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Nokia Invested In Mozilla?
Pine UK writes "The Register, is reporting that Nokia has invested in the Mozilla Foundation. This news should come as a shock to Opera, who in recent times have had a very large market share in the area of portable device browsers. Opera has also been the browser choice for Nokia, who ship it with all their Symbian 'smartphones.' Nokia have not yet confirmed nor denied their investment in Mozilla."
If you fork, you have to pay developers. If you invest and make the Mozilla Foundation (works for other OSS organisations too) see what you need and rally to your cause, you get them to develop for you .
That's no worse than not giving money and taking the product, which they could also do. As long as Mozilla is getting a fair deal in return for adding the features Nokia wants, I don't see a problem with it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
? If you are developing for anybody/everybody to use freely than how can someone using it for free be taking advantage of the orgranization? Considering if they didn't want anybody and everybody to be able to use it they would've licensed it differently.
Nokia may be investing in Mozilla because they can give donations and then get the product with no strings attached. Giving donations and entering into contracts are two very different things and it's a lot easier to have your way with an organization that you donate to than dealing with contracts.
Investing? A donation is not an investment. The only investment out of this, is that it will help the Mozilla Foundation stay alive, which is an investment if you plan on using their product. But this is not an investment in a traditional sense. It gives Nokia no leverage on the foundation or on the product it produces. They would need to create a binding contract to be able to legally force the Mozilla Foundation to have their way.
Ahem, most of "Operas" in Symbians (we speak about 300*200 at MOST!) are licensed BUNDLES.
/. people hates Opera since its a commercial program, closed source (allthough one of biggest supporters to QT) and sorry to say, displays 2 lines of damn Google ads but please, please SPEAK IF YOU KNOW WHAT IS THE SUBJECT.
Some wants you to buy them, after 1 month or so, some doesn't.
For GODS SAKE, at least install opera 7.5 and post comments. Opera 7.5 for desktops is an Internet SUITE.
Opera for mobile (Symbian) is the innovator and leader in mobile market. I am speaking about a code, with real low ram can render entire page you are reading now and can manage to find "importmant" parts to display on a tiny screen. Oh, does it without flooding phones memory...
I understand
Let me tell straight. Opera is the master of Mobile. Nothing less. If you don't believe, you better call Redmond and ask them.
Everyone around me using Nokia smart stuff bought it already...
Of course there is no 'force' involved here. You can choose between banners, google text ads (just about as bad for your privacy as looking at them in a webpage), and paying a few bucks.
It is FUD that Google stores URLs you visit. Google is not storing this on a IP level, and https sites and password protected URLs are not sent to Google by Opera to begin width.
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
That will be enough the please the masses. The only thing Aunt Tilley complains about really is "I can't stand those stupid popups!". IE users will revere Microsoft for installing popup blocking into the browser so they don't have to bother with inconsistent third party apps to do so without ever realizing there is was an alternative to begin with.
It's the truth, plain and simple.
And I apologize in advance for my Aunt Tilley reference :)
Firefox is 4.7 MB (actually with the latest nightlies, there was yet another size decease to 4.4 MB) and Opera is 3.4 MB.
Inspired by this article, I just downloaded Opera for my #2 computer (Debian Sid, w/ 96MB of RAM, somewhat taxed already by other services). The overall experience is quite a bit snappier than with Firefox 0.8. Firefox seems to choke on memory quite a bit more than Opera, even when I have image display enabled on Opera, and disabled on firefox. The playing fields is level in the sense that I'm running Ion3 display manager (which rocks BTW, all resource-starved should check it out ASAP!).
The memory footprints as reported by 'top' don't appear all that different - both have 20MB resident (firefox a bit more), Opera has 22MB shared and Firefox has 29MB (well, that's 8MB difference).
OTOH, on my main machine with abundant ram and other resource, I would never use a non-OSS browser. There it's Firefox all the way.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Companies like Nokia, Intel etc have a fairly independent investment (or venture capital) fund that makes investments in a very broad portfolio of companies. They spread their bets so that whichever horse wins, they win. Its called the spray and pray strategy. As a result, they will frequently make competing investments.
The interesting thing is that just because they invest in a company does not mean that the business units interact with those startups.
I really wonder how Microsoft will respond to the recent movement in the browser market.
Microsoft failed to gain control of the Internet, so they've walked away from it.
They're far more focused on DRM now, and it looks like there's a chance they're actually going to take over that market. Gah.
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Mozilla is not bloated code - everything in there does something. Bloat refers to useless code.