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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."
Frankly, I'll keep my money in safer places....
So, I would assume, Google. Also factor in the demand factor for the shares, expectation of being the next Netscape, etc.,
Will be interesting to see how Opera performs as a public company
I'm sure there are quite a few people that'd like to get in on this, but not if it's prohibitively expensive.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I hope some other multinational conglomeration doesn't steamroll over them and buy them out.
I fear the day when google goes public. It will be the end of usable websearching as we know it. (Hides from the corporate whores jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth)
Lousy facepalm.
Phew, I was afraid Opera was in trouble. They haven't released a new version in a long time (at one point it was every 2 weeks or maybe a month). Then again, Opera has been pretty rock solid on my systems, with the only crashes occuring during an occassional FLASH ad on tvguide.com/listings.
I'm glad the company is still going strong, as Opera is my browser of choice. While I like Mozilla and it's brother FireBird, I still think Opera is the finest browser available. People may laugh at me for buying licenses, but the overall experience has been great.
Can someone explain why companies love going public so damn much?
They already have a product (so no money needed to front the development). They alreay show a profit. Wouldn't an IPO just mean they need to share their profit, in exchange for a wad of cash that they don't really need for anything, and that will actually cost them, in the long term?
Same idea applies to Google. Single most successful search engine in history, and they want to share their profits by going public?
I just don't get it...
I use Opera 7. It does a good job at blocking pop-ups and I can zoom the text size easily.
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.
If you want stock gain, buy into a company that does really nasty things to people. For instance, the company that makes Tasers, those guns that shoot darts that police use to zap protesting college students with 50000 volts of electricity, has seen their stock price go from $2 to over $120 in a year.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Maybe OEMS who want to license Opera for mobile computing will care, but your right. As far as the oh so bold %3 of people who don't use IE, longterm they'll probably all end up being Gecko users. The reasons for using Opera over Firefox for general browsing are slim to none. Before Firebird/FirefoxPhoenix came out they really had a point about Opera being lightweight as compared to the big monolithic Mozilla suite. But that was then and this is now. Nobody wants to pay for what you can get for free. If Opera can't establish itself as "the" browser for handhelds/pda's they don't have much of a future besides being a takeover target once their stock dips to sub $1.00 levels.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
For what it's worth, I've been using Opera exclusively since version 3.something in 1998. When they switched to ads, I used a cracked version for a couple months, but then regged it after the guilt got to me. Considering that (excluding operating systems) I use this piece of software more than any other, I probably owed them a lot more than it cost. Though I must admit that I'm the only person I know who gave them any money, and I know about a half dozen other people who use it regularly. I assume most of their revenue comes from licensing deals w/ mobile phone makers.
If you're willing to learn the interface and customize it to your liking, there's no doubt in my mind that there's nothing faster. Most importantly, you can use it with either the mouse OR the keyboard without any loss of efficiency. From my experiences, most other browsers have functions that can only be done with one or the other.
just my $.02
Not to mention all of the stuff that comes in the nice tight package - tabbed browsing, popup blocking (including "block all but requested" - there are legitimate uses for popups, you know), mouse gestures, keyboard browsing, etc with no extra setup or packages required.
Then there's the stuff that's really making them money now - stuff like small-screen rendering, which makes smartphones and the like reasonably useful without requiring the entire contents of the web to be rewritten.
And yes, I like it so much I paid for it (several times by now), knowing that there are plenty of viable free alternatives. It's just that good.
Look in mobile phone and embedded space. This is the growth market for web browsers and also happens to be where Opera is kicking major arse and Microsofts lockin on the desktop counts for very little (and in some ways even helps Opera, as many phone companies are naturally fearful of letting MS own the platform).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That's the only reason I can think of for why they would be going public. When you are public, one of the big rules is get as much money as you can when you have the chance. Right when you cross over to break-even is that chance. Before break-even is silly (we've been through that bubble and are not buying it anymore) and if you leave it too long you might dip below break-even again which would tarnish your image (from the investment point of view).
In my opinion, going public is both the best and the worst thing that can happen to a company, from the employee perspective. I've worked for a private company, a public company, and a private company that went public. In a public company you can make a lot of money off your stock options (assuming you have some). But the atmosphere in a private company is much more agreeable, with the lines of communications much more open. When my last company went public, it was like a door slammed and all information about how the company was doing, and what potential customers we were talking to, disappeared. We essentially woke up after the party, feeling rich, and realized nobody would talk to us anymore.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
FUD.
There has been a single handful of security issues in the past years, which were either solved with a fixed build even before the vulnerability was made public, or at most a few days later.
There are currently no open vulnerabilities.
In what sense is this 'worse than IE'?
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
How about you use what YOU like. I have used both Opera and Mozilla and I decided to use Mozilla because I liked it's interface. Just because Mozilla is OSS does not mean it is better. (Go ahead and troll me :)
For you Opera users, here's something fun--hit Shift-F12 and see what your webpage looks like rendered by Opera on a tiny device!