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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."
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...
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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 :-)
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
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 :)
"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!
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.
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.