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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.
Are you interested in acquiring one aging, slightly flabby, fairly good tech? I'm cheap!
I am not left-handed, either!
If they do buy opera will they call it google browser beta and only let it be usable by windows?
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?
I can't begin to imagine why.
My favorite thing about Slashdot is that the article summaries are so objective.
Google is in a unique position to be a software developer that can create new applications before the market sees a need for them, and be a success at it. I believe they've found a great way to dismiss Microsoft back to the 90's and leave them in the dust.
Google is finding (in many ways) that they're running up against a standards wall. Gmail is very successful in part because of "AJAX" but you know there is more out there. Remember, these guys make software that is mostly server-hosted.
I can't imagine what google is working on next, but I have been contemplating their need for a "proof-of-concept" engine that would be considered a web browser to some, but in all reality it would be an operating system. This sub-operating system would be hardware abstracted from the real OS, but give Google the ability for power users to see what Google can do with data.
Opera makes sense to me. I wish they'd have more platforms supported (Pocket PC was surprisingly ignored until this past month) but it is very standards-oriented and gives Google a real opportunity to denounce Internet Explorer without coming out and saying it directly.
Google can't come out and make a new mini-OS "web browser" that supplies its own standards, so what they can do is take the browser that seems to follow the standards the closest, and adopt their applets to work perfectly in this standard browser. If IE can't run the software, Google can offer a reduced-capacity version of their applet for IE, and basically users who want the powerful one will dump IE for Google. That would be Google's first nail in Microsoft's coffin.
For anyone to think that Google doesn't have the desire to be the next Microsoft, you have to see how much money Google is burning to come up with the best and newest data aggregating applets. Microsoft can't keep up, and they're quickly losing the race to releasing new -- and NEEDED -- applications. Word, Excel, IE -- they're all old news. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google SMS, Google Blogsearch, they're all applications that can be enhanced even further if Google had a standard platform to write their uber-versions for. Opera can be that standard platform that extends Google from merely a website to becoming its own operating system.
mobile market, opera dominates there - google would love to be on every mobile platform.
LetterRip
C'mon, buy Wikipedia already. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and Wikipedia fits that goal better than Google Groups does.
It has been known for some time that google registered gbroswer.com. Could this simply be the beginning of the Google Browser?
A little WHOIS action:
Sure, this is old news... but is it coming to fruition?
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...
1. Google buys out Opera
2. Google.com now viewable with Opera and Firefox only
3. M$ pay Google to have IE support for Google.com
4. Google reject M$
5. M$ counter offer
6. Repeat step 4 and 5... 50 times
7. Insane PROFIT!!
Gubuntu, Googlinux, Googdriva, Googebian, Googepis, GoogleHat, Googell Desktop Linux oh god not...Googentoo!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
The man's been married for a while now. By this point, slashdot is the only thing left in his life over which he has any control. I say we all turn a blind eye to a little editorializing from the man, considering it's the only way he can feel like one anymore.
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.
Search Me.
Oprah. I hear that the feeding and makeup costs alone would even make Bill Gates blush.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
It's a much more polished browser, IMHO. Firefox is great, but Opera still beats it in performance, resource usage and (most important) its terrific user interfase, IMHO. Once you get used to it, you just can't go back.
/. users that bash it now would be drooling all over it.
Give it a whirl - it's completely, 100% free for desktop users now, as you can get your own key for free on Operas' site. Don't diss it because it's not OSS. I still think that if Opera were open source, 99% of the
One word: cellphones.
While Google may have firefox to lean on / depend on to counter IE on the desktop, there's no equivalent on the cellphone/pda side of things (at least nothing that's being used by the big phone makers). Cellphones are going to become increasingly important in connecting to the internet, and Google probably wants to make sure they're not squeezed out by MS and PocketIE. Opera has a pretty good footprint in the PDA / Cellphone world. If Google wants them this will be why.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is no reason for them to purchase a browser and then open-source it. Trying to establish a developer's community around new code isn't a trivial task, and rewriting the current Opera code to make extending that code possible would be a significant resource sink which could be better used making the browser better, or adding functionality to mozilla.
Not that I think that google is really buying a browser, but the knee-jerk "open-source it" response is just ridiculous.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. -Henry David Thoreau
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?
