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Opera Browser Creators Planning IPO
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Norwegian web browser developer Opera Software is reportedly planning an Initial Public Offering on the Oslo Stock Exchange next month. According to a press release issued today, Opera's revenue for the last quarter grew 108.7% and CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner stated that 'After developing and refining the technology and commercial side for nine years, Opera Software is now ready for public listing.' Opera has, according to CNET News, gained popularity in the past few months thanks, in part, to having ported their well-known browser to smartphones."
I know I'm not the only person who experienced dozens upon dozens of spontaneous crashes when I was using Opera... I switched to Firebird, excuse me, FireFOX, and with the addition of one extension have mouse gestures, tabs, built-in google search... all of the "features" with a fraction of the crashes. What makes Opera so appealing, and are they ready to go public?
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
For the currency impaired, that's the revenue for this year. Last year was 2.0 million USD
On a similar note, 108% revenue growth isn't that impressive when you're talking about this small of an amount. Now if IBM showed 108% revenue growth, then there'd be something to talk about.
Sorry, but color me unimpressed.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Opera isn't freeware. It has a free version with ads and a paid version without the ads.
The timing for an IPO is bad. Now that they appear to be turning an operating profit, protential investors can only see the limitations of Opera's profit potential. When Opera was still sustaining losses, investors could (unrealistically) fill in the blanks on Opera's potential. I suspect that many investors are savvy about a company whose chief competitor is the 800 lb gorilla of the industry and whose major competing products are free of charge.
It's an easy way to 1) raise capital 2) spread risk around.
Imagine you are in your kitchen baking cookies, and you sense that your cookie-baking will make you rich someday. You just need some money for advertising and a bigger kitchen. How can you do it? You can try and grow slowly, but you might never succeed. You can take out a loan, but what if you can't pay it back? You're screwed. So you can try and convince people that your business is growing, big time, and you will offer to sell pieces of the business for a high price (higher than the value of all your equipment at least). You take this big mass of cash, grow your business, and everybody gets rich as your income grows and the value of your stock goes up accordingly. And your company is in neat little pieces that can be bought and sold as needed. Instead of just you owning your business, all these people own little pieces of it.
And if the business flops, you don't owe these buyers anything, because they assumed the risk when they buy.
Pretty simple really...there's also seconday benefits like exposure and PR but the basic point is to raise capital.
Opera is located in Norway, not Sweden -- two neighboring but very different countries. (The Norwegians feel about the Swedes much the same way the Americans feel about Canadians.)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yes you can. Read this:
t /1 0121118.html
http://www.thestreet.com/pf/markets/asktheexper
I guess you can buy direct into foreign markets, or you can buy ADR's, which are some sort of vouchers.
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
Yes, I have the tried the mouse gestures in mozilla. They are not at all consistent. You have to "draw" the gesture exactly with sharp edges or it failes to recongnize. With Opera it is very robust. And yes, mouse gestures is important to me.
This one might be my ignorance, but I can't get the tabbed browsing to work right on Mozilla. Most of the time it opens new tab for new window but sometimes it will open a new window. Not to mention that the download window always opens a new window. Opera always keeps everything in the same window.
And finally, I love that I can close opera and start it later and have all my open webpages restored. No need to temporary bookmarks. Couldn't find this mozilla.
So until mozilla gets these right (specially mouse gestures), I will stick to opera. Although one thing I miss that mozilla has is the google toolbar. Hopefully, opera will pick it up soon.
Besides, a lot of times the company is not really owned by the person who came up with the original product, but by that person's investors. And the reason investors invest is that they think it will make them money.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Because by "going public" their corporate offices sole responsibility becomes maximizing dividends for the stockholders. I don't agree with this formula, but it's as simple as that.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
They haven't released a new version in a long time
They are busy working on 7.50, which has some failry major changes to the layout of the GUI. A preview version was made available a few weeks ago (search the opera.beta and opera.linux newsgroup archives for a link). The new version includes an RSS reader, a spell-checker, a cookie editor, an IRC client, the much-requested ability to apply their small screen rendering to hotlist panels to make just about any web-page a side-bar panel and lots of fixes and enhancements. The preview is alpha quality but it looks interesting, I expect a beta must be near.
