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Chinese Tech Group Offers To Buy Opera; Board Endorses
jones_supa writes: There's been plenty of speculation around the future of web browser maker Opera, and now that looks like it will soon be resolved. Today the Norway-headquartered company confirmed that it has received a $1.2 billion acquisition offer from a group fronted by Chinese consumer tech companies Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360. The deal is for 100% of the company, and it represents a 53% premium on the company's valuation based on its most recent trading price. Opera's board said in a statement (PDF) that it has "unanimously decided to recommend" its shareholders to accept the bid. The final deal is subject to government and shareholders' approvals.
Please no. Please? Opera is one of the few innovators in the browser space that manages to pack features without getting bloated.
So, it will now be the Beijing Opera!
After using Opera since 'early' 5.x days, the 12.x series was the last true Opera for me.
When they stopped supporting Linux, after 14 years of Opera use, I switched to Firefox (Iceweasel-rebranded under Debian) and added a ton of plugins to do what Opera was doing natively.
Not supporting Linux for a year (or was it more?), and having it become a different shell for Chrome was to me the death blow for Opera.
If this goes through, Opera is getting ripped out of every computer I had it on. Time to go looking for a replacement browser.
The difference in culture surrounding privacy between the Chinese and Norwegians is the dark side of Earth's moon to Mercury's sun-side.
..the fat lady has sung.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Opela
$1.8 billion for a company that lost $51 million last year. Good investment.
I understand there's a tech bubble going on, but how is it that Opera is valued at 1 billion? What makes such a value reasonable at all?
I mean, its market share should be around 10% of the entire market. What kind of money are they hoping to make out of their users...
i swear you just want to suck him off, but he said no, so now you post this shit on every single article. grow the fuck up loser
If you like the vintage Opera browser, before the Chrome shenanigans, you should really try out Vivaldi. Read the Vivaldi story. It brought me joy, and it made me weep. It brought me happiness, and it brought me sorrow. But as it says at the end of their story page,
Vivaldi. Vivaldi! VIVALDI!
I'd keep an eye on this in the next few weeks:
http://www.opera.com/privacy
Didn't Opera buy Fastmail a few years ago? As a long time Fastmail user, like so many other tech people, I'd worry about my email provider being controlled by the Chinese.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Why is it I can't find any references to the Tiananamen Square Massacre on the web anymore? Why do all references to "Taiwan" either refer to "Chinese Taipei" or just give a blank page? Too bad .. I really liked Opera.
China is due for a massive correction in the economy. Debt driven growth has reached saturation and from now on, we will see a lot of deleveraging and money being printed (ie. QE) to prevent deflation.
Acquisitions is one of the best ways to swap depreciating Yuan assets (to use as collateral) and turn them into foreign assets. As the likelihood that CNY will devalue increases, you will see more and more of these desperate deals.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
revive the Presto engine!
Seriously, I would hate the world where everything revolves around WebKit though I've got a sneaking suspicion we already live in it.
Why not?
Instagram had zero revenue and Facebook paid $1 Billion to buy them. Twitter has never made a profit and loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year and yet has a market cap of over $9 Billion.
Right. Because you can tell how an app will perform by the looks of its interface...
Yes, you can. If it looks like Chrome, it's going to be shitty to use. That's because anything with a UI that looks like Chrome will have been designed by hipsters. And any UI designed by hipsters is inherently shitty.
Firefox is a great example of this. In the beginning, it didn't look like Chrome. There were real menus, there was a useful toolbar, there was a status bar, and there was no goddamn catch-all hamburger menu. Firefox was easy and efficient to use, by both beginners and power users alike.
Then hipster designers started mucking with Firefox's UI, and they promptly ruined it by making it look nearly identical to Chrome. The menus are gone. The toolbars are all fucked up. The status bar is gone. And there's a fucking terrible hamburger menu now! Firefox is an awkward, inefficient browser to use now. Users waste too much time trying to find functionality that has been hidden or even removed in some cases, and they have to resort to numerous extensions just to restore Firefox to a barely usable state.
The end result of these UI changes has been the destruction of Firefox. Firefox is down to about 7% of the browser market, and users are fleeing it fast. Some are going to Pale Moon, but others are going to Chrome. After all, if they're going to get the awful Chrome-style UI when using Firefox or Chrome, but Chrome at least isn't as goddamn slow and bloated as Firefox is, then these poor users might as well just use Chrome. At least it's the least horrible of two very horrible UI experiences.
