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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

I remember people told me Opera was dead years ago. Strange all the adjectives people use for companies pulling $600+mil/yr these days... ;)

Good to see one of my old favorites making it so well so long in a cut-throat business. Unsurprising that it might come to an end soon. I know they used to brag on their strong and interesting approach to diversity. Wonder how much that ended up helping them innovate into survival where others failed.

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Opera the browser company is dead.

Their management decided they don't want to make browsers anymore, replaced the presto development team with a chromium modding team, and focussed on selling ads.

In the financial report 1Q15 you can see that out of 127 mio revenue, only 17.1 mio come from browsers: http://www.operasoftware.com/company/investors/finance

If they're still one of your favourites, then i guess you like ads a lot?

I agree that Opera the browser is not as competitive as they once were, but for the ads point you could say the same about Chrome since Google makes its money from advertising, not from the browser. I haven't seen any ads outside of the web content in Chrome or Opera (at least since version 8.5).

Good counter. It's pretty much all ads these days with browsers being a delivery mechanism.

Or I just didn't know that. Thanks for the info. ;)

You might want to take a look at Vivaldi, https://vivaldi.com/story/.

BOOM! Not dead yet! Bank on the Blink engine, too. Good to see the divergence continue and the power-user focus might make it fun to use as it evolves.

Well, that pro-diversity approach was mostly gone with Presto.

I agree. It was inevitable as much of IT's hardest problems end up as duopolies or tiny oligopolies.

600mm revenue? What was the profit?

Full numbers are in the article. Opers expects an EBITDA in the range of $108 million-118 million

Cheers! I had done a cmd-f for "profit" and had no hits.

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