Suck figs.
The only thing that I don't like is, as you mentioned, the inability to gesture on a blank page. You can gesture while one is loading, but not if you're still connecting. Kind of annoying, but oh well. Head over to the Mozillazine forums if you need help with tabs, those guys can know everything
Oh, and about the download thing; in this latest release (Firefox 0.8), all downloads are loaded in to a single window/box. No more screwwing around with 90 download windows at once anymore. You can do that with a (very popular) extension called Tabbrowser Extensions (sometimes known as TBE). Under Tools -> Options -> Extensions -> Tabbrowser Extensions -> Startup. Theres a section for restoring sessions (and a sub option for tabs) on restart. Oh, and theres also one for restoring your session after a crash - that one is VERY handy.
I know you're not likely to switch browsers, but just wanted to post some answers for anyone else with the same questions. Happy browsing!
Opera's browser has gained popularity mostly in one area -- cellphones and PDA's. Although there has been growth in it's PC product sales, most revenue has been from licensing deals in the embedded space. Plenty of room for growth there.
Frankly, I'll keep my money in safer places....
Oh, you betcha. But it's not as off-the-wall as it seems at first glance.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Well. Let's see.. Opera is the standard browser on:
in addition to being available as perhaps the only real browser for Nokia 3650/7650, Nokia N-Gage and Siemens SX1, and Opera also has partnerships with several companies
http://virtuelvis.com/
They already have a product (so no money needed to front the development).
... excepting a hostile takeover. Of course, this "free money" does come at the cost of control of the company.
According to this page on the Opera site, the product was, in fact, self-financed until 1999, when the company borrowed $15 million, perhaps to finance the phone browser, perhaps to compete more aggressively on the desktop. The company says the money was borrowed from "financial investors," which could mean a bank, venture fund, private "angel" investors, relatives or personal credit cards.
All of these investors have one thing in common: they expect to be paid back, plus a premium for putting their money at risk. Imagine being tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and then imagine there is a way to pay off all of those debts and also avoid going to bankers for new capital for a long time, possibly forever. This is the appeal of an IPO.
Also, even if there is no debt to pay off, issuing shares has the distinct advantage over any other kind of debt in that it does not have to be paid back. If you blow the money, you may get booted personally as CEO but your company will not be foreclosed upon and sold or liquidated
The big deal here is the embedded space, as mentioned in the last article. Opera has been making a lot of deals in the embedded markets and that is primarily what is driving their growth. Opera spotted a niche that FOSS browsers were not filling and that IE was not filling well. They worked hard on their browser to make it a good fit for small platforms and now that hard work is paying off.
Whether Opera is popular on PCs is entirely beside the point. Opera's public mind share may be in PCs, but it's market share is in embedded devices and that is what is driving their performance. It's also what makes it a good IPO candidate.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Yeah, M$ has told us that IE7 wont be out until longhorn is. So we have at least one, probably two years until then, which means for browsers with built in tabs and pop up blocking, people will have to go elsewhere. Not that that's a bad thing...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
But it doesn't work with Ebay. My password is rejected everytime I use Opera and accepted everytime I use Internet Explorer 5.
Also whenever I use Yahoo! mail with Opera and I am entering my password, the prompt JUMPS to the user name box and the characters that I type appear appended to my user name. Again this doesn't happen in Internet Explorer.
I sure wish they could fix this nonsense.
Have you even TRIED changing your browser's identification string? It's a couple of clicks away in the Quick Preferences menu...
Also, I should note to everyone that the latest beta of Opera has a redesigned interface that removes clutter. Let's be honest--Opera is the fastest and lightest browser, and almost all of its innovative features were copied by the freeware browsers. Not that I'm not typing this in the new Firefox right now! But once the new Opera comes out, I may switch back again. Heck, changing skins happens instantly in less than a second with no restart.
