started in 1998. Opera 4.0, released in 2000, included
Web browser the browser. Virtually all URLs on the Web start with either "http:" or "https:" which means the browser will retrieve them with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. In the case of "https:" the communication between the browser and the web server is encrypted for the purposes of security and privacy. Another URL prefix is "file:" which is used to display local files already stored on the user's device. Once a web page has been retrieved, the browser's rendering engine displays it on the user's device. This includes image and video formats supported by the browser. Web pages usually contain hyperlinks to