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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."
Is it time to start buying stock? :)
This space is not for rent.
Good luck to Opera on their IPO. Just remember, it isn't over till the fat lady sings!
I'd buy that for a kroner.
Opera is a nice browser, but honestly how many people do you know that actually regged it? Most people are using the ad supported version. With the company going public it makes me wonder about how many ads and to what level the ads will be showing up in future releases. Instead of just a banner at the top maybe pop ups FROM Opera? Perhaps I'm just seeing things negatively but this certainly makes me wonder about the product. I will say it is nice to use on a Zaurus though.
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.
amazing how 2 free to use apps can be both offering stocks in 2004. Do i see a bubble rising in the tech sector again??? I better get back to buying domains for selling cat skinners, corn row straighteners, and board stretchers!!!
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!
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...
Guess it would depend on what you define as higher.
My guess is Google will have a higher market cap.
Pricewise, there is no telling. Is there some way to get information on # of outstanding shares there are?
95% of others: Ooooh! Tech stocks! It's the next '90's!
This side up.
Not to bang the drum slowly here but if Netscape which was already paired with a money maker (or loser depending on your view) such as AOL, and it's pretty much a dead product nowadays, I wonder what Opera is thinking aside from making a quick dollar. Even if they made a measly $190k they lost $3.1 that will eventually have to be paid back if not done already.
Now, Opera is alright as a browser, but as it stands the majority of `quickie' users tend to be - dare I say it? - IE (l)users, and with Microsoft making it pretty much the first thing a new computer user sees, I wonder what is making Opera think they can compete with the (s/^/crooked/g) Microsoft 400lb Gorilla.
MoFscker
Their board will get slammed by the "big kids" trying to get a piece...the directors will get sick of it quickly and quit within a year...Either way the "standards compliance" will be the first thing to go when the corps take over...and that is Opera's only "killer" feature...If the directors want their money, sell it to somebody like google, or OSDN or IBM...somebody that's big enough and "in tune" enough to appreciate it....unlike the whole AOL/Netscape thing.
Now only if they could get a search keyword highlight (like the google toolbar), I will stop using mozilla (which has a google toolbar lookalike).
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
This news on the same day that Firefox 0.8 comes out. With everyone all gung ho over the new mozilla browser, no ones gonna give a rip about opera.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I don't know whether I'd go and buy their stock but the web browser is amazing.
------
Sig
Take your 108.7% increase, give the staff a nice bonus, and keep on developing.
Why is it that every tech firm thinks that making a profit means sell up as fast as possible? Why put yourselves in the hand of people that have no idea about your technology, company culture or internal standards and just expect you to keep turning profits at all costs?
Keep the money, keep your company and keep inovating.
I like Mozilla, and usually support free software, especially OSS, but I don't see what's so wrong about liking payware. It's not like I'm dirt poor, and can't afford the registration fee.
Free Software and Open Source software is great, but not every company is Microsoft; some are benigh or even benevolent. There's nothing wrong with paying for software if you like it more than the free alternatives.
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 $120 in a year.
This browser IPO is going to be huge! It will turn Microsoft Windows into pile of poorly debugged device drivers and everything will be run from the Web browser!
You simply cannot lose launching a Web browser company!
Opera isn't freeware. It has a free version with ads and a paid version without the ads.
After one our browsing slashdot it is using 55MB of RAM, I can't type on composer real time (I type and it show up few seconds later), it takes 8 seconds to open a new window and once you get a lot of registers on history/bookmarks/download manager performance sucks because parsing xml is very inefficient.
My specs are: k6-2 266mhz, 128MB ram, pretty common around here.
The timing for an IPO is bad. Now that they appear to be turning an operating profit, protential investors can only see the limitations of Opera's profit potential. When Opera was still sustaining losses, investors could (unrealistically) fill in the blanks on Opera's potential. I suspect that many investors are savvy about a company whose chief competitor is the 800 lb gorilla of the industry and whose major competing products are free of charge.
True, But im am happy to live with a program that might not be up to par with a pay program just so I dont have to support the company that makes it. Its not about the money its about principles.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
So what do you recommend for someone who wants a similar browser for FreeBSD, Linux(Debian) & MS Win?
