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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.
...it's sure to be only a matter of time before the product goes down the drain...
Opera fired all their developers years ago and now it's just a reskinned Chrome.
If you want something new, try one of the FireFox forks that strips all that extra mozilla shit. You know, like FireFox used to be.
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.
Very very similar. Opera is Chrome with a different spin on it. Well, sort of. It all depends on just how dependent chromium is on Google's support. My perception is that chromium's long term existence is completely and utterly dependent on Google's support.
In some ways chromium browsers are the best of both worlds: Google does all the difficult security and infrastructure stuff, including supporting the extension store. Then you strip out all the asshole and have a great browser. It's a great reason to use Vivaldi.
On the other hand, to basing a publicly traded business model off of chromium feels like the act of a wretched scavenger. Can't say I respect it much. Live by Google, die by Google. Sooner rather than later. As stated previously, my attitude depends on how dependent I think chromium is on Google.
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.
You can strip it out of FF yourself
The point of software is to do things for us.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Opera is shit. It used to be the best browser around, until they ditched their engine and internals to become a chrome-clone. Once upon a time it was innovative and full of awesome features that other browsers didn't have, but they just... gave it all up.
If I want Chrome I'll use Chrome. If I want it open sourced I'll use Chromium. There's no need or desire for the festering reminder of a once great browser.
(And yes, I AM butthurt about it. )
Opera fired all their developers years ago and now it's just a reskinned Chrome.
Yes.
And, for added Lulz, they're now a publicly traded company with no source of revenue other than "monetizing" their users.
Thanks, but no thanks.
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.
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.
Opera used to be a Norwegian company with Norwegian developers and an active responsive community.
Within the last 5 years, Opera ASA fired all of their Norwegian developers, outsourced to the Czech Republic and sold to a Chinese Consortium.
There is little to no reason to continue supporting a closed source non-European "chromium."
If closed source isn't an issue, then you might as well be using Opera's spiritual successor, Vivaldi -- created by the original founder of Opera (Jon von Tetzchner), whom also hired many of the fired Norwegian Opera dev's.
there are only Rabbits.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Opera sold off its original VPN service, Surfeasy, to Symantec. It uses a VPN service from a company called Hernlabs located in Sweden. It's pretty limited.
The auto-update situation is weird. It looks to auto-update everytime you launch the application and everytime you close it. In Windows, it also has scheduled tasks to check for updates and also updates if you select "About Opera" from the menu. Seems to be de facto tracking its use. What I usually do is go into program directory and rename the opera_autoupdate.exe file and remove the update tasks from the task scheduler. This stops opera from phoning home so much. When I want to update, I just rename the update executable to it original filename and relaunch. It's a pain though cause you have do these steps after every update.
The point of software is to do things for us.
"Yes" and "no." Tools do not decide how they are used, but software is in the unique position of being heavy-handed with dark patterns when it comes to hiding defaults.
By doing things for us like Apple does, the spirit of "getting things done" is perverted by those who pretend they are the only ones capable of deciding what gets done.
Outright removing options is why all browsers are at best on my "reluctant use" list. My former "Trust" is long gone because power users do NOT get a say anymore. I have seen dozens of bugtrack submissions to Firefox and Chrome where "won'tfix" and "this works as designed" show the ridiculous nature of software failing to do things for us because "right and wrong" changes over time. It would sure be offensive if your hammer autoupdated one day and refused to continue being useful nailing anything that didn't look like a nail just because it's "wrong" or deprecated in the eyes of the designer. I know my use case, and how to protect myself.
* insecure http iframes? blocked by devs.
* running javascript scriptlets from the addressbar? blocked in some of them. Don't care to test now
They treat their power users as if they were all mindless users with no option to stop the warnings.
0) features being discouraged and then removed or chrome's requiring long command line switches that they silently deprecate on a random version upgrade.
1) pasting scripts into a console, like when you're troubleshooting? major pain on Firefox where you take it like a slave and have to use "allow pasting" because some jerks in the industry these days believe the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few requires tons of naggy handholding. https://stackoverflow.com/ques...
2) Trying to apply the fix above requires going into about:config where the browser yells at us slaves again with big fat warning at some point. It makes us humble ourselves picking "I'll be careful, I promise!"
3) injecting my own extensions into the browser? outright blocked or subverted by dark patterns. When I'm using recent versions of chrome there's a big fat warning on every startup stating the browser is endangered by my conscious choice. I'm not aware of a way to disable the warning. I have an older version of Chrome on a different boot OS where no such warning was required some years back. That version is too old to even see Google's extension store so I can't download new ones there.
4) one thousand papercuts that make the life harder for someone focused on control, chipping away at our entitlements every new release... we now have the "Not secure" labels appearing everywhere, the "your self-signed certificates are death incarnate!!!1!!!!" attitude and others.
Replying to myself to clarify that I *do* agree with the GP post's apparent position that Firefox shouldn't NEED tweaking for sane defaults in the first place.
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.'"
Opera is shit. It used to be the best browser around, until they ditched their engine and internals to become a chrome-clone. Once upon a time it was innovative and full of awesome features that other browsers didn't have, but they just... gave it all up.
If I want Chrome I'll use Chrome. If I want it open sourced I'll use Chromium. There's no need or desire for the festering reminder of a once great browser.
(And yes, I AM butthurt about it. )
Well, if you are a developer, you can use to run two Chromes. That's about it.
The built in ad blocker's nice. Built in VPN too, come to think of it.
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
Don't know why it's different for you, but Chromium most definitely respects hosts file on Ubuntu.