A Talk With Opera CEO

With several new areas of expansion for Opera The Register took a few minutes to talk to Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. The interview addresses several of the most recent news items on the Opera front including, the adoption to Nintendo's Wii console, several advocates switching to Firefox, and others. "We just try to focus on our side. We've always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We've had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn't make sense. We've introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like - and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience."

Comments

Link to Page 1 of article

[AskChopper]

The above URL links to page 3 of the article. Here's the fist page http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/18/opera_ceo_in terview/

Print version of article

[xubu_caapn]

http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/18/opera_ceo_in terview/print.html

Re:Are they really making money off Opera?

[scorchypoo]

They're one of the market leader in mobile and embedded browsers. They're also selling copies of browsers on the Nintendo DS and Wii. The desktop is only a small part of their business.

Re:Firefox tabs

[ggvaidya]

If he doesn't like the deal he's getting these days, perhaps he should start patenting stuff or quit the software business [...]

... which is right about the point where I stop using their browsers, I guess. I love Opera, and one of my major reasons for doing so is that it's a well-engineered product made by a company which has always been pretty good "corporate citizens". Yes, they have strange ideas about design and advertising, but they make good products, run a sustainable business, give me a very decent browser for free, support said browser at no extra cost, and are very good at coming up with interesting new features, which have a much better record than most other software I use as being completely "fleshed out". They're also "good geeks": they don't go nuts patenting things, are pretty okay with other companies reusing and building on their ideas, allow you to download early tech previews of their software for testing and feedback, and have their browser primed for the kind of people who like having a couple of dozen tabs open at any one time - i.e. the sort who are much too fond of Wikipedia for their own good. Also, that bit you quote doesn't sound (in context) like sour grapes: Jon is pointing out that one of Opera's biggest strengths is coming up with innovative features, including mouse gestures and tabs (innovative half a decade ago). Opera 9 has several new features such as Speed Dial and Thumbnail Preview, which made things easier for me within hours of installing, so I'd say they're still doing a great job on that front.

Speaking of which, I checked Wikipedia on the mouse gestures bit; Konqueror's doesn't say when it got mouse gestures, but the mouse gestures page says Opera has had them "since version 5.11 (April 2001)", when KDE was at version 2.1. So if you can figure out when Konqueror got mouse gestures, you'll have your answer. Anecdotally, I found what might be the original patch for Opera mouse gestures in Konqueror, which would support Jon's idea of Opera as the originator.

Cheers!

Re:Are they really making money off Opera?

[bigbigbison]

They have multiple income streams. As noted in the interview, Opera, like Firefox, makes money from google and other search engines.

And, as the browser for the Wii and the DS, I'm sure that Nintendo is giving them a nice amount of money.

Re:Speed

[larry bagina]

I've heard opera's javascript interpreter was supposed to be fast. So, I just did a quick, totally non scientific (only one run, other minor activity in the background, etc) of a the slickspeed selector test, which tests various javascript libraries for their speed/accuracy. This was performed on Windows XP:

Opera (9.20/ build 8771)
246 : 3409 : 244 : 413 : 2518 : 329
Safari (3.0.3 / build 522.15.5)
322 : 1966 : 347 : 360 : 2488 : 519
Firefox (2.0.0.6) -- two times, second was with firebug enabled
397 : 10833 : 409 : 2569 : 14535 : 1100
423 : 14059 : 429 : 5188 : 14426 : 3352
ie (6.029)
4695 : 8536 : 3393 : 2379 : 17856 : 1890

Smaller numbers are faster, so opera is faster (in this test) than firefox. The toolkits, btw, are prototype, iQuery, mootools, ext, cssQuery, and dojoQuery).

Re:Can't use IE, Firefox, or Safari

[Rebelgecko]

Try entering

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

into the Terminal (when Safari isn't open) and changing your user agent (Debug->User Agent) to Internet Explorer. Most sites that "require" a certain browser will work in Safari.

Re:Speed

[arrrrg]

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

Re:Firefox tabs

[welshsocialist]

I have a feeling that Opera was not the first browser to do tabs; a browser called NetCaptor was one of the first to do so in 1997. For a detailed account, see here.

Re:huh?

[a.d.trick]

Profiles have been in Firefox since as long as I've known about it (around 0.9 or so), certainly before the Mozilla Suite was canned. They're about as visible as about:config; it's not something a regular user would ever notice. Also, it has no significant performance cost, and can be very important for people who are developing and testing Firefox. They don't what their testing version of Firefox to nuke their real profile. It's also nice for extension developers for pretty much the same reason.

