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

Re:Firefox tabs

[LWATCDR]

"Not one item from the list looks like from outer space - all are concepts which any monkey can bring into a browser. "

Yea.. Sure they do.
Everything is easy once someone else does it.

Re:Speed

[Lisandro]

it might be because opera needs qt libraries.

I dunno... i use Opera 9.23 with QT compiled statically (on Linux using XFCE) and it runs quite snappier than Firefox, specially on startup/shutdown.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this subject, i know :) But, AFAIK, Opera is today the most useable browser out there. I like Firefox a lot, but Opera is still far superior, specially when it comes to user interfase, speed, and memory footprint.

Re:huh?

[MrNaz]

Firefox corrected some of the kitchensinkisms of Mozilla.

And then, as soon as Mozilla Suite was discontinued, it promptly replicated the whole kitchen sink mentality, somehow adding everything that's *not* useful in a stand alone browser (e.g., profles) and leaving things out that are (e.g., a reasonably useful download manager).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Translation: Theenking ooootseede-a zee Oopera

[Anonymous Coward]

And that gets modded as funny? Have I transported back into the 70's, where because someone spoke with an accent we should point and laugh at them? What next for slashdot - stories about Baidu.com getting comments about their CEO having slitty eyes and being referred to as ting tong?

Opera rocks.

[Mark Gillespie]

It's truely the only cross platform browser there is.

I can have Opera on Windows, Opera on my Mobile, Opera on my Wii, Opera on my PS3.

As soon as they sort out having bookmarks shared between all of these, seamlessly, then it's a no brainer.

Re:On supporting Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

And my firefox install with all the plugins I use is a whopping 15 megs! OH EMM GEEEEEEEEEEE! That's so bloated that I might just run out of space on my 500 GB hard drive due to it's humongous bloat!

You're right! Incompetent Firefox developers are a feature!

I swear, Firefox could rape people's mothers, and you fucking tards would be screaming how it's actually good somehow.

Re:Opera the greatest

[TheRaven64]

Reply on equal grounds. Explain why Opera is not superior to Firefox

He did, he said Opera is non-Free. There are two sorts of F/OSS users. Open Source advocates believe that an open development model will produce superior code. Free Software advocates believe that having the freedom to modify and redistribute your code is inherently valuable, and many believe that this makes up for any lack of features since it means that they can add (or pay someone else to add) any missing feature they care enough about. If you are one of these people, then it doesn't matter how many features Opera has, the fact it is non-Free is a problem.

While I'm not a completely rabid Free Software advocate, I've been burned enough by proprietary software to want to avoid depending on any more of it than I have to. I don't mind using a proprietary browser (based on a Free Software rendering engine), because it's easy to switch browsers if the limitations become concrete, but it's a line other people are less willing to cross.