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Is Facebook Going To Buy Opera?
New submitter x0d writes with this excerpt from the L.A. Times: "The Facebook spending spree may be continuing as a new report says the social networking giant might be looking to buy Norwegian company Opera Software. Now fully under the microscope of Wall Street as well as Main Street investors, Facebook is trying to solve its mobile monetizing problems and has been gobbling up various companies in recent months to increase its presence in the world of smartphones."
The opera mobile browser works by offloading a lot of work to a server run by opera. This would give facebook access to everything which goes through every mobile opera browser.
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Opera owns Fastmail. Do you want Facebook to own your email?
Opera is the best browser out there. I don't trust Chrome not to report data about me to Google, and if Facebook buys Opera I wouldn't trust it not to report my browsing data to Facebook. I will have to move back to the mess that is Firefox
The difference between Unite and Facebook, other than privacy, is that Unite is useful.
On one hand I think the FB app could use a LOT of advice from Opera's mobile team. I have an overclocked GalaxyS2 running at 1.5ghz...modded to the gills. Nothing on this phone is slow...except Facebook. Every update makes the experience more and more miserable. Opera's mobile/mini browsers are among the fastest and smoothest apps I have ever used. By far. Bar none. On any mobile platform....or any platform ever, for that matter. On the other hand I've been using Opera for over 12 years now. It is my go-to browser and it is the first thing I install on a computer...regardless of OS. It has always been ahead of it's time...often by a very long time (we've been returning to the same multi-tabbed browsing session for how much longer than everyone else?). Anyone I recommend the browser to becomes a lifelong fan. Geeks and non-geeks alike. It's tiny, lightning quick, hyper-compliant and more configurable than anything else.
I know that having Facebook sized development money can be nothing but a great thing for the progress of the browser, but, I'm more concerned with the direction of this development. Also some very obvious concerns with the use of turbo-mode to help FB aggregate more of the world's information...
...I'm going to vote 'I really hope not' on this one.
I haven't used Opera in a good long while*, and I've never heard of the mentioned source site Pocket-lint, but after the damning parting words of von Tetzchner, I wouldn't put it past Opera to allow let Facebook take them.
Nice knowin' ya, Oppy.
*Actually I did a few times a month or two ago for some SVG testing; otherwise I've barely touched it, and I'll be uninstalling it now just in case the probable turns out true.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
There are better targets than a once-great browser. Opera is no longer, no matter what their home page says, the fastest browser in the business.
Twitter, for example. A Facebook takeover of the company will ensure render comatose any hopes G+ has of winning any marketshare.
Another is Yahoo. Too big? I'm pretty sure Yahoo's stockholders would agree to a stock swap that would leave hot-young CEO Zuckerberg in control. Facebook can use some of whatever remains of Yahoo's search technology.
Damn. I've been using Opera for several years now. If it comes under the thumb of Facebook, I'll jump ship. I don't want those fuckers backdooring themselves into everything I do online.
Likewise. Opera has been my main browser for more than a decade, although my wife generally uses Firefox. Luckily, I've also been using Chromium, and consider it an acceptable replacement: not quite as good with privacy settings, but slightly more compatible with weird web sites. If Opera becomes part of Facebook, I'll drop it on principle (all Facebook IPs are already blocked by my router to inhibit unwanted tracking).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yes, Opera may be closed-source. But they deserve huge respect.
They invented tons of things we take for granted nowadays. Tabs, proper zooming, user scripts/styles, separate search field, mouse guestures (incl. rocker), pop-up blocking, privacy mode, built-in bittorrent client, you name it. And they haven’t stopped. I consider Unite a key feature that will become essential.
They also saved us from having to use IE6 in the dark ages after Netscape was murdered.
And it was the fastest browser for a loooong time. (Basically from the start up until Chrome forced Firefox to become faster.)
And Oprea Mobile is the rare case of a mobile browser that doesn’t suck.
If they had offered a Firefox-like Add-on system and done a similar marketing (think: Firefox logo), they would be the most popular browser instead today.
Frequent crashes? etc? I suggest there's something wrong with your system. Other than crashes in snapshots, the released versions have always been solid.
Just because it doesn't crash for you doesn't mean that it's "solid". One not so nice thing about Opera lately is that it 1) likes to crash if you have profiles and other user data left over from a past version (their tech support always recommends wiping all your settings whenever you upgrade - WTF?); and 2) it likes to crash on certain specific websites due to bugs in their renderer or JS engine - so you won't see those crashes unless you frequent those sites.
You're pretty much talking out of your ass.
Because my observations do not agree with your preconceptions?
I was using Opera as my primary browser since 5.x times, so, no, I'm not talking out of my ass. I wish I could keep using it, but as it is, I have reluctantly moved on to Chrome because I couldn't keep pretending that Opera is still the best choice.