Re:Firefox tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. That patch wasn't even included, so gestures came much later (unless you count the clunky May 2001 kgestures program which used gestures to trigger DCOP calls.)

I believe Opera had them first as I remember around 2002-2003 hearing discussions about adding universal gestures to KDE, then subsequently using the shiny new gestures. I don't recall gestures making it into KDE 2.x, but they were included early in the 3.x series. (It looks like a quick kgesture program was available the month after Opera's gestures, but was not maintained for long.) [1] Okay, there is evidence that the universal gestures (via khotkeys) were properly introduced in CVS in 2003. [2] The framework allowed (and still allows) one to save, load, and distribute gestures so that one could download the Mozilla gestures or Opera gestures.

The reason, IIRC, gestures took so long to include after the first patches (for Opera gesture, then for the Firefox/Phoenix gesture mimicking) was that KDE wanted to be able to have all applications use gestures. On the Mac, I miss using gestures in the non-Cocoa programs (which include Finder and iTunes) because it was great to use them for web browsing and file browsing.

[1] http://dot.kde.org/990672846/
[2] http://dot.kde.org/1066450520/

Re:Speed

[Fweeky]

See Preferences -> Advanced -> Redraw after to have it be more/less aggressive at page (re)drawing.

I can't remember or immediately find the equivilent setting in Firefox.

Re:The only thing stopping me from using Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Try http://operawiki.info/OperaAdblock

Re:Firefox tabs

[ceeam]

Tabs or no tabs but Opera had an MDI browser back in ~1994.

Re:Translation: Theenking ooootseede-a zee Oopera

[reanjr]

You are probably not aware that after MS changed one of their sites to specifically break Opera, Opera released a "version" that turned that site into Swedish Chef talk. The GP was making reference to that. Probably could have made his point with only a few paragraphs, but it is humorous to those with the requisite background knowledge to understand the joke.

FFS

[empaler]

From the top of the linked page (to which you don't offer any text, only a straight URL):

A polite request
Please stop posting this article on sites like Slashdot, Digg, newspapers, etc. It is old news. This article is around 2 years old now (although it has been kept up to date), and has been retired - posting it simply shows how long it took you to find it. It has already been posted on Slashdot enough times, Digg more than enough times, similar sites more times than I can count, as well as newspaper sites all around the world, and far more blogs than I will ever be able to read.

I thank you for your attention, and I am very happy that you found this article interesting or useful enough to read. However, it really does not need you to post it yet again - all you will do is eat my bandwidth, and I ask you not to do that.

Re:Speed

[suv4x4]

He seems to think that Opera is fast. My experience has been that although Opera renders more accurately than Firefox (1.5.0.2), Opera is a lot slower.

If only it mattered how fast Firefox is. Since when you open few more tabs in it, it'll instantly become ultra slow or hang mid-action while waiting for who-knows-what, while no other browser (safari, ie, opera) does this.

As a heavy Firefox/Opera user I can tell you, the overall experience in Firefox is sluggish at best.

Re:Firefox tabs

[jlarocco]

I mean who the hell was actually willing to use an operating system with adware built into it (or spend 30 dollars)? Not trying to troll, just stating that Opera started off with a terrible strategy, and they are paying for it now in the desktop market.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Opera isn't going for a massive userbase on PCs. Unlike Firefox, they actually have to pay their developers. And unlike Internet Explorer, they don't have a huge operating system and office suite monopoly to subsidize browser development. Opera making a huge push for PC market share wouldn't make sense, and they'd go out of business.

Their cash cow is mobile and embedded browsers, and that's what they focus on. Fortunately for those of us who use the PC version of Opera, their code is portable enough to run on desktops also.

Making their desktop browser available for free probably had more to do with publicizing the Opera name than it did with competing with Firefox and IE.

Re:Opera the greatest

[improfane]

Seriously, why people choose Linux or BSD is beyond me.
He didn't say that. You people try to find ways to put words in peoples mouths they did not say. That is not the correct way to argue. If you cannot take his criticism of your browser, don't reply. Reply on equal grounds. Explain why Opera is not superior to Firefox.

there goes another point about installation time and effort.
Nor does that refute his point. You cannot knock down points as you please by changing them because you think it makes the argument easier, that's a straw man argument.

His point still stands, it's faster for HIM.

His point is that Opera is the superior product in itself. This point still stands. He isn't referring to the political aspect of being closed source.

Re:Respectfully disagree

[Poromenos1]

Your calling Opera cluttered makes me doubt you've ever used it. Mine has a menubar, tab bar and address bar, none of which has any buttons on it. You don't even need the menu, with the sidebar and gestures. So, try using something before trolling.

