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Safari Killing Opera for Mac OS X?
analog_line writes "According to an article at News.com, the folks at Opera have given an ultimatum to Apple: Use the Opera engine in Safari or we'll have to rethink developing Opera for the Mac. While I know people who use Opera for the Mac, I find it hard to believe that Opera thinks they'll get any response other than, 'enjoy developing for one less platform.'"
So what if Opera sued Apple for the same reason Netscape sued MS?
Apple is probably planning on bundling safari with OSX. Granted, they probably won't integrate it. Is this right or wrong? Is it anticompetitive? Analysis?
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Insert joke about a fat lady singing here.
No, really. They acknowledge that Opera 6 sucks pretty bad, and promis that 7 will rock ass on OS X.
If anything, though, I'd think Chimera would be the one hurting Opera the most.
The fact that it costs money certainly doesn't help matters.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
If Konqueror doesn't use the Opera engine, will Opera drop linux support? Since they've released a Windows version, they must've gotten Microsoft to use the Opera engine in Explorer...
Yeah it sucks when Apple releases a free version of your App... but it would suck more if there were less Macs to sell your app to. Apple releasing a web browser was a very neccesary step for Apple to keep tha Mac platform alive and to try and take away the Wintel market share. The more mac users, the bigger the market for Mac developers.
Opera has a head start on Safari... instead of giving up, they could just try and out-innovate Safari they way Watson has out-innovated Sherlock.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
If they can't produce to web browser that will cause people to buy it over Safari, then they should just not develop Opera for the Mac. There's nothing wrong with that.
And before anyone says anything, this does not mean that Apple has an illegal monopoly. There is nothing wrong with not propping up third-party developers.
-Brent
IE already comes with all Macs.
Safari will probably take IE's place as the default.
Is Safari really already so much better than IE that Opera and others see no hope in going up against it?
Is the sole selling point of alternative browsers really just that they're not from MS?
I don't understand why there's a willingness to work on alternative browsers when the default is from MS, but not if the default browser is from Apple. If Apple makes a feature complete, windows version of Safari available for free, how many of the alternative windows browsers will close shop?
"We think Safari is one of the best and most innovative browsers in the world, and it seems our customers do too," the Mac maker said in a statement. "No one is making Mac users choose Safari over Opera--they're doing it of their own free will--and Opera's trashing of Safari sounds like sour grapes to us."
Boy, that sure doesn't sound like someone in Public Relations would say. It'd be interesting to know just who it was at Apple who said this, as it seems more inflammatory than anything else.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
1>I think this is sounding like Opera might be in some trouble. This sorta reminds me of when Be Inc said "Open up your specs or we'll stop developing".
What does Opera think it will accomplish other than they won't have to spend money to make opera?
2>If this was to start a war like the early NS vs M$, I don't think Opera would have a chance. For one thing Safari is based on {GPL'd}KDE software and therefore Apple has released it's changes to the source code. It's a lot faster than Opera. Opera just sucks! I don't know what happened, it used to be the fastest browser around circa version 3. Maybe they need Helmar back in charge of Project Magic?
Is he still hanging out in Africa as was his last post to the Opera NNTP server several years back?
I have an Idea, how about Opera, instead of trying to force it's outdated browsing engine on others, why don't they just go grab apple's changes and use those at _THEIR_ new engine?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Opera makes an Mac version? Who knew?
Seriously, though -- Opera must have a smaller "market share" than iCab, let alone OmniWeb, IE, Gecko-flavors or...well, smaller than ANYthing that browses on the Mac.
All I've ever seen from Opera is a delayed, three-steps-behind version that has been seemingly produced as a grudging, halting afterthought on the Mac. Why should I care? Essentially, we're being told "A product that nobody used BEFORE Safari came out is being discontinued because something else that IS popular has been released.". I'm supposed to care about something that is inferior, under-supported and over-priced?
Sorry bout the AC posting, but I think you're confusing Opera with OmniGroup and OmniWeb.
Ken Case, the CEO of OG and developer of the OW engine, said they would take a look at WebCore. I don't recall hearing anything out of Opera until now.
I think the most disturbing thing about this article is that CNET's treating Opera's whining as actual news.
Didn't they just say they were happy about Safari about a week ago?
