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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.
Absurd rumor mongering at its best/worst. If Google really wanted to get into the browser arena, why wouldn't they just create their own based on the open (And most importantly, FREE) Gecko engine?
It has been known for some time that google registered gbroswer.com. Could this simply be the beginning of the Google Browser?
You can't? I can...
Microsoft has announced an intention to kill Google. (All right, Ballmer said so to a guy who was leaving to go to Google. Same difference.) Microsoft has made some announcements of stuff to compete with Google. Microsoft also controls the most-used browser.
Add it all up, and I can sure see why Google might want to have a (better, but less popular) browser under their control...
Reasons to buy Opera:
1. Opera is a fast browser with clean code. Fits with google quality requirements/desires.
2. Opera is closed source. Google can add secret sauce for tracking or search or ad related reasons.
3. Opera can be made into a product to compete with MS without giving away the source to competitors.
I think Google has some interesting "backdoor" powers when it comes to tackling the Office "menace."
First, if they can incorporate Open Office or even their own Office-style applet and combine it with the ability to search the web for information in real time, they could offer researchers, writers, students and even businesses the ability to grab information about the topic they're writing on instantly. Start writing a paper on cattle mutilations and GoogleWriter could offer you instant access to facts, opinions, Wikis, blogs and more on the topic.
GoogleNumbers could offer insight into the spreadsheet you're forming, offering equations and possibly enhancements.
GooglePresentations could incorporate Google Images or some search routines to bring in key phrases, pictures, graphs, who knows what information.
I'm not saying Opera is the end-game for Google, but it opens the door to incorporating more desktop oriented software the user is familiar with while attaching Google's top-notch aggregated data feeds for the user to tap.
Have you looked at WebCore recently? Since Apple opened development Nokia has been one of the primary external contributors. There are beta versions of WebCore browsers for Series 60 'phones and the '770 floating around, and they stack up quite well against Opera - I wouldn't be surprised if Nokia decided to ditch Opera in favour of their own browser sometime soon. Of course, if Google bought Opera and gave away the mobile version for free, then this might be more attractive...
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Very fascinating suppositions and it jives with the question "why not firefox?".
According to your theory Google wants a standard platform with which to build up their apps. Firefox, being controlled by other people will be a moving target to a certain exent, which would slow them down.
If they buy Opera and beef up their web apps to Opera as a platform Opera is standards compliant so Firefox can easily adjust. The Firefox crew does the work of adjusting to Google instead of Google adjusting to Firefox.
I'm a Firefox man myself, but I think Opera has one thing going for it: it's better "out of the box". I find that the Firefox browsing experience absolutely blows away that of any other browser, but only after I've taken 15 minutes getting and configuring all the right extensions, and possibly using nightly tester tools to make them work in the latest Firefox version.
Week after week the buzz is about Google and new products while MS is struggling to get updates to existing products out of the door.
So who exactly is innovating in the marketplace and who is just protecting existing investment just like an old fossilised company?
Don't diss it because it's not OSS.
:-/
Because it's not OSS, it won't run on many of my machines (where mozilla and KHTML will). They have a reasonable number of platforms but are still missing StrongArm/Linux (half my machines).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Oh man, the "continue from last session" feature is what did it for me with Opera. Once I learned about that neat little feature I never went back to another browser. Between that, the mouse guestures, and the side panel thingy, I've been in heaven.
I just wish it had better javascript error reporting for debuggin JS. The javascript console in Firefox is the best error reporting I've found so far.
Off the top of my head, Session Saver and image zoom. It's god damned amazing to simply shutdown my linux box, with everything open, and when I boot it back up, everything is where I left it. While Konqueror does this natively, Firefox needs the session saver to make this work. It even tells you if there's an issue with the saved session, and allows you to choose not to restore it. I think (not 100% sure) that session saver is also responsible for the "Snapback Tab" option under my tools menu, which allows me to restore an accidently closed tab. That might be Tabbed Browser Preferences though, which I also run.
I use a 19" LCD screen perched 3' away on the back of a big table, to give me plenty of space to work. When I'm leaned back in my chair with my feet up, some images are a little hard to see. Image Zoom is wonderful for that. Just a right and a left click, and my image is zoomed in.
While I have stumbleupon and forecast fox installed, I haven't used either in months. The above 2-3 extensions combined with adblock and flashblock are the primary ones I use.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Firefox's default behavior is non-tabbed. Every action must be specially told to use tabs. A few extensions later, and things mostly stay in tabs ... mostly. But now that everything is in a tab, all of these tabs are the size of the window. Unfortunately, a lot of pages use a smaller popup window for certain things ("larger view", "details", "specifications") which looks really bad the size of my screen.
Opera's default behavior is tabbed. Everything, everywhere, uses tabs. A page wants a new window? Have a new tab. You have to explicitly tell it to split a tab off into a new window. And all those tabs behave as MDI windows inside the Opera parent window, so pages that want to be small can be small, or I can tile pages, or whatever.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".