Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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.