It's not what's cheaper, it's what can they get on more hardware. Opera not only supports the usual OS's (Windows, OSx, Solaris, Linux, and on and on) they are also a big player in the mobile market. This would get google a jump into the mobile market that MS and Yahoo can't touch at the moment, not to mention massive support across current PC platforms.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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
(Note to mods: How "insightful" are comments made about a product by a person who's never used the product going to be?)
Opera has never forced banner ads on anyone. Currently, you can download the browser free, with no banner ads. Prior to a few months ago, you could pay (gasp) and not have to put up with the banners. In either case, it's your choice.
Which swelled the download file to, what?, 3.7mb? Looks like the Firefox download is 5mb. You're not forced to use the e-mail client, address book, etc. Hell, until you mentioned them, I'd forgotten they existed. Moreover, Opera, "out of the box", comes with many bells-and-whistles that are only available to Firefox as plug-ins. I'd rather do one install and have things just work, than have to download a half-dozen other bits, install them, and then pray that they don't break when the next FF version comes out.
Opera is not new on the scene: it predated FF by many years. Many features in FF (most famously, tabbed browsing) were in Opera far earlier. Opera is light, fast, stable, ready-to-roll out of the box. No, it's not open source, but it's silly to think that code is high quality if and only if it's open source. We already have a good thing going on with Opera.
If "wedging the browser market" is really your concern, then I'm surprised that you are so loyal to a relative late-comer to the market, and can't be bothered to look at a high-quality, non-IE browser that has been on the market for many more years.
Still early in development, and I don't know how excited big phone companies would be to use OSS (especially if using an Microsoft OS), but Mozilla has Minimo coming down the pipe. The existing preview builds already work in many Windows Mobile devices.
Sadly, my PDA isn't one of them.
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?
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:
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Thanks to their Ajax prowess, Google can set themselves up as the provider of any kind of software you can think of... with two exceptions. You need an operating system and a browser to be a Google consumer. Why not go ahead and take care of one of those? They're just increasing the amount of the stack that they control.
Makes sense, right?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Opera runs comfortably on extremely low-end phones. WebCore does not.
Clever signature text goes here.
Seriously, why would you choose Opera over Firefox?
After having Firefox and Opera open all day at work (working on company's website), Firefox (v1.5) is currently taking up about 76MB of memory while Opera (v8.5) is sitting at around 22MB. And, Opera has a built-in mail client which I happen to like.
That's why I choose Opera over Firefox.
Slackware
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
The first result for Googling 'adblock opera' brings up this page with a list of possibilities for adblock-like functionality within Opera. I've used the C++ Adblock for a long time with Opera and it does great.
As far as I know, Opera has extension-like functionality, you aren't stuck with the base browser if you don't want just the base browser. Don't see what much else you'd need other than Adblock, but lots of people swear by those Greasemonkey extensions, dunno if that's in Operaland yet.
Moral of the story (and many others): Google it, damnit.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
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
Additionally, I don't think you can get Opera in "just the browser" flavor. Last time I checked, it forced you to download this really crappy email client of theirs and address book and other things.
It's small enough that the non-browser features don't add much to the app size, and current versions are willing to keep everything you don't use hidden and out of the way. When I use Opera it's "just the browser" and has no problem talking to Thunderbird or KMail for email.
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".
that they're not going to make a server-side, AJAX-based Google Browser? I was so waiting for that...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
They don't need a browser of their own, but they need a competitive browser market. Firefox, thus, is very important to them -- even if it never gains a majority market share, it forces Microsoft to improve IE again. Opera may have a similar strategic value, especially because on mobile phones it seems like it's mostly Opera or something proprietary, and proprietary means that Google could be locked out or extorted to provide access fees. It doesn't matter that much to them if another browser does well on mobile phones, just like it doesn't matter that much if Firefox or IE win, so long as they have a quality browser(s) available.
I also sometimes wonder how Opera is really doing financially. If they are strapped for cash -- and I have zero idea how they are doing -- that may limit their ability to improve the product, or even the viability of the product entirely. So Google might just be trying to keep the market healthy (from their perspective) by keeping different products in the play.