Norway's Opera warns on growth, says firm may be sold

I've always viewed Schibsted as a owner of media companies, VG, Blokket etc. Not a company that is producing software. That at least how I read your views. From the little I've viewed they don't do anything special on IT operations, quite boring. So it might make sense, and what I've heard is that the quality of the operations (at least in Norway) haven't been to good.

Random ramblings ends here <-

They have an incredible team but their browser is a skin for chromium compared to what it was before they dropped their engine (shortly after the founder left due to a board "too quarterly oriented".

A couple years later the new opera is till far beyond what it was and it seems they're not even trying to fix this while vivaldi on the other hand is driven by a vision and has made much more progress in a more timely manner.

I've been using opera as my main browser since they removed ads in 2005, today I'm still using presto based opera with no plan to switch to the blink based version of opera because many of the features that made opera are missing and are not coming back which make the "chromium skin" designation a reality.

It's a little ironic for such news to end up here, because I'm pretty sure Opera (mobile) is the only one of the major browsers still supporting text reflow, which is why I use it for reading HN which doesn't have an official mobile site version.

I've used Opera since 2004 and the current Chromium based Opera is barely even a shadow of what it once was. It took them well over a year just to implement bookmark functionality, because they didn't feel it needed it and then realized it did.

Even the newer Vivaldi browser also based on Chromium (started by the former CEO of Opera) has more classic features (tab stacking, partial key rebinding, sidebar) than the official Opera and started far later after the Opera Chromium reboot.

Is the team incredible? Perhaps, but not in the way a long time Opera user would desire. I'd be happy if it had even half of the features of Opera 12, but as it is now, it's around 10-15%. Thankfully, Opera 12 (Presto) with some tweaking works pretty well still after being discontinued around 2 years ago.

this was the main point of my comment.

before they were a browser maker. everyone knew them for that. the work from their team shone.

now they are skin makers. and a unknown ad network.

the work of both their awesome browser devs and ad servers are mostly unknown to anyone. it all goes to google fame in the end. or do you think people outside of this very small circle of browser developers read release notes and credits?! heck you had to link to a source tracker.

nobody knows what is the opera browser anymore, because, i was one of them, you use opera because of feature X and Y. then you install Opera 13 over opera 12, and... you have a trimmed down version of chrome! you don't have your loved feature X. Nor feature Y. and some features from chrome haven't even made it to opera 13! so you just go to chrome and forever give up feature X and Y (not sure why so many people do that), or you move forward to firefox and have incomplete versions of X and Y.

I doubt opera kept any user after 13.