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Opera Software Co-Founder Passes Away
worb writes "One of the two founders of Opera Software, Geir Ivarsoy, recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. His funeral yesterday was attended by Opera employees who paid their last respects to their former lead programmer. While Opera hasn't had the same success as Firefox on the desktop, it has had considerable success in the mobile phone market due to its speed and small footprint, combined with excellent standards compliance and innovative features."
Though I am no opera user - thanks for the effort supporting an alternative solution. The possibility to choose is well appreciated.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
The alternative he provided created much-needed freedom to leave MSIE back when Netscape couldn't get its act together. Rest in peace.
He will be known as the Phantom of the Opera!
Sorry, that was in poor taste. My regards to someone who helped contribute to the diversity in web browsers.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
If you search Google for "why Opera" you'll find pages like this one, with a nice list of reasons for why you should consider Opera.
The best thing you can do is to simply download it and give it a fair go. If you surf around and read about Opera you'll discover lots of nice little touches that make browsing more convenient. Maybe you'll find that you love Opera. Maybe you won't. It's a slightly different approach than what Firefox is doing, but at least you won't have to rely on extensions for functionality. That can be both good and bad, I guess. (Opera seems to be a bit more efficient on the memory usage than Firefox, mind you.)
But Opera is actually also extensible in various ways, such as User JavaScript ("Greasemonkey"), and similar. There are lots of nifty things to discover, such as custom made toolbars.
Anyway, the Search Engine Journal editor asked Opera users to convince him to use Opera. He got quite a few useful replies. Maybe they will be of interest to you, too...
I don't use Opera now, but I used it very briefly. Opera rose at a very dark time. IE had just won the browser war with Netscape 4 being a bloated, happy, piece of crap. Opera gave us hope when us anti-IEers were most down. Although I use Firefox now, the conditions for Firefox's success should be creditted to Opera.
Here is a remembrance of Geir Ivarsøy from someone at Opera Software who knew him: Death in the Family
It's probably not the right time to rant about this, but... could people *please* take care to actually spell names correctly? It's Ivarsøy, not Ivarsoy; you'd think that at *least* his Slashdot obituary would get this right.
It's not difficult, either. If you can't type the ø character directly, use a HTML entity, ø (ø), or ø (ø) - it's really simple.
But don't just substitute another letter that looks vaguely similar. Would you like it if somebody whose native language doesn't have a "d" substituted a "b" in your name for it because the two letters look quite similar? Of course not. So please, do the same thing and try to spell other people's names correctly. With HTML entities, it's not hard, and it's a sign of respect - doubly so on an obituary.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.