"Seriously someone give me a good reason to pay $30 for a browser, even if it is "the fastest browser on earth, that's not worth $30 to me..."
.. well it's different. (At least from Outlook, Netscape, etc...) It downloads one copy of the message. Folders are created, not for copies of the message, but for different ways of viewing it. So one folder might say "Show me all the messages that have SLASHDOT in the headers", but another folder would say show me all the folders with MICROSOFT in the headers". You can imagine that those two emails could overlap sometimes? Well instead of getting dupe messages, you get the one message, but you can see it in either folder. It's sort of like Outlook's categories. I don't really like it for personal messages, but man it's great for email notifications that somebody has replied to your post. When you right click on a link, you can say "Open in background window". So your mail window stays up, but the new window appears behind it. That's great if you want to go down a list of emails and open links to them.
.INI files etc, but it was doable. You Linux folks may not care, but us Windows guys like programs that aren't overly dependent on the Registry.
:P)
It's got a really nice interface. Not only is it intuitive, but quite powerful too. Here are a few things I do with it: (note: I do not intend to imply that these are things Mozilla cannot do. I'm simply stating what I use it for.)
- I post my artwork on a lot of different forums. For each project, I create a folder. In that folder there's a bookmark linking to every single thread I've started about that project. When I right-click on that folder, I can say "open each one in a new window." That's exactly what it does. When the windows are done loading, the titlebar of each page turns the text blue.
- The magnify button scales up text and images, nice for zooming in on artwork I browse. (Porn too!)
- The transfers window is nice for downloading files. Not only does it stay out of the way, but it also allows you to re-xfer and resume files without having to go hunt down a link.
- Opera's email client is
Okay, I babbled a lot on this topic, but I seriously love Opera for forum browsing because of how its email works.
- Opera's customization is surprisingly robust. Add buttons.. remove buttons... reorder them. I am continually suprised by Opera's intuitiveness in this regard. They've really through what somebody might want to do when they click, drag, or right click.
- Refresh every n minutes. That feature's cool if you're waiting for a website to update.
- Linked Windows: Click a link in one window, the response happens in another. This is a GREAT porn surfing feature! (I ain't gonna lie to you guys, porn surfing is important to me!)
- You can transplant it to another machine. This is undocumented, but I've been able to move Opera with all my bookmarks, email, etc to another machine. It took some editing of
- You can turn off images with the click of an icon. I found this useful while travelling once. The dialup connection was HORRID. So I turned off image downloading and boom the internet was much more responsive. (IT's also good for avoiding Goatse links.
Opera's popularity is understandable. Mozilla may have a lot of what I mentioned. At that point, it becomes a matter of personal preference.
"Derp de derp."
That's Shift-F11 (View -> Small Screen). There is no Shift-F12 hotkey, at least not on the current version 7.23 for Windows.
Opera isn't (as far as I can tell) banking on making all its money by selling directly to end-users. It has a very big push to embedded devices. If the development aspect of Opera is better than IE's, then they have a good chance.
How a 4.0 MB program takes up 8 times as much RAM I will never know.
:), use.
That's because you don't understand how computer programs work. You don't just load them into memory, and boom! Everything works.
Programs dynamically allocate memory to be used for their internal workings. This is what is commonly referred to as a "heap". It's basically a big "heap" of memory that a program can, at its whim (and within boundaries set by the OS
Think about what your average complex program does. It's not just math. It needs to store a LOT of data. Things the user enters, and things that result from calculations from that data. Different representations of that data, you name it. The worst part is when you're pulling data from another computer. You suddenly need to store all of THAT data within your own RAM. Kinda like webpages. Opera caches everything insanely well (I can go back in my browser through dozens of links, and the pages will render almost instantaneously). All of this is stored within RAM. The longer you use Opera, the more RAM it will use, and this is a big reason why.
Anyway, if you're writing "hello world", you're correct. Your program will pretty much use only the memory needed to load the executable (and a bit for stack space, plus OS-related information). But anything reasonably complex, with complicated data structuring, and pulling data from other sources... THAT will use a LOT of memory. That's just how computers work.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.