Opera is located in Norway, not Sweden -- two neighboring but very different countries. (The Norwegians feel about the Swedes much the same way the Americans feel about Canadians.)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
since the press release is a little light on details: presently, 70% of Opera Software ASA are held by its employees. They hope to make some 8 to 12 million euro (9 to 13 million US$) by going public. must be fun working there :)
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
the Fat Lady isn't getting ready to sing. It's nice to see a smaller player produce a quality product
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I wonder which would start higher, Opera or Google?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Rhetorical Karma Whoring Question" moderation option.
Trolling is a art,
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.
I'm sure you didnt put the latest version of all your software on that 133. Why then should you expect to be able to put the latest version of mozilla? Sure the latest version of opera may work fine but none the less if you tried to put on a new version of mozilla whos to blame?
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
because there is nothing wrong with the adware version. i have no reason to reg, so its free, just like mozilla. not only that, but mozilla is ugly IMO. really ugly. it does seem to handle some of the multimedia stuff a little better than opera for now... i just really prefer opera, it seems faster, its prettier, and i love me some gestures. more power to both of them, however.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
Well, I wouldn't put it quite like that, but I tend to agree. A few months back I gave Opera a fair shot. I ran it exclusively for about a month. There were a few weird things about it that I didn't like. (Where the heck are the tabs? Oh - it's not called tabs in Opera even though Opera says it has "tabbed browsing". And I don't like integrated e-mail in my browser, personally. And the Opera e-mail client "sucked", in my opinion.)
There wasn't anything about it that I liked well enough to make it my new browser of choice. I had heard that it was the fastest browser available in terms of rendering HTML. So I wanted to give it a fair try. I don't have an Open Source axe to grind. If a proprietary product is genuinely better, I'm willing to admit it. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll use it, but I don't have any problem owning up when something else is better. But personally I just didn't see any fantastic speed increases. (Or even non fantastic speed increases for that matter.) And the ads, they are annoying when you aren't use to having them. I'm sure I could get use to them, or I could pay to get rid of them. But why bother when FireBird (now FireFox)/Galeon/Mozilla is just as good (better)?
You don't have to pay for Opera. It's an adware application, which means that you have to look at a small adverting window. In Opera it's just a small window in the top right corner next to the toolbar, so it's really not that bad.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
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
Mozilla
You don't have to pay, you know. You can have the little banner ad up in the top corner doing its thing. With the coming of context sensitive Google ads up there, I actually think it's worth it for me NOT to pay for it. I like those little things up there.
I just wish they'd hurry the port of version 7 for OS X. I miss a lot of the mouse gestures and things that I get with Opera.
But why bother when FireBird (now FireFox)/Galeon/Mozilla is just as good (better)? Well, as far as I know there isn't yet a version of any of these I can run on my Nokia 3650 phone (Symbian OS). That's why I have Opera. (Then again, as long as T-Mobile's t-zones service is apparently blocking access to port 443, having any web browser on the phone's only "partly useful" to begin with...)
I'm more afraid that this will be the CEO/Senior Exec's opportunity to get a whack of cash.
Personally, I don't see a strong reason for Opera going public except to make somebody rich in the short term.
Long term? Well, we're still dealing with the fallout of that from similar companies the '90s - no new products/revenue streams but lots of new Lexuses.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"Why pay for Opera when Mozilla v1.6 is out."
A.) I'm not actually paying antyhing from a cash point of view. There are text based ads in the upper right portion of my screen that otherwise does nothing. (They used to have comics in there, I miss them.) Small price to pay for a browser with such a heavily refined UI.
B.) I like Opera's interface more than Mozilla's. It's friendlier and more attuned to my personal tastes. I've boosted my productivity considerably with Opera.
C.) If I support 'free software', is it really free anymore? Making money off it defeats the purpose of working on it.
Sorry, but I'm going to use what's better for me. If you think that's evil, then yeah, whatever. I'd rather reward the people who've made a better product for me than encourage a group of people to maybe possibly consider working for my benefit.
"Derp de derp."
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
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
Not unless *they pay me* for that screen real estate. And to clarify my comment about it being the fastest browser, I said "even if it is" which I have found to not be the case...
if that banner wasnt there, it would be blank space. it doenst bother me at all. there is no way i can see to make it useful for me and if they want to give it to me for free just so they can put text ads up there occasionally, thats ok with me.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
The big revenue stream for Opera is in the mobile/embedded space. They sell the browser to Nokia, etc. and make money there. The desktop space is probably a lot smaller in terms of market size for them.
[Please type your sig here.]
wget
What do you have against the people who make Opera? Or are you just against every business?