No, that was Omni (a NeXT software company that has moved over to OSX). They produce a different browser but are thrilled about the Webcore (open source) engine since in their opinion this will allow them to make a better interface without having to worry about the engine. Omni believe it or not actually is better at cool looking easy to use interfaces than Apple (which is saying a lot).
See this article -- Chimera Developer Considers Dropping It as well. Quite honestly, I don't think that this is a big deal. As others have already pointed out, Apple was already bundling MSIE with OS X, and I never saw anybody complain that that was killing Chimera or Opera. This is simply another web browser for OS X. If you find that Browser X suits your needs best, then simply download Browser X, and drag Browser Y to the trash.
opera was already losing their edge awhile ago.. they had plenty of time to to catch up, and they did not.. so their problem.
1) Opera is out playing on the playground and bragging about how fast he is. 2) A new kid shows up and is actually fast. 3) Opera yells some obsenities. 4) Opera takes his ball and goes home. Kind of a testament to how good Safari is. Do you think Opera would be making this stink if Safari was no good? It's like saying, "the Mac browser market was pretty easy to compete in because all of the browser were mediocre, but now Safari raises the bar and we don't feel like jumping" I know there are some definate advantages to being backed by Apple, but I still think no one would be complaining (except Apple fanatics) if Safari were just another average browser.
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
I know some people like Opera for Mac, but personally I couldn't care less. I am tired of fighting with horribly buggy betas that crash constantly. If Opera wants to compete, they need to produce a robust full version of Opera, without ads, that lives up to their speed claims. As it is, I'll use anything but IE over Opera.
I am not trying to troll here - I genuinely would like Opera to succeed. The company just needs to get their act together.
Riiight. Somehow I don't see Apple buying this, particularly given that KHTML is an arguably "better" renderer, and I'd imagine costs a lot less to work with than this particular "option".
Looks like Opera just don't want to cross-develop, and they're going to blame whoever they can for their reason. No great loss; there's heaps of resonable-to-good browsers on the platform, so I'm sure we can live without.
I think you've summed it up well there. Opera on the macs I've used it on (400Mhz G3 with Jaguar, and a few G4/Dual G4s also with Jaguar) just doesn't compete. It's noticeably slower than IE, chimera and Safari, and featurewise doesn't offer anything I can't get on the other browsers.
That's not to say there aren't other people with needs that Opera addresses just perfectly, however.
A reliable source mentioned to me a while ago that Opera was negotiating with Apple for a place on their desktop. Perhaps at the time Apple was debating whether to re-enter the browser market after having abruptly jilted poor old Cyberdog, and was contemplating an alliance outside of IE. So maybe Opera felt it had some assurances in place that their product would get a needed boost from Apple and relied on that to develop Mac product that was otherwise not worth the trouble, and maybe Apple pulled a fast one. Apple has been known to undermine developers in the past, and while it certainly has the right to do so it shouldn't deliberately alienate them. I know Apple feels it has to keep its next "killer app" under wraps until the next MacWorld, but there must be ways to telegraph intentions (or sign NDA's) with allies w/o tipping off competitors.
All guesses. But it does make Opera look less irrational.
Was back when I thought it took a great deal of time and effort to develop a high-performance browser, and bought Opera's performance claims. Then I met Chimera Navigator. Whatever happens, I think the for-profit model of browser development is dead.
by Opera's logic, we should hear the following press release... "Microsoft has just announced its own web browser, dubbed "Internet Explorer", and in a fit of childishness, we no longer see a point in developing Opera for Windows." because if we don't.. then its obvious that they are basically just pussies.
(Note to opera guys - you make a browser for Windows, and so does Microsoft. A little consistency with your whining would be nice)
if its not as obvious as the dead-squirrel on Congressman Trafficant's (D) head - the real issue is that Apple, in about 5 minutes during Steve's demo at MWSF, proved to the world that they can flat-out out code Opera and beat the bajezzuz out of them at their own game of "lightweight, small, fast, easy to use broswers".
They are pissed that they got so soundly defeated by a "hardware" company.
Life's tough, get a fscking helmet. - Dennis Leary
And damnit, that goes for everyone else who's whining about Apple making applications for Mac OS X and are complaining that Apple is "killing" the "small developers.
