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."

Translation: Theenking ooootseede-a zee Oopera bux

[by Anonymous Coward]

Interfeeoo Sume-a ooff Oopere's lung-term bets ere-a begeenning tu pey ooffff. Zee Nurvegeeun veb peeuneer hes infested in TF und mubeele-a fur yeers, und noo Neentendu's heet Veei cunsule-a hes poot Oopera intu mure-a thun ieeght meelliun leefing ruums. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Meeni hes mede-a zee veb useble-a oon meelliuns mure-a phunes. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Und zee must recent mejur releese-a ooff FureFux hes beee met veet pooshbeck oon its perffurmunce-a, usebeelity, und secooreety. Bork bork bork

Re:Translation: Theenking ooootseede-a zee Oopera

[chuckymonkey (1059244)]

Holy huge wall of unintelligible text. You must be a Perl coder.

Re:Translation: Theenking ooootseede-a zee Oopera

[reanjr (588767)]

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.

Link to Page 1 of article

[AskChopper (1077519)]

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/ [theregister.com]

Firefox tabs

[WK2 (1072560)]

We've introduced things like [tabs] - and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied...

Translation: We did tabs, damnit! Not Firefox! I repeat: Firefox did not do tabs first! It was us!!

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

you know it's just as annoying to copy someone by doing everything right before they do, right?

meanwhile in a galaxy far, far away...

[martin-boundary (547041)]

Han: "But dammit, I shot first! First I tell you! It wasn't Greedo! What do I have to do so you all believe me?"

Re:

[welshsocialist (542986)]

I have a feeling that Opera was not the first browser to do tabs; a browser called NetCaptor was one of the first to do so in 1997. For a detailed account, see here [adamstiles.com].

Re:Firefox tabs

[ceeam (39911)]

Tabs or no tabs but Opera had an MDI browser back in ~1994.

Re:Firefox tabs

[LWATCDR (28044)]

"Not one item from the list looks like from outer space - all are concepts which any monkey can bring into a browser. "

Yea.. Sure they do.
Everything is easy once someone else does it.

Re:Firefox tabs

[Lord Kano (13027)]

Everything is easy once someone else does it.

That's what I say about female college Freshmen.

LK

Re:

[hkmwbz (531650)]

Terrible strategy or not, Opera has had to make its own money. All other browsers are backed by some major corporation (Mozilla by several), and get a free ride. No such luxury for Opera. Then Firefox showed that you could make shitloads of money off of searches... Funny how Opera's innovation (search field) keeps the money flowing into Mozilla Corp.

Re:Firefox tabs

[jlarocco (851450)]

I mean who the hell was actually willing to use an operating system with adware built into it (or spend 30 dollars)? Not trying to troll, just stating that Opera started off with a terrible strategy, and they are paying for it now in the desktop market.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Opera isn't going for a massive userbase on PCs. Unlike Firefox, they actually have to pay their developers. And unlike Internet Explorer, they don't have a huge operating system and office suite monopoly to subsidize browser development. Opera making a huge push for PC market share wouldn't make sense, and they'd go out of business.

Their cash cow is mobile and embedded browsers, and that's what they focus on. Fortunately for those of us who use the PC version of Opera, their code is portable enough to run on desktops also.

Making their desktop browser available for free probably had more to do with publicizing the Opera name than it did with competing with Firefox and IE.

Re:

[Tangent128 (1112197)]

Not one item from the list looks like from outer space - all are concepts which any monkey can bring into a browser.

Look beyond the list- let me know when Firefox does Widgets, or presentations [opera.com].

Re:Firefox tabs

[ggvaidya (747058)]

If he doesn't like the deal he's getting these days, perhaps he should start patenting stuff or quit the software business [...]

... which is right about the point where I stop using their browsers, I guess. I love Opera, and one of my major reasons for doing so is that it's a well-engineered product made by a company which has always been pretty good "corporate citizens". Yes, they have strange ideas about design and advertising, but they make good products, run a sustainable business, give me a very decent browser for free, support said browser at no extra cost, and are very good at coming up with interesting new features, which have a much better record than most other software I use as being completely "fleshed out". They're also "good geeks": they don't go nuts patenting things, are pretty okay with other companies reusing and building on their ideas, allow you to download early tech previews of their software for testing and feedback, and have their browser primed for the kind of people who like having a couple of dozen tabs open at any one time - i.e. the sort who are much too fond of Wikipedia for their own good. Also, that bit you quote doesn't sound (in context) like sour grapes: Jon is pointing out that one of Opera's biggest strengths is coming up with innovative features, including mouse gestures and tabs (innovative half a decade ago). Opera 9 has several new features such as Speed Dial and Thumbnail Preview, which made things easier for me within hours of installing, so I'd say they're still doing a great job on that front.

