Slashdot Mirror
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."
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/
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Translation: We did tabs, damnit! Not Firefox! I repeat: Firefox did not do tabs first! It was us!!
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
In Russia, Ukraine and in Northern and East European countries we have between five per cent and 10 per cent, and some above 10 per cent share; Japan similar.
Trouble is, in America most people think that going to the opera is for losers. Maybe they should call it "Rock 'n Roll Browser" in the US.
Just a few days ago, I had the existing AT&T DSL service switched over to my name. Although I didn't need new equipment, AT&T said they needed to disconnect the service for four days, after which it would take an additional four days after registration under my name to reconnect the same service. Because they didn't send me any hardware, I never received an installation CD. (Not that I ever intended to defile my system with their awful installer.) When I called up AT&T tech support, the woman was relatively clueless--I pretty much walked myself through the process. But there was one hitch: Using either Firefox or Safari (IE was discontinued for the Mac), I could not register a new DSL username in their system. The hardware and network setup were working perfectly; something about AT&T's (aka Yahoo!/SBC) online registration system, however, required that I use IE. And as a long-time Apple user, I would switch to cable modem before I'd install "malware" on my machine. It then came to me to try Opera. I downloaded a copy on my PowerBook through a nearby free access point (I love that place--best danishes I've ever had). And it worked. Obviously, AT&T is to blame, but am I ever relieved that Opera came through for me. Granted, I've gone back to using Firefox, but just in case, I've kept Opera on my system.
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.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
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).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
it might be because opera needs qt libraries.
:) 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.
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
I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner - he comes across as a very forthright, positive, motivated CEO - and he's pretty good natured to boot. Contrast that with recent interviews with Linus, who's opinion on certain matters everyone respects but comes across a bit too sassy to make an enjoyable read, or major company CEOs, who sound more like company brochures than people.
I used to use Firefox over Opera because I could install Firefox with one command under Linux. Now that Opera is available in the same way, I find that I still choose Firefox, mostly because it's what I'm used to. I feel like Opera is just a tad too late to the party to really take off in a big way - had they made their product as easy to get and as visible as Firefox way back when (what with a website that auto-detects the correct package and provides a big easy-to-click button, prepackaged binaries for Linux, advertising, etc.) the bite marks in IE could be twice as big as they are now. Of course this doesn't mean that Opera has no chance - the world is plenty big enough for three or four major browsers - and they're certainly making a dent in the off-PC market.
Good luck to them, and the next time Firefox fails to download quite as promptly as I like maybe I'll give Opera another go! In the meantime, just keep getting interviews like this one out there and visible and Opera will keep growing.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
Try http://operawiki.info/OperaAdblock
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.
Holy huge wall of unintelligible text. You must be a Perl coder.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
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.
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.
I currently run Firefox on my home PC, home Mac, home Mac-mini, and wife's computer.
Just last week I switched to Opera at work, after learning one of my, well respected, co-workers was using it for browsing. Ever year or so I'd done a "switch" for a day, but always went back to Firefox. I think this time the switch to Opera is going to stay.
Seems Opera is on par to all the features I've come to rely on in Firefox (tabs, mouse gestures, adblocking, tabbed download info), except that they are all baked into the browser instead of needing to be added in. The tight integration, shows in many subtle ways (e.g., where options are presented in the menus, etc...) that makes the overall product feel more polished. The smaller memory foot-print, faster (perceived?) UI response, and better standards compliance all make me feel more comfortable than the browser I've been advocating to friends the last 7+ years.
The lack of Open Source use to bug me, but not any more; I don't see myself ever becoming involved in the source code. I truely believe the money behind Opera is what has contributed to it being such a great product.
- Built in tabs (I don't care who was first, I care if there are tabs in the current version.)
- Built in tabbed download status
- Built in mouse gestures
- Built in ad-blocking
- Built in FULL full screen
- Built in "Speed Dial" feature (neat idea!)
- Better CSS2 compliance than Firefox or IE
- A solid bookmark manager
- Smaller (than Firefox) memory footprint
Another week of test driving this at work, and then my home computers are switching over too.