I don't know what Internet you browse but most of the sites I browse have pages longer than the height of even a 19" monitor at 1600x1200 (and no, I don't have a 19" at 16x12), it's very simple. More space for the web page = less scrolling.
i dont know what opera browser youve used, but have you used the one from opera.com? the banner takes up no less vertical space than the buttons on the left already do. okay, maybe few pixels, but im not worried about that little amount. its negligable, really. yes, it is very simple.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
---------
Create a WAP server now
why does 'going public' always equate into 'after this they must try to bring in all the cash they can
A public corperation is obligated (by law even I believe) to maximize profits for its shareholders, by pretty much any means they can. Trust me, if the majority interests think that that can make more money by using pop-up ads, not only *will* they, but if the current CEO doesn't aree with it, they will fire him.
That is the reality of going public; the original owners no longer have control of the company, it is now delegated to the board.
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.
Opera :-)
Only if your blind and need the Large Icons and Large Text. I use Mozilla Firebird/fox with small icons and limited text. My Navigation bar isn't more than 15 pixels in height.
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.
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
I don't know what happened for you. That's the first account of instability I've ever heard coming from Opera.
Opera is EXTREMELY fast, takes up very little memory, and has all the functionality and more of Mozilla, etc. In fact, those free browsers ripped off a bunch of their features from Opera (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc.)
I've had Mozilla crash lots of times, on the other hand. And it was always with a lot of tabs open, so I lost them all.
Guess what happens if Opera exits for whatever reason and you have stuff open? The next time you start up, you find out it auto-saved the session for you! You're right back where you left off.
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 :)
> but there are so many other alternatives out there
Not really. Not for handhelds for example.
Opera still has their "one page 2 one column" feature.
Don't let the IPO kill Opera, so long as 7.5 delivers on it's alledged features I think I will finally be using a browser in FreeBSD that does everything I want... and fast.
./revolution
Because they're _not_ as good (better). Opera is better than all of them, I've tried them all. If you disagree with me, you must be an idiot or a moron, at least; worst case, a terrorist.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I haven't registered Opera, partly because I really like how it shows Google ads in the banner area (but mostly I'm cheap). Google and Opera have been working together for a while, and I love it; IPOs for either one would benefit both.
we'll sell dog food, over the internet!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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."
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!
Most people around here seem to miss an important point. Opera is a Norwegian company and it is going to be listed on Oslo Stock Exchange, not on NASDAQ. Being a small company is not a problem for them. They don't aim for multi-billion capitalisation, just for a way to raise some relatively small amounts of capital to finance their expansion plans (whatever they are).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
In my early days of computer, I was an idiot and used IE for like six monthes. Then, after realizing what absolute trash it was, I moved onto Netscape Communicator for about two years. Coming to another realization that it was just a stupid version of Mozilla, I used Mozilla for about 3 monthes, then switched to Opera 7, which was very impressive...about 8 monthes ago. Then I decided to give Mozilla.org a much deserved visit. Well, I noticed that Firebird 0.7 was out, so I downloaded it and gave it a shot. About five minutes later i was installing the Optimoz tweaks and mouse gestures, and uninstalling Opera. Firebird is sumpremely awsome, and the fact that it's free and OSS makes it surpass any small niceitys that Opera may feature. Opera is a nice browser, but I think they need to be very careful about how big they let their heads get, especially when I see OSS outperforming them, or, at the least, on par with them.
... the Opera Creators said, "Let there be an IPO!"
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
100% agreed.
... it's in the memory. How a 4.0 MB program takes up 8 times as much RAM I will never know.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Load times are peculilarily subjective. By far, it's the fastest browser I've ever used. Mozilla was slow in its interface as well as slow when loading pages. Phoenix was better, but never quite as good as Opera for me.
What the hell is FireFox?
And finally, the toolbar has a translate button which uses the google translator for converting webpages into english (and other languages) with one click. With opera, you have to manually give the url to google (or altavista) for translation.
Opera has right-click translation. Highlight some text, right-click and you have whole load of options including dictionary, encyclopedia, and translation (all powered by Lycos).
Suck figs.
have you tried Tools > Options > Downloads > File Types > .DOC > Change Action > Save to Disk ?
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
myself and a friend of mine both actually found that on linux, the opera adware version just stopped working after a certain amount of time. thought it must be time limited or something. i liked it while it worked! but when that happened, just went back to mozilla.