Speaking of which, I checked Wikipedia on the mouse gestures bit; Konqueror's doesn't say when it got mouse gestures, but the mouse gestures page says Opera has had them "since version 5.11 (April 2001)", when KDE was at version 2.1. So if you can figure out when Konqueror got mouse gestures, you'll have your answer. Anecdotally, I found what might be the original patch for Opera mouse gestures in Konqueror [kde.org], which would support Jon's idea of Opera as the originator.

Cheers!

maybe it's a naming problem

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:maybe it's a naming problem

[by Anonymous Coward]

I think a lot of the hatred for Opera stems from the fact that they messed up the cool naming scheme for major browsers. First you discover somewhere, then you explore it, then you conquer it, then you go there for fun. Navigator -> Explorer -> Konqueror -> Safari. I think it bodes well for the browser I'm developing right now, OverdevelopedHolidayResort.

Re:

[MrNaz (730548)]

Hey, there's no problem with putting an opera house when enough people come there for safari. Just look, it worked for Sydney!

Re:

[dbIII (701233)]

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.

I don't think so - they'll think you can win, free.

Are they really making money off Opera?

[bogaboga (793279)]

I do not use Opera these days, but used it from 2000/2001. Those days, the Firefox browser, then called Phoenix or so really sucked! Question though...Are these Opera guys really making money off Opera? The Firefox folks are not doing badly with their product. How are Opera doing?

Re:

[scorchypoo (961199)]

They're one of the market leader in mobile and embedded browsers. They're also selling copies of browsers on the Nintendo DS and Wii. The desktop is only a small part of their business.

Re:Are they really making money off Opera?

[bigbigbison (104532)]

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.

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

They're also getting quite big among smartphones and even phone operators.

Opera Mobile is shipped on more than 50 million handsets from from the major mobile phone manufacturers and operators worldwide.

Can't use IE, Firefox, or Safari

[wickerprints (1094741)]

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.

Re:

[Rebelgecko (893016)]

Try entering

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

into the Terminal (when Safari isn't open) and changing your user agent (Debug->User Agent) to Internet Explorer. Most sites that "require" a certain browser will work in Safari.

I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner

[intx13 (808988)]

I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchner - he comes across as a very forthright, positive, motivated CEO - and he's pretty good natured [com.com] 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.

Re:

[dreddnott (555950)]

Late to the party?? I've been using Opera for ten years! I'd say it's more like the rest of the world that's late to the party.

Opera Supports BIG Pages better with less RAM

[Bellum Aeternus (891584)]

In my company we have a 'reports' web page that generates a list of items sold to whom, where, and when with in a given time frame (specified by the viewer). Needless to say the resulting page can be huge, literally ten of thousands of table rows long by dozens wide for even a short time span (a full year cannot be rendered on a typical workstation because of memory limitations, think 5+ million rows) - so far only Opera is capable of copying the data to the clip board for pasting into something like Access (god save me). IE and Firefox both choke (lock up and crash) on such a large select and copy when using a machine with less than 2GB of RAM.

I don't know what they do differently in Opera, but they do it right - and it's gotten them a number of new users in my company's administrative offices to boot.

But will it go Open Source?

[slobarnuts (666254)]

Let me know when Opera goes Open Source, because, for the love of god, I can not upset Virtual Richard M. Stallman [wikipedia.org]. Who am I kidding, I probably still wouldn't use it if it were, I am just a Firefox groupie or something.

The only thing stopping me from using Opera

[Frogbert (589961)]

The only problem I have with using Opera is that there is just no substitute for Adblock plus, something that allows me to subscribe to a list of blocked urls and html and have it do its thing in the background. If someone has found one please let me know.

Re:The only thing stopping me from using Opera

[by Anonymous Coward]

Try http://operawiki.info/OperaAdblock [operawiki.info]

Proxomitron got me in trouble with /.

[Poingggg (103097)]

I used Proxomitron back in 2004 and somehow it managed to create 8000 hits in one hour to /. when I rearranged the panels on the main page. This resulted in me getting banned from Slashdot. Not funny, I can assure you! This came to light after an e-mail exchange with Robert Rozeboom from /. (if you're still working there: thanks Robert!). I found out it was Proxomitron because when I had it active my firewall indicated very heavy network traffic, which did not occur when proxomitron was bypassed.
Of course t

Tabbed Browsing

[Dog-Cow (21281)]

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.

Firefox user, in process of Opera switch

[Tronster (25566)]

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.

Security

[Britz (170620)]

The lower the marketshare, the lower the chance that your browser ist targeted by malware authors. Since Firefox is gaining at such a great speed I have started to advise Windows users to use Opera for security reasons. Other than for security neither Firefox, IE7, nor Opera make a difference for the casual PC user.

