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Opera Browser Raises $115 Million In Its Stock Market Debut (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Opera, an underdog in a browser market dominated by Google's Chrome, raised $115 million in an initial public offering Friday. The company sold 9.6 million American depositary shares at $12 each, the high end of the $10-to-$12 range it expected for the IPO. When the stock started trading more broadly at about 7:30 a.m. PT, it rose as high as 28 percent above that before settling in at a 10 percent rise, to $13.24, during midday trading.... In fact, Opera raised a big notch more, because at the same time as the IPO, it also secured a $60 million private funding round from Tospring Technology, also known as Bitmain, which makes Bitcoin mining computers, IDG Capital Fund and IDG Capital Investors. And the financial firms underwriting the IPO had an option to release another 15 percent of shares -- 1.44 million. "It gets us roughly up to $190 million," Chief Financial Officer Frode Jacobsen said....
In the first three months of 2018, Opera reported net income of $6.6 million on revenue of $39.4 million. The company makes money through partnerships with search engines, including Google and Yandex, that pay for search traffic it sends their way and through advertising deals like promoting websites on the browser's bookmarking, or speed dial, page. Opera has 264 million monthly active users on smartphones and 57 million on personal computers, Opera said in regulatory filings. Starting in 2017, it built an AI-powered news service into its browser and now offers it as a standalone app called Opera News. That has 90 million monthly users. The news app and service has been responsible for the turnaround in Opera's recent financial fortunes, Jacobsen said.
In the first three months of 2018, Opera reported net income of $6.6 million on revenue of $39.4 million. The company makes money through partnerships with search engines, including Google and Yandex, that pay for search traffic it sends their way and through advertising deals like promoting websites on the browser's bookmarking, or speed dial, page. Opera has 264 million monthly active users on smartphones and 57 million on personal computers, Opera said in regulatory filings. Starting in 2017, it built an AI-powered news service into its browser and now offers it as a standalone app called Opera News. That has 90 million monthly users. The news app and service has been responsible for the turnaround in Opera's recent financial fortunes, Jacobsen said.
What's the security and performance with Opera?
I've already ditched Chrome and it's second-OS-on-your-machine approach. I'm using Safari on my personal, and Edge on my work machine. I'm open to something new.
Guess PT Barum was correct..
...it's sure to be only a matter of time before the product goes down the drain...
See, there's NOTHING like it anywhere else!! There are no competitors in its class.
None!
And those people KNOW how to get things done!
I just see this stock going $100, $200 maybe $300/share!!
And the growth is unlimited!! I see them branching out into other software and maybe commercial space travel! Where else are there going to be browsers in space but Opera.
And the name recognition!!! Opera
I mean it just brings one's thoughts to .... boredom.
Never mind.
opera is not a norweigan company anymore. they may still have an office there, but opera software and the browser is 95% chinese-owned. their owners have a shady reputation, at best... and that's on top of their government also having a piece of the action.
"Opera, an underdog in a browser market dominated by Google's Chrome"
Opera IS Chrome, dumbass.
I used to use Opera, many years ago. I really liked having the tabs on the bottom, among other things. Then they abandoned their engine and switched to the Chrome engine. No more tabs on the bottom - so I switched to Chrome.
We need a fourth browser engine outside of webkit/blink, gecko and edge. Use your money to put Presto back into prime time and reduce dependence on Google.
The company makes money through partnerships with search engines, including Google and Yandex, that pay for search traffic it sends their way and through advertising deals like promoting websites on the browser's bookmarking, or speed dial, page.
YOU, and I'll say it again, YOU are the product. As Netscape found out years ago, people will NOT pay for browsers.
Throw the money in, hope it goes up, cash out. A tanking is coming.
Chicoms own it Mao bones it snatch your passwords thankyou queer bird. BURMASHAVE
It's amazing how they keep living on, a decade after they were considered dead.
First by getting on mobile phones before Android. Then by ... I don't even know. Now by this.
Too bad that Opera, the browser, is dead. Long live Vivaldi. Its successor in spirit.
It would be like trying to keep Windows ME going. The code was just not made to support the horribly misguided "modern" catastrophe-by-design that is HTML5.
At some point you just have to level the building and start from scratch.
My guess is that they took WebKit, because they did not have the money to actually write something from scratch again, with them barely hanging on for their dear life for quite some time.
I, for one, am post-browsers. I'm looking into separating hypertext viewers, virtual machines, and network clients into separate programs again, like they should, and killing the "prime example of the inner-platform effect": HTML5.
The comments below .. are a total waste of bits :[
Frankly, I'd rather have it be the government that does not have the ability to imprison me.
Yes, in China, I'd use US software. And in the US, Chinese.
A couple of things about Opera:
a) It has a built-in VPN service. Last I knew (Slashdotters, please correct me if this is no longer true), the VPN was run by a Canadian company under Canadian law and hence was probably reasonably secure despite the Chinese owning Opera.
b) It recently dropped the ability to turn off auto-update, which, for me, is very bad.
Will it run on Amiga? I here they have another model coming soon . . .
[ducks]
hawk
It's based on Chromium, and contrary to what's been posted above, is in active development and contributes back to the chromium project.
It's got a built-in VPN that's limited because they sold off their original VPN (SurfEasy) to Symantec and its server selection is sparse (Unfortunately if you wish to post messages to Slashdot through the Opera VPN, you can't because Slashdot owners are complete cunts and prohibit it. However, I can go through some shady web proxy site, let my computer become a part of a bot net and have no problem posting to Slashdot.)
Opera also has a "turbo" mode that allows speeded up connections to non-https sites. Essentially you're connecting to Opera's own caching servers to retrieve pages. Https sites connect directly. If you already have a fast connection, you won't notice the difference much. With dial-up or slow mobile connections, there is a perceptible speed difference, especially with static pages.
Probably one the best features that distinguish Opera from Chrome is its built-in ad-blocker. By default it uses Easylist, EasyPrivacy, and NoCoin (cryptocurrency mining protection) lists and allows custom lists to be added. It's pretty thorough.
there's other nifty features that Opera has builtin that you can only get through extensions with Chrome. In fact you can use Chrome extensions in Opera. So it's much more than a Chrome clone.
there are only Rabbits.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why not do the logical thing and switch to Vivaldi? You know, the browser developed by all the original Opera people that still lets you have tabs on the bottom?
Frankly, I'd rather have it be the government that does not have the ability to imprison me.
Yes, in China, I'd use US software. And in the US, Chinese.
And then China sells data to the US and the US sells data to China and you wind up imprisoned anyway. You may or may not have noticed this, but China is our #1 trading partner...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
or is it legit for a change?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I'm browsing with... *counts* ... 97 open tabs; seven different tab groups; seven pinned tabs; a handful of tabs which are hibernated and I can add another new tab with no noticeable slowdown or hitch. I've been running this 24/7 for several weeks straight with zero instability nor memory leaks and/or crashes.
This is the new monarch of browsers... Vivaldi.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book