You could look for form 14As on edgar (the SEC's database of corporate filings) as the offering approaches. This only works for google, but I'm sure there is something similar in Opera's home country. Right now there are only a few filings related to Google. Related to google the early pricing guesses have been between for something like 10-12 billion. I've not seen any estimates for Opera, but figure a value in the range of 30-50x earnings, or about 3x-7x annual sales, perhaps a bit more than that and you can estimate a value. This would be the offering price, not the first day close.
In the US offerings are usually done to get offering prices in the teens, although google and other high provfile IPOs are likely to go in the 20s. With the anticipation for this one, expect a nice first day bounce. Each foreign country has it's own customs for share pricing, (British companies keep their share price in the single pound range).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's good to see they have identified this and quickly moved into the Smartphones to gain a greater marketreach.
Trolltech has made a similar move, offering QTopia which operates in Mobile Phones and PDAs.
The future is bright!
This are nice features. For those that want some of these in Mozilla, get yourself the multizilla extension (a better tabbed browsing experience) + (for image magnification), get the bookmarklets from http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/ (zoom images in/out, zap images, zap javascript and so on)
Opera is a nice browser, but honestly how many people do you know that actually regged it?
I registered Opera after using the ad-sponsored version for a number of years. A college prof mentioned Opera in one of my classes years ago - specifically bringing up its use of mouse gestures. I tried it out and found that it was far better than IE (was using windows at the time). After using the ad version for all these years, I suddenly decided to register the damn thing. I figured that Opera had been providing me with this great, free browser for all those years, I might as well give a little something back. Not only that, but the money supports a company that has had the guts to compete against Microsoft's illegal, monopolistic tactics.
Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
It also works every N seconds. I use that when spammers forge my domain in the headers of their spam. Once I start seeing the bounces, I eat as much of their bandwidth as I can. Am I going to shut them down? No, I'm sure they have more bandwidth than I do. Will it increase their cost? I suspect that I signifigantly drive up the total amount of bandwidth that they have to pay for. Do I feel bad? Not at all - they've implicated me in their spam, so fuck 'em.
The magnify button scales up text and images, nice for zooming in on artwork I browse. (Porn too!)
There's a mozilla bug number for this one, but as is normal for mozilla, it's a 3 year long discussion with various people talking about how it can't be done, instead of someone just doing it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I have registered version 6 and 7. See, I'm supporting software I use and love. My only complaint is that they don't have a port to PocketPC.
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.
If it's that much of a problem for you, then just press F11 and go into full screen mode.
Emerald Astrology
actually, XP SP2 includes popup blocker
kawai
Mozilla has some of the features I love from Opera (tabbed browsing, gesture support, to name a couple). However Mozilla copied these features from Opera, they were not the first on the block with them. As a result Mozilla's support for these features is lacking compared to Opera. Case in point: gestures. I have regularly had gestures crash mozilla, or make webpages inaccessible (or both!).
Opera innovates. Gesture support and tabbing are Opera first for the browsing world. Check out the 'quick download' feature on the transfers window. You paste a link there and it starts downloading automatically. Or the fast forward/rewind features. Say you're looking through a forum and you have to click on the message, click back to the thread, and click the next message repeatedly. With fastforward it only takes one click. With this feature you can be browsing through images on a webpage and click fast forward and go to the next image without having to go through all the other clicks inbetween. Opera has the "reload every..." option where I can have a webpage (such as slashdot) reloaded every so often automatically. Opera integrates a search toolbar into the app, with google as the default. This has been around for some time and keeps getting better with more search options such as low price search, ebay searches, and domain name search- all from the toolbar, quick and simple. Mozilla's FireFox app has taken the hint and added the google search idea. What innovative ideas has Mozilla brought to the table? I don't know of any this level but I'll bet we'll see these copied from Opera in a future version.
I have 10 pages open in Opera right now and 2 transfers going and its using 16MB of memory. I have one page open in Mozilla 1.6 (google) and its using 23MB of memory (same page in FireFox v0.8 still uses more (17.3MB). The Linux version of Mozilla is a 284% larger download than the largest version of Opera for linux (13.9MB versus 4.9MB).
Opera consistantly starts faster, renders pages faster, uses less memory, has awesome tabbing and gestures that work well, continues to innovate and support more platforms. This is the reason I pay for Opera.
... in my opinion, though it IS catching up fast.
The answer is that Opera is so much better than the rest it saves me that I would pay $3000 a year to use it, considering how much I use the web.
