Chinese Tech Group Led by Qihoo 360 Bids $1.2B for Browser Maker Opera | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Tech Group Led by Qihoo 360 Bids $1.2B for Browser Maker Opera

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116 pointsmolsson72 comments

Given all the horrors @taviso posted concerning Comodo and AVAST etc, it's really really sad to see that the remains of Opera Software are now in fact being bought by a consortium that amongst other things are running "an anti-virus maker that ships a browser". What could possibly go wrong?

And the fact that Qihoo recently got busted in a Volkswagen-like scam when their "anti virus software" was tested does not inspire confidence in their business ethics either: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2917384/malware-vulnera...

The wikipedia page for "360 Secure Browser" says: "High usage numbers may be due to the browser being difficult to uninstall and a warning pop-up that appears when a user attempts to install another browser, claiming that the other browser is unsafe and should not be run." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_Secure_Browser

This article gives a bit more context: http://www.digital-dd.com/qihoo-browser-war/

Argh, that article has the "Things are different in China" excuse in there that utterly makes my blood boil. Granted, things are different in China, but that doesn't excuse fraud or 豆腐渣编程[0].

They're worse than Baidu.

[0] tofu dreg programming

I don't think your translation helped anyone understand that phrase.

Sorry, it's based off tofu dreg construction, which is a chinese slang term meaning substandard, rushed construction. Used either as 豆腐渣工程 or just 豆腐工程. I've heard it explained as old tofu being mixed into concrete to push up volume, that it refers to buildings being built as sturdy as blocks of tofu, or spilled concrete that wasn't removed looking like tofu dregs.

I've taken to using 豆腐编程 (doufubiancheng) to refer to the sturdier variant of chinese software engineering, which suffers from similar quality issues as chinese construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project

see also this wonderful image: https://twitter.com/Linde136/status/696286289474228225/photo...

This image is actually from a recent earthquake in Taiwan, whereas Tofu dreg projects are mostly referring to low quality constructions in mainland China.

Shit is shit wherever shit may be.

I think the linked photo is a clear example of the spirit of the euphemism.

I was surprised to see that Qihoo 360 was credited in most of the qemu CVEs from earlier this week:

https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3471

The company might be rogue but they do have a very strong security team.. maybe the best in China and one of the best in the world.

kim jong un also has a strong Nuclear research team.

A rogue tech company developing software is as dangerous as a rogue nation developing Nuclear weapon

Sigh. Opera is the only (mobile) web browser that implements text reflow sensibly, limiting block level elements to screen width.

So when you zoom into text that's wider than screen, it always reflows so that just vertical scrolling is required to read it.

Other mobile browsers force me to either zoom out making text illegibly small or to continuously scroll horizontally.

I so don't want to lose such a useful browser. If Opera is gone, I might have to write my own to do the same. Or more likely to hack Chrome or Firefox to do more sensible layout.

Yes, text reflow is essential and it's the reason I'm using Opera on my phone and tablet. It's much more important that pinch to zoom: zooming is useless if you clip out half of the text you're reading and you have to start scrolling left and right.

I wonder if Opera added it to blink as a patch or if they're working on an upper layer of the software. If it's a patch it would be nice to contribute it to the main repository.

BTW, it's at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/master

Does it include the text-reflow code ?

Text reflow is something that seems obvious. It's beyond hilarious that other browsers don't implement it.

Maybe Steve jobs needs to wake up from the grave to implement sensible browser features.

Simple font size option is absent in IE for WP. The contraption they put in its place requires changing the don't size for the entire operating system - just because I want to increase the font size of a single article.

The Android browser used to implement it, before Chrome for mobile came along. I think text reflow appeals to a certain kind of power user but is confusing for most users. So it sounds like a good feature for Opera, but not for mainstream browsers.

Here's the bug report from firefox about this issue[1].They removed it because it's slow and because they feel that today page authors use large enough text.

So maybe the sensible thing to do is to convince the firefox team to enable it as an option.