I use Opera v10.10 for 90% of my browsing/shopping.. I open IE11(cause it's there) to place an order! on sites that don't work in Opera; Which admittedly now is growing(Walmart, ebay,newegg, ..) The original/inhouse html/javascript engines used in Opera up until they became just another chrome clone were quite good;THERE IS NO OTHER browser that offers the same control over web content; blocking content, changing styles on a per-site basis as well as picking and choosing so many site specific display/scripting options...
Chrome version provides NONE of the good stuff, nor does any other "modern" browser..
Oh and it can load 40 tabs of pages with the same resources taken by chrome/IE11 with just about 4 tabs these days.. ugh, I weep for the future web...
You two should get a room.
Time to find a good alternative to Opera's SurfEasy VPN. Too bad, because I find it the best free VPN around.
Opera Mini intercepts all web traffic in order to reshape/recompress
It acts like a sort of "Man n the middle" for web traffic.
Put on your tinfoil hats boys and girls, this will be a wonderful ride.
PS: Also, think of all the Symbian(S60)/ASHA(S40)/NokiaX phones whose browser and store is handled by Opera now, by way of Microsoft...
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/flow/item/20265_Nokia_Store_to_be_replaced_by_.php
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Opera already was on its way into a death spiral. They decided they couldn't keep up with the pace development of other rendering engines with Presto, so they said they were going to clean-sheet remake Opera using Blink.
Well, what they really did was make a crappy Chromealike skin for Blink and give the middle finger to their loyal users. Why would you download or use this instead of Chrome/Chromium? It doesn't make sense.
Luckily, some of the original people have been actually working on a real "Opera on Blink" browser in the form of Vivaldi, which I'm really liking. Interface customization is getting better with every release, and it gives you lots of options to twiddle with (and can use some Chrome extensions). Highly recommended. I don't really know what anyone's use case for Opera would be, even on mobile it's basically just a barely modified Chrome. Maybe Opera Mini or something?
Sam
I start reading in Chinese.
He objects to manga being considered child porn? Ain't my thing, but doesn't that make him "a sane human being"?
Think I'll get rid of Opera before there are any more updates and move to the Vivaldi web browser (created by opera guys apparently). when the Chinese nation gets their hands on anything, 2 things generally happen: Attempts to make it cheaper at our expense, or attempts to get more from us, again at our expense. I'm not saying westerns don't do some of this too, but China has a lot more practice at it. QQ and WeChat are two good examples.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
is that the Chinese may be buying Opera. If this is the case, it will become, by default, untrustworthy. The Chinese government have a say in everything tech related in China. No, thank you. I will remain with Chrome, despite its imperfections.
Firefox lost me forever with 44 when they removed cookie settings, further showing they are embracing the same minimalist lunacy of the Gnome team. Opera was OK until version 12. When they dropped Presto, they became a shell of their former selves, no longer really original despite them having so many browser firsts we all now take for granted.
I liked the previous versions of Opera because they did things different. Imagine my surprise when one day Opera started behaving like Chrome. I just started using Chrome more and more.
I use multiple browsers at once (each for a different purpose), but I had to replace Opera with Firefox because it's at least a different codebase.
Opera died when they became Chopera.
Vivaldi might become nice, but it's still closed source which means it can turn into another Chopera in the future. Not to mention it's got some goofy quarks and runs like crap (last time I tried it...)
If you're a fan of Presto Opera, then you should seriously look and contribute to Otter Browser: https://otter-browser.org/
It's open source, cross platform (qt5), and renderer independent (meaning you can switch rendering engines) clone of Opera 12...
Vivaldi MUST hurry with it's stability and polish. I've been using the snapshot release(s) as my main browser for a couple months now, but still put up with a few stupid annoying bugs -- mainly extension-related. But I absolutely LOVE how customizable the interface is -- I was able to bring back my most-beloved Opera feature, tabs on the side! Everything else they're doing is so in that Opera Presto vein, that we Opera fans do truly now have a successor to the Opera Presto line. It'll be so much better once things stabilize!
Instagram is growing. Opera is dying. That is very different.
Full disclosure: I use (and highly recommend) Fastmail.
The founders of Opera spit from Opera some time ago and started to develop a new browser called Vivaldi designed in the same spirit as the original pre-crapware Opera browser:
https://vivaldi.com/
It's been my default browser for some time now and I"m quite pleased with it.
Poor form, Opera lackey.