With todays highly fickle speculative stock market... IPO's for companies generating positive revenue is nothing more than a money grab before the company falls flat on its face... Why did google put off its IPO... I bet ya they figured out thier high revenue stream will last for quite some time and if they wait a while its likely they will be able to sell off thier shares for much more at a later date... I have no doubt in my mind the top level people at google will have virtually no shares aftera short time period of the IPO unless the price keeps soaring higher and higher.. Which is doubtfull... I can see after 3 months the price of google stock being below its IPO price.. I am sure the same iwll happen with Opera or any other company that has a established product that has a positive cash stream.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
firebird^H^H^H^Hfox
-Check out their message board and see all the ways Opera can look. With great keyboard shortcuts, the layout can be very simple, with minimal screen space needed.
-Double click on a word or highlighting text brings up a context menu, allowing you to copy to text or note, search on, check dictionary or encyclopedia, translate the words go to a url or email someone.
Socialism, when properly implemented, guarantees a job for everybody, unlike some other systems. Maybe read up before posting?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
It's not time-limited. Your GNU/Linux sk1LLz just weren't 1337 enough.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
More than mere navel gazing.
Personally, because Opera's tab and mouse gesture implementations are far nicer than Mozilla's. I like to browse in a very minimalist way, with only tabs visible, so decent mouse gestures are pretty important to me (I noticed in the Firefox release notes that it's now boasting a bigger viewable area than [the default in] other browsers.) I drop in on Firebird or Firefox (or whatever it's calling itself on any particular day) occasionally, to see if it has caught up, but so far have been disappointed, which is a shame because there are some extensions which I really like. The 7.5 beta of Opera is also very nice, so far.
I think FreeBSD should be able to run the linux version of Firefox. ==> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/linuxemu.html
Oops, the link screwed up:
Linux Binary Compatibility
unless they provide some way to do xml-rpc, xml-http stuff. basically to have the browser be able to call more data from the server without actually loading a new page. there are some hidden iframe hacks you can do, but its light and day between these hacks and actual xmlhttp work.
i understand the desire to adhere to a standard, but its much akin to deciding not to include an axel with your car because there are no axel standards: its just not gonna drive.
opera needs to get off their high horse and do something about this, ASAP. my favorite browser, but i cannot deploy it because its missing the most crucial instrument of DHTML, well, except maybe making snowflakes fall across my page.
Myren
you know, i never use it full, so i didnt notice that. the ad banner even goes away. huh. i still dont particularly care for it full screen, but it would indeed make the most use of jaylee7877's screen, if its all that important to him
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
My post should explain some reasons.
Some of these are a bit outdated and incorrect.
I have switched from Opera to Mozilla but I miss it sometimes.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
This is going to be the greatest stock since Netscape!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
>Socialism, when properly implemented, guarantees
>a job for everybody...
at one tenth the wages of other systems.
And as long as you support the government in power. (When you figure out how to implement socialism without a government, call me - and prepare to prove it.)
And ruins the economy to boot.
Austrian economic theory has proven socialism to be totally unworkable for decades now.
You read up.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Well, they don't have the Google toolbar, but they have a google search-field up on the addressbar. At least in 7.5 preview 1.
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),
...but if you can point me to a site where pop-ups are actually better, and not just a design thing, do tell. Pop-ups and the BLINK tag should die. Permanently. Which btw also goes for animated GIFs/flash sites/java applets mimicing it as well.
Not to mention those funny pop-up alike "tracking" ads that follow you down the page when you scroll. Also incredibly annoying. For some reason, despite having content that is 99,9% like a newspaper, many sites feel it's their right to bombard you with the equivalent of a konfetti "pop-up" in a real newspaper.
To that I can only say: Live by the sword and die by the sword. They massively abused my browser, so I feel no remorse massively "abusing" them by reading their sites without the ads. Maybe in a decade or three we're even.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually, by going public, you now need to fulfill the terms under your new contract with shareholders. Your contract does not need to say that you are going to do everything in your powers to maximise shareholder value, although it often does, and to make such a promise might help you to raise more cash.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Actually, Opera's a shareware browser, and utilizes Google AdWords in the unpaid version. I should know - I see an AdWords block up on the top of my browser.
Actually, you can change the banner to an actual banner ad, instead of a 468x60 position for an ad. I'm not sure, but there might still be comics in there. Opera does seem a bit slower with the graphical ads in here, however.