Tabbed Browsing

[Dog-Cow]

It really annoys me when people claim that Opera or Mozilla introduced tabbed browsing. I know /. will love to hear it, but AOL was the first that I've seen. Their GNN browser in the early 90's had tabbed browsing. It was even able to load multiple tabs at once on Windows 3.1, an OS w/o threads. I remember having a dozen or more tabs open at once, several of them loading simultaneously, on a machine with 4MB of ram.

Re:Profiles != bloat

[TheRaven64]

The Mozilla Suite used to include IRC, mail, etc. FireFox is nowhere near that bad, IRC and mail were not bloat, except in the download size sense. When you didn't use these components, they were not loaded. When you did, then they shared a lot of resources with the browser, so you had a smaller overall footprint. Now, if you want to run FireFox and Thunderbird you still need two copies of Gecko, XUL, XPCOM, etc. in memory. They've been promising to fix this with XULRunner for ages, but still haven't.

On Opera speed, memory residency, + security

[Anonymous Coward]

SOME "FYI" ON SPEED, MEMORY OCCUPANCY, & SECURITY (for Opera, vs. the other 2 major players in IE, & FIREFOX):

"He seems to think that Opera is fast." - by ChrisMaple (607946) on Sunday August 19, @11:16PM (#20289859) So do others, as evidenced here (the most comprehensive & even-handed/fair comparison of browser speed online that I have found, to date):

BROWSER SPEED COMPARISONS ON MANY TASKS & MULTIPLE OPERATING SYSTEM PLATFORMS:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

(Especially on the MOST USED OS PLATFORM ON THE PC, Windows, but also, overall!)

----

"My experience has been that although Opera renders more accurately than Firefox (1.5.0.2)" - by ChrisMaple (607946) on Sunday August 19, @11:16PM (#20289859) It passed the "ACID2" test, & iirc, before ANY other did... but, don't quote me on THAT account (before any other browser):

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/12/1416222.shtml

AND, just 2 days ago, I loaded Opera 9.23.8808, FireFox 2.0.0.6, & IE7 fully hotfix patched as of last "Microsoft Patch Tuesday", & the memory usage was in this order:

- Per Taskmanager processes tab, prior to minimizing the window (which causes unused application features to page back to the backing .exe file on disk, summoned only when needed, & Opera won that one, too)

IE7 (least, with GOOGLE toolbar) memory usage = 19,048k

Opera (next least - & no widgets installed) = 18,272k

FireFox (most - & no addons installed) = 31,172k

Read 'em & weep, or test yourself - your numbers SHOULD be the same, unless you opened a lot of tabs in them, OR extended your say, FireFox with .xpi addons, &/or IE with addons & toolbars from 3rd parties that is... which probably will make YOUR readings worse/higher imo on a guess.

----

"Opera is a lot slower." - by ChrisMaple (607946) on Sunday August 19, @11:16PM (#20289859) Says you... others say differently, per the url & test above, as well as the security data below (as far as that is concerned, & today online? IT IS A DEFINITE CONCERN!) plus, if you are a FireFox fan? Perhaps you ought to look @ this page:

FIREFOX MYTHS:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html

AND, yes folks:

Opera had tabbed browsing before IE, or FireFox/Mozilla AND YES, it can be extended with addons, if you look up "Opera Widgets"...

PLUS, Opera 9.23.8080 final biuld IS FREE + FULLY FEATURE LADEN, more than any other browser imo, without addons thrown in (as is, outta the box/stock oem model)

APK

P.S.=> Opera also shows LESS security vulnerabilities than the other 2 of the "big 3" & their most current builds/models/versions:

Opera security advisories @ SECUNIA (0% unpatched):

http://secunia.com/product/10615/?task=advisories

FireFox security advisories @ SECUNIA (43% unpatched):

http://secunia.com/product/12434/

IE 7 security advisories @ SECUNIA (56% unpatched):

http://secunia.com/product/12366/

apk

Proxomitron got me in trouble with /.

[Poingggg]

I used Proxomitron back in 2004 and somehow it managed to create 8000 hits in one hour to /. when I rearranged the panels on the main page. This resulted in me getting banned from Slashdot. Not funny, I can assure you! This came to light after an e-mail exchange with Robert Rozeboom from /. (if you're still working there: thanks Robert!). I found out it was Proxomitron because when I had it active my firewall indicated very heavy network traffic, which did not occur when proxomitron was bypassed.
Of course this was years ago and maybe it's improved now, but I have not used it ever since.