Slashdot Mirror
Ask Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner
Opera Software
has gotten all kinds of media play lately, including rumors that both Google
and Microsoft
were buying the company. Whether you love or hate Opera, you've got to
give them credit for building a decent browser and grabbing a small but
noticeable market share in the face of competition from both MSIE and
Firefox. Co-founder/CEO Jon
von Tetzchner is obviously reponsible for at least some of
this success -- and for much of the company's high press
profile, due not only to the Opera
Browser itself but to at least one whacky PR stunt
and at least one high-profile beef
with Microsoft. So who is this guy? Ask and find out. He's
obviously not your typical software company CEO, so we don't expect
typical CEO-type answers from him. We'll send him (direct, not through
a PR person) 10 or 12 of your best questions Friday
afternoon (US EST), and run his answers during the first week
of 2006.
I can understand how a company competes against microsoft in the browser world, but how has things changed now that Mozilla and Firefox came into the picture. How do you plan on making money when a free, open source product is directly competing with you? Not only is it a complete product, but because it is open source, it has addons for just about anything available. Seems like an impossible battle to fight...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Opera has been an innovative browser for some time; it was one of the first to offer popup blocking, tabs (or MDI of some description), sessions, mouse gestures, and so on. However, since then, other browsers have implemented them as well; Firefox has extensions offering mouse gestures and sessions, and popup blocking and tabs are now commonplace.
After offering so many features, would you prefer browsers such as Firefox and IE to come up with their own ideas instead of taking them from other browsers, or prefer the sharing of ideas so the web is better off overall?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Better extensions/plugins. Firefox has earned great acclaim for its dynamic extension support. Extensions such as Fasterfox, Adblock, Web Developer, and many others are the sole reason people use Firefox over Opera (or any other browser). I know Opera is working to help unify the Netscape plugin API, but the upcoming version 9 doesn't appear to have anything that can match Firefox's extension capabilities. When will we see Opera support plugin/extensions as powerful as Firefox's?