They've had that since version 6.x, or maybe earlier - the only pre-6.x version I used was 2.12 (Web Archive is your friend), and that was just to see how Opera was in the early days.
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
Oh, I wasn't arguing that the current (or past) so-called socialistic economies (which have, in fact, been more in the lines of oligarcic state capitalisms) are necessarily better options. I specifically amended "-- when properly implemented, --"
/required/ to buy commodities as now.
I should also mention that the 1/10th wage is a misleading figure -first of all, I'm not sure where you get the number and secondly, it's irrelevant due to the nature of the economy. A great deal of money is not
In any case, Austria is hardly a socialistic country. Having a decent social security infrastructure doesn't mean the country is socialistic. You might also look at the Nordic countries for reference on the model of Austria but implemented better.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I'm using Opera right now, you insensitive clods!
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
Not to say that everyone is not entitled to his own ethics, but some of us feel it is unethical to use software that restricts peoples freedom.
So, for me there is something that is wrong about non-free software, that it restricts peoples freedom , who cares about the money??
For many of us (everyone who supports the FSF, for example) there is something wrong with paying for non-free software, it's great, though, paying for the development of free software. When you pay for non-free software, you are funding a company that bases its revenue on restricting people's freedom. Non-free software restricts your freedom to help other by sharing the software you have, your freedom to help yourself by improving that software, and to help others again by distributing your improvements.
If you use GPLed software, you gain all those freedoms, plus the assurance to keep them throughout the whole life of the software project.
-- There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels. --
Wow. You need to turn the zealousy down. I'm all for freedom too, but what does that have to do with anything? I could understand if you were talking about Microsoft's or Adobe's shadier business decisions, but this whole rant is a bit out there.
It's not like Opera prohibits you from viewing immoral webpages or anything, it's just a tool. Sure, you can get a hammer for free from a neighbor, or buy one at Home Depot. Both will hammer just as well, but the bought one might have a nicer handle, or the older hammer might be of longer-lasting quality. You compare both before deciding.
It's all about preference. I CHOOSE to use the payware in this instance because I have the freedom to choose, and I personally like Opera just a little bit more. Who's to say I don't also choose to use OpenOffice or Linux at home. I choose to use those tools as well.
I think Opera did a good job here, and the company deserves my small payment. I could just as easily stick with the free version, or find a cracked version out there, but I choose to compensate them for their efforts and the little bit of happiness it has brought me.
Or should development shops (large or small) suffer just because they chose to charge for their product?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough, but paying is not the problem. RMS himself charged for Emacs, back in the time. The problem is paying for non-free software, I would much rather pay for free software.
The difference is that when you use Opera you don't and can't know what is happening with your computer, and you can't share it with your friends, and you can't improve it, legally. And you are supporting a company that takes away that power from people.
If you follow the link in the parent, you can see it better explained by the FSF.
It's not the money, it's the freedom!
Ok, I had to respond to this one. I started using Opera with one of the late version 5s. I'm not some ubergeek. I just loathe IE and Netscape and want something that will work.
Anyway, in 7.0 I finally decided to switch out of Eudora for my e-mail and into M2. What a boondoggle. While I love many of the features that Opera M2 offers, I have two significant problems.
1) My e-mail archives are what I use to store half the facts of my life and, when importing, Opera kept crashing on random messages. It took me a week of dedicated work to get my archives imported, and I had to make duplicate files and delete a bunch of messages before Opera would do it.
2) Opera will spontaneously crash on occasion. When it does, I lose e-mail messages. When I go to look at them, I get the text, "Message body not downloaded."
Aw, heck, it would be nice if Opera's address book were better too. As much as I really dislike MS, the Windows address book is just plain functional. Opera's isn't even close -- and they have no plans to talk to my Palm either.
Anyway, because of the significant issues I have with the mail database, I am looking for something else to move into. I just am worried about being able to export the past year's worth of e-mail messages.
I'm not a troll, have a look at my track record, anonymous coward.
If you would bother to educate yourself about the product that you are defending you would see that they too have had a history of not being responsive to discovered security flaws. Did I ever say IE was "good", no, I didn't.
I'm pointing out that opera, the commercial closed source product that it is, really, has some pretty serious flaws that sometimes, not always, get addressed in a timely manner.
Is that "trolling"?
Unfortunately, I've wasted 5 minutes having to explain something that an intelligent, open minded individual, would have figured out for themselves by actually bothering to read, comprehend and follow what i've written. Or, you might have read my post on an off day.