Personally I use Iceweasel, because it comes directly from my good ol' trusted repository, but I also have Opera installed and use it as a secondary browser for sites that don't work in Firefox. I also prefer the cookie management in Firefox to that in Opera. Opera used to be way ahead, but they stopped making progress on that front a long time ago. Though I realize that privacy is more of a myth now with special Flash and Java supercookies and the likes that never show up anywhere.

Re:Speed

[larry bagina (561269)]

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 [mootools.net] 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).

Re:

[SpeedyDX (1014595)]

From my experience using the two, Opera refreshes sooner so you can see the top part of the page sooner, but loads the page slightly slower. Firefox refreshes later so you don't see the page until later, but loads the page slightly faster. The "illusion" is that Opera is faster. The vast majority of the time, the important information is located at or near the top part of the page. The fact that Opera loads the bottom part of the page slower is rendered irrelevent because of that. I'd rather be able to see

Re:Speed

[Fweeky (41046)]

See Preferences -> Advanced -> Redraw after to have it be more/less aggressive at page (re)drawing.

I can't remember or immediately find the equivilent setting in Firefox.

Re:Speed

[arrrrg (902404)]

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html [howtocreate.co.uk]

FFS

[empaler (130732)]

From the top of the linked page (to which you don't offer any text, only a straight URL):

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.

Re:

[sootman (158191)]

Welcome to Slashdot, where even FA submitters don't RTFA. :-)

Re:

[jstomel (985001)]

If you have a fast processor with lots of RAM this is true. But firefox starts hideously slow on an older system and is a memory hog. It all probably depends on your system configuration.

Re:

[suv4x4 (956391)]

He seems to think that Opera is fast. My experience has been that although Opera renders more accurately than Firefox (1.5.0.2), Opera is a lot slower.

If only it mattered how fast Firefox is. Since when you open few more tabs in it, it'll instantly become ultra slow or hang mid-action while waiting for who-knows-what, while no other browser (safari, ie, opera) does this.

As a heavy Firefox/Opera user I can tell you, the overall experience in Firefox is sluggish at best.

On Opera speed, memory residency, + security

[by Anonymous Coward]

SOME "FYI" ON SPEED, MEMORY OCCUPANCY, & SECURITY (for Opera, vs. the other 2 major players in IE, & FIREFOX):

"He seems to think that Opera is fast." - by ChrisMaple (607946) on Sunday August 19, @11:16PM (#20289859)

So do others, as evidenced here (the most comprehensive & even-handed/fair comparison of browser speed online that I have found, to date):

BROWSER SPEED COMPARISONS ON MANY TASKS & MULTIPLE OPERATING SYSTEM PLATFORMS:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html [howtocreate.co.uk]

(Especially on the MOST USED OS PLATFORM ON THE PC, Windows, but also, overall!)

----

"My experience has been that although Opera renders more accurately than Firefox (1.5.0.2)" - by ChrisMaple (607946) on Sunday August 19, @11:16PM (#20289859)

It passed the "ACID2" test, & iirc

Re:Speed

[Lisandro (799651)]

it might be because opera needs qt libraries.

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 :) 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.

Re:

[MrNaz (730548)]

Firefox corrected some of the kitchensinkisms of Mozilla.

And then, as soon as Mozilla Suite was discontinued, it promptly replicated the whole kitchen sink mentality, somehow adding everything that's *not* useful in a stand alone browser (e.g., profles) and leaving things out that are (e.g., a reasonably useful download manager).

Re:

[a.d.trick (894813)]

Profiles have been in Firefox since as long as I've known about it (around 0.9 or so), certainly before the Mozilla Suite was canned. They're about as visible as about:config; it's not something a regular user would ever notice. Also, it has no significant performance cost, and can be very important for people who are developing and testing Firefox. They don't what their testing version of Firefox to nuke their real profile. It's also nice for extension developers for pretty much the same reason.

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

The Mozilla Suite used to include IRC, mail, etc. FireFox is nowhere near that bad,

IRC and mail were not bloat, except in the download size sense. When you didn't use these components, they were not loaded. When you did, then they shared a lot of resources with the browser, so you had a smaller overall footprint. Now, if you want to run FireFox and Thunderbird you still need two copies of Gecko, XUL, XPCOM, etc. in memory. They've been promising to fix this with XULRunner for ages, but still haven't.

Re:

[Poromenos1 (830658)]

Your calling Opera cluttered makes me doubt you've ever used it. Mine has a menubar, tab bar and address bar, none of which has any buttons on it. You don't even need the menu, with the sidebar and gestures. So, try using something before trolling.

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Reply on equal grounds. Explain why Opera is not superior to Firefox

He did, he said Opera is non-Free. There are two sorts of F/OSS users. Open Source advocates believe that an open development model will produce superior code. Free Software advocates believe that having the freedom to modify and redistribute your code is inherently valuable, and many believe that this makes up for any lack of features since it means that they can add (or pay someone else to add) any missing feature they care enough about. If you are one of these people, then it doesn't matter how man