Good God... they GAVE you developers tools free with every copy of the OS, and have a website that guides you by the hand for FREE on how to make apps.
There are tons of tiny apps - PageSender, Watson, Interarchy, VueScan jump to mind - that are small, cheap, and GOOD!
At least guys like Waston have sack. They admitted that they were on their laurels, and - and this is the most important thing....
Watson is the BETTER thanks to Sherlock 3!
Its called competition. At all levels. As soon as someone makes a better video editor than iMovie - then bully for them.. i'll use it.
I might have paid "twice as much for my Mac as what i could get for a Windows box" but you know what?
i don't think or feel like i did, and things like Safari are the reason why.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Look at Opera's history of competing with bundled browsers:
But, somehow, a beta product is going to cause Opera to leave the Mac market?
Please. The real reason is buried in the article:
Opera simply wasn't successful on the Mac like it was on Windows. I personally suspect that that's because Opera didn't make the switch to the Mac UI very effectively (hard to describe, but it just felt weird relative to using it in Windows), and didn't have the same feel for performance programming in MacOS, making Opera feel sluggish (unlike its trademark lightning-fast performance in Windows).I think Opera just can't compete on the Mac, knows this, and has made a token "hell why not" offer to Apple to stick around for big money to have an excuse to leave.
--Matthew
I have been a long time Opera users at the point I made my switch from Windows and Linux to Mac. I was a registered user of Opera and used to tell tell all my friends about it. My intent when getting my Mac was to buy the cross-platform upgrade and run Opera as my main browser. However before I spent the money, I tried out several of the other browsers and ended up buy an OmniWeb license. While OmniWeb has pretty bad standard support (especially CSS), it worked with most of the pages I used and I liked a lot of the options and settings it provided. For some reason, I could never place my finger on, Opera didn't feel at home on my Mac. I guess I'd gotten used to the MDI interface under windows... and Opera 5 beta or so just didn't feel polished/user friendly enough when I tried it.
Having mostly used OmniWeb for a while, when Safari came out I decided to try a bunch of different browsers again. Opera 6 looks a lot better than it did the last time I tried it, and I'm actually thinking seriously about switching back to Opera. I've also thought about switching over to Safari once it's not a beta and converting back to OmniWeb after it switches over to WebCore.
Personally I think that Apple's switch to Safari will help non-IE, non-gecko browsers and websites might adjust just a little to handle different browsers. One thing I can't help but wonder is... is this a tactic by Opera to get people to look at/buy there browser. After any media attention is good.
Apple does have a monopoly over "Macintosh" computers because they won't sell licenses. They relaxed their hold for a few years and allowed clones, then changed their mind. There is now no way to build a legal clone, except maybe to cannibalize a working computer for the proprietary parts. If you need a Mac-compatible computer, you must go to Apple, and with it you'll get their OS, too.
A monopoly is not illegal unless abused in some way. Microsoft's monopoly over Windows is not per se illegal. But their attempt to leverage IE by using their monopoly power was, obviously, improper. That IE is free changed nothing -- rather, it underscored that IE was getting a free ride thanks to the underlying profitable monopoly.
Now, within the market of Mac-compatible computers, I'm wondering how Apple bundling more and more products into its ubiquitous OS could not eventually cause the same sort of problem. Unlike what Microsoft was doing by "integrating" Windows, the Apple components are pretty easily to deactivate. However, the Apple products are clearly intended to be competitive, and at some point Apple might be said to abuse its monopoly over Macs to shoehorn in other things.
It's difficult to imagine, mostly because they're not Microsoft, but what if Apple were to squeeze out competitiors by embedding the free stuff or refusing to publish its API's and so on? The millions of Mac users can't just switch to another OS without getting a new computer, and their choices would end up being Apple's choices. [Now that there is a robust open source browser market developing, I don't think browsers will be the next battleground.]