[1]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298

> They removed it because it's slow and because they feel that today page authors use large enough text.

This boggles the mind. Have they never actually used Firefox on a normal-sized phone?

On Fx this feature is not in the code any more. It would be a large investment of resources to implement it.

Are you from the Mozilla team ?

HTC Sense 6 browser still implements it pretty well. I still use it despite it being somewhat slow and annoying in other ways, because at least I can read with it.

It absolutely baffles me how people manage to use other browsers. Using the internet with Opera Mobile on a tiny screen is wonderful, I much prefer it to dumbed-down mobile/responsive layouts with huge text.

If anyone knows of a FLOSS alternative with well-working text-reflow, please shout. Hell, I would pay 10€ for such app.

Quite agree. I've ranted about this before https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/12/do-all-google-employees-hav...

Chrome used to have this, but removed it for no good reason. Wish Firefox for Android had this.

Thanks for the link, and for the rant. It deserves a separate submission to HN :) I'll let you do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802584

the dolphin browser on android used to be able to reflow like opera, but i think since they upgraded to the new chrome engine, it no longer does it properly.

Sigh - just never update the opera app and you'd be set!

Even without updating, depending on version and on use use ,opera communicated with servers or even gets whole pages. So i'm not sure this strategy would work.

> Sigh. Opera is the only (mobile) web browser that implements text reflow sensibly,

Completely agreed. It was removed from chrome because they decided websites should change.

>[text reflow] was removed from chrome because they decided websites should change.

Could someone explain more fully? I'd like to understand the thinking of those Chrome maintainers who decided to get rid of text reflow.

The developer's idea was that mobile sites need to be "better" and removing the code reduced clutter.

http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/migrating.html#Co...

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378

Combine this and the dreadful random sizing of text in chrome on mobile on certain websites based on some giberish algorithm and I have to seriously question what they are smoking over there.

The irony is many of google's own pages don't reflow

Or because they failed to build a high quality text-reflow like opera's , so they found an excuse ?

I guess this was coming. Opera was on a long and painful road to irrelevance, right from when they threw away all their amazing work to become yet another chrome variant minus the most useful features that really made Opera what it was - respected, lightweight, fast, and supremely customisable.

As for this acquisition, it's a surefire way of alienating whatever userbase they managed to hold on to. Qihoo is a purveyor of questionable software to put it mildly, their servers are in mainland China and are probably controlled by the CCP/PLA unit 61398, and I sure as hell won't trust them with anything.

Opera has over 200 million users in developing Countries, precisely because of its lightweightness/speed on mobile.

The infotainment UI in my car (a GENIVI product from JCI and now Visteon) uses Opera as the rendering engine. A lot of cars are (were?) starting to use this.

how would you weight the importance of developing countries (users)

It's been coming for a long time, certainly. But it's surprising it's happened quite so soon: the company is still posting record profits, and despite a large drop in share value in the past year (nearly halving), seems to be doing fine financially.

As a Norwegian I am not sure what to think about this. Every single dam successful tech company created in this country gets bought out: Fast, Trolltech, Tandberg and now Opera. And I've been part of several which has experienced this. Sometimes it might make the product bigger in the market but often it has not been a success. Certainly not seen from a Norwegian perspective, with respect to jobs or corporate culture.

Well, Microsoft has maintained the development teams in Norway, so there's that. And Opera didn't wait to be purchased to dump a bunch of people in Oslo. I can't really speak as to the Trolltech and Tandberg jobs, though.

Trolltech (now the Qt Company) did manage to maintain its staff across a few acquisitions and split, some of the most senior staff still remains active at the company.

I'd rather say this is not just Opera side has moved on, many people left Opera before the several rounds of layoffs, and some choose not to stay even when they are offered a new position (myself included).

I wonder if that's because their owners have been fellow Nordic companies, and thus had less of a clash of cultures.

I think the real problem there is that with this kind of stuff, one can scale market presence without scaling the workforce like we are used to from physical industries.

