Later versions had a built-in BitTorrent client too. It let you not only spoof the user agent, but it let you disable images, disable JS, block content, and a bunch of other settings per site.
It showed a loading progress bar indicating how much of the page content had loaded.
It had an option to only show images that were already cached - useful on very slow connections and better than just turning off all images.
It had mouse gestures for going back/forward, opening new tabs, etc. Oh yeah, it was the first browser to ever implement tabbed browsing.
All of this was built-in, and yet it was somehow lighter (in terms of RAM usage) than other browsers?
They were truly innovating. We just don't see a lot of software doing that any more. So many companies these days are trying to figure out how to extract more of your personal data and show you more ads.
I mean, Google has probably even more unethical practices, I would have thought. (compared to Opera, not to China. Though the US is worse than China for sure.)