Yo frankie... Take a chill pill and settle down!!! Apple was forced to make their own browser. They've sat by the wayside and watched as not a single browser developer has brought a reliable product to market. If Opera hadn't treated Mac users as second class citizens, they would have a competitive on the market, but they don't. If M$ had brought a cocoa version of IE to market and quashed the bugs user after user complains of, there would be no safari... If OmniWeb and Chimera would come along more quickly there wouldn't be an issue... But no... Not a single vendor has given us a fast and stable product. Safari will do one thing... It will raise the bar for which third party developers to compete. I have a feeling you haven't used Safari, but Apple has taken the minimalist approach... It does two things and two things well... It's fast and it's stable. Omni web can and will build a competitive browser, most likely using the same rendering engine... Chimera will have all the features Safari is missing... IE will hopefully die away as they seem to have no interest in fixin IE. The open source community will benefit from Apple's work here, I don't see what the issue is. Opera can either put up or shut up, their product is inferior...
Anyone who develops for the Mac knows that everything is an uphill battle. You have to fight the good fight and make the best product you can knowing ahead of time that your market share will be slim. With this in mind, why are the developers of Chimera and Opera moaning and groaning about competition? Anyone that is a part of the Mozilla organization knows full well of this. Seeing that the Opera developers already compete on the Windows platform, what's the problem with competing on the Mac platform as well? They already compete with IE, OmniWeb, iCab, Chimera, Mozilla, etc. on the Mac platform.
/System/Library/Frameworks, /Library/Frameworks, or ~/Library/Frameworks, who cares? This makes it easy for developers to write applications that have HTML view's in their own programs. Gecko (CHBrowserView) could even be packaged as a framework and exist right along side WebKit. If you want you can delete any framework on your system that you don't like. While Apple may not give you the option to run Mac OS X on x86 machines, it does provide real software options, unlike Microsoft.
If anyone thinks Apple is going to pull a Microsoft and start saying that Safari is an integral portion of the OS and cannot be removed, let's look at their track record on other bundled applications. iTunes can be replaced by Audion and still have iPod support. Apple does nothing to prevent this. iChat can be replaced by Adium. Mail can be done away with and be replaced with Mutt, Pine, Entourage, etc. iMove, iPhoto, etc. can all be deleted and other applications may be used in their place.
I can drag Safari into the trash and it's gone. Should Apple release a version of Safari that links to WebKit frameworks installed in
System wide bookmarks would also be nice, as would the ability to have bookmarks in multiple folders. So too, would be the ability to remove menu items, and otherwise prune the interface down to what you want. Quick cookie swapping would allow you to change identities on the fly, without the tedious task of logging out / logging in.
But then we're talking about the power user, and not the simplicity and elegance of OSX. We're talking about Opera.
Opera: Baffling newbies since 1995
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Other examples of the same ultimatum...
Ultimatum to my neighbor:
Start using my lawnmower to mow your lawn, or else I'm going to stop mowing mine all together...
or..
Ultimatum to my mail man:
You need to use MY shoes to walk up to my house to deliver mail or I'm going to have it delivered somewhere else.
Ultimatum to wife:
(Yeah, like anything I write here would ever fly)
My
Tomorrow's Apple/. will probably be something like:
Lynx developers decide to abandon Lynx port to Jaguar.
In a surprise move, Lynx developers feeling dissed by the fact that Apple didn't use the proven Lynx rendering technology have sent iSteve an email (from pine no less!) stating that if Lynx is not demoed at the next MacWorld, they will cease the release of their nearly complete port to MacOS/X. Said key developers, "what really surprises us is that we figured with names like Lynx and Jaguar, we were certain they were destined for each other. We were sure that chosen OS/X code name was a cue to us to continue our work"
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
The basic idea of Opera is great. Lots of options, privacy protection, tabbed browsing, separate browser window, etc. I've tried to switch to it - but it's impossible to deal with all its quirks, bugs and slowness.
My biggest complaint is that it does NOT handle tables or forms correctly. I've included some examples to play with (there are many more, just do a search).
For many of these bugs to exist in version SIX of a browser is just plain crappy. Especially considering that Safari and Chimera in their beta versions are nowhere as problematic and render pages beautifully.
Opera is killing itself and they company is using Safari as an excuse.
If anyone is killing Opera, it's Opera. I tried it and I thought it sucked. I tried Safari and Safari rocked! For now though, the best browser is still Chimera. We'll see what else Apple comes up with with the full release of Safari. While it would be a shame to lose some diversity on the Mac if Opera ceased, they should really be trying to make a better product rather than complaining about Apple.