Google to Buy Opera?

patro writes "Opera Watch writes Google is planning to buy the Opera browser. The source of the claim is Pierre Chappaz, the former president of Yahoo Europe. Google obviously can't buy Firefox, so Opera might be the next possible candidate." I can't begin to imagine why.

Comments

gbrowser.com

[abscondment]

A little WHOIS action:

WHOIS Record For
gbrowser.com


[snip]

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1278108)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US


Domain Name: gbrowser.com


Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com/

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571

Created on..............: 2004-Apr-26.
Expires on..............: 2006-Apr-26.
Record last updated on..: 2005-Nov-09 15:09:25.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.ALLDOMAINS.COM
NS2.ALLDOMAINS.COM

Sure, this is old news... but is it coming to fruition?

Re:This is stupid.

[krgallagher]

" Absurd rumor mongering at its best/worst."

Yeah this is from a blog, and even the blog says 'An Opera official outright denied this claim, after I asked about it, saying "Rumors come and go. Google is not buying Opera."'

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Bogtha]

The whole forced banner ads thing kind of drove me away from it (not that I ever used it, but it kept me from ever using it again even).

Um, what forced banner ads thing? You always had the option of paying for Opera, people who actually bought it didn't have to see the ads. And even the ads for the free version have gone now. So... what's the grudge for? Do you hold a grudge against all non-free software? Or just the ones that also offer an ad-supported version?

Opera may be a fine browser, but we already have a really good (and open) thing going on with Firefox.

There are only two real advantages I see that Firefox has. The first is its extension mechanism. The second is that it's open-source, and that one wouldn't really matter to Google if they were planning on buying Opera, since they could always open-source Opera once they've bought it.

In all other respects, I think Firefox is trailing Opera. Opera got all of these first, and in many cases, Firefox either doesn't do as good a job, or hasn't implemented it at all:

• Tabs
• Popup blocker
• CSS (including lots of CSS 3)
• UserJS
• Aural CSS
• XHTML+Voice
• xml:id
• Web Forms 2
• SVG
• XML Events
• VoiceXML
• Cross-document messaging
• Handheld/phone support
• A decent amount of DOM3 stuff
• On-the-fly Javascript fixes for badly-constructed websites
• Much better Acid2 rendering

Not only that, but I just checked and an Opera download is ~4.1MB and a Firefox download is ~8.1MB.

So the advantage of going for Opera over Firefox is that it's much more technologically advanced. The Firefox advantage is sociological in nature, and Google certainly don't need any help in that department.

WebCore vs. Opera on mobile phones? Heh.

[hkmwbz]

"There are beta versions of WebCore browsers for Series 60 'phones and the '770 floating around, and they stack up quite well against Opera"

Really? Have you actually tried to run this new browser on a normal mobile phone, and not a monster with 50-100 MB RAM, which is the only thing they've been running it on so far?

Opera runs comfortably on extremely low-end phones. WebCore does not.