The history of the Opera web browser began in 1994 when it was as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, the project branched out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA, with the first publicly available version released in 1996. Since that time, Opera has undergone extensive changes and improvements, such as the relatively recent addition of built-in phishing protection. The Opera browser was, until version 2.0, called MultiTorg Opera and was not available to the public although online documents show it at The Third International WWW Conference in 1995. It was known for its multiple document interface (MDI) and 'hotlist' (sidebar), which made browsing several pages at once much easier, as well as being the first browser to completely focus on adhering to the W3C standards.