Something that really makes one wonder about the "sanity" of the 68-ers idea of education fixing all woes.

Among the technologically knowledgeable Chinese people I've met Qihoo 360 Antivirus is pretty much considered malware, like if McAfee Antivirus and RealPlayer had some horribly evil child together. So this doesn't look like good news for Opera.

This is bad news. Opera runs products like Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Opera Max, and SurfEasy VPN. Each of these products require routing data through Opera's servers. Trust is of paramount importance. And Qihoo is not a company that I trust.

Opera is long dead. Since they've started to work on this chromium version they stoppted listenning to their users.

Vivaldi is the new Opera.

Ever since JvT was pushed out by shareholders eager for profit, and Lars stepped in, they have stopped listening to users.

Many old timers now work at Vivaldi. And even folks like Haavard left - https://opvard.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/goodbye-opera/

Otter Browser is the new Opera.

Vivaldi is also interesting, but no MDI and no "click tab to minimize"... meh.

I still use Opera Mobile, they might be dead on the desktop but I've used their mobile offerings for a long time. This doesn't bode well for that product :(

This might sound naive but it is a serious question.

Wouldn't it have been the best way for Microsoft to get a hold of the mobile market by buying Opera then "updating" people's apps to a new version which would be "Edge for Mobile" ?

As it is, Microsoft has practically zero imprint on the mobile browser market.

Would there be any problems with my proposed approach?

I've thought of the same thing. A while back it did look like were dipping their toe in the water (article below). I guess not.

http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/microso...

In a similar vein, I think that Microsoft should consider writing a Windows UI layer for Android getting people used to the Microsoft ecosystem on mobile, while allowing compatibility for Android apps.

Wonder how this will affect Chinese citizens that have used and trusted Opera Mini to bypass censorship and the great firewall of China in the past. What browsing history is kept by the Opera Mini servers?

Opera mini runs Chinese servers separately. If ppl use Opera mini in mainland China, their activity is already on servers which the gov has a legal access to.

Opera mini , specifically , uses it's servers to render mobile optimized pages, so all of the search history is on the servers.

Lots of negativity around this purchase but in my opinion Opera was destined to be Left in the dust of the big 3. I think this purchase guarantees at least some money flowing into competition and new ideas from a company that seems to embrace common sense web standards.

Congrats to the team and the owners.

qihoo is a nortorious company of building spyware. I will not use anything related to opera anymore.

Didn't know Opera is still in business.

Their Opera mini mobile browser has 300+ million users.

Looks like they are even publicly listed... https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=OPERA.OL+Interactive#{%2...

Pay $10 to become VIP level one. It removes ads in browser. $20 for VIP II: rendering css on your page. $30 for VIP III: able to run javascript. $40 for ES5 support.

Chinese government wants the Opera proxy, great way to monitor people.

Don't do it Opera (though for 1B I can't blame them).

I decided to stick with Opera browsers & SurfEasy VPN exclusively, this move makes me question my decision.

Terrible development. Opera was hands-down the best desktop browser. Somehow less buggy and more userfriendly than Chrome. Handles tons of tabs without problems, fast snappy and even with support for vertical tabs.

This is no good! I am not using Opera as my main browser, but I do use it to test my webapps. Is there a way to disable auto-update from now on, surely, safely, and cleanly? My last version is going to be 35.

Let's hope they restore the Presto engine.

Any product by 360 is effectively malware. They are by no means a legitimate "security software" vendor.

Hopefully not.

They could open source their older Opera 12 (presto) and Opera Mail, just before they sell the company.

-- and get sued for negotiating in bad faith.

Before the negotiation. The old code is death weight anyway and not used in Opera 15 at all. But the code could be useful, to revive Opera Mail and a community could form around their beloved older Opera 1-12 browser.

Opera's main competitors are open-source projects. You are suggesting that they create another competitor right before putting the company up for sale, and I'm suggesting that they are unlikely to do that.

Yes, a different for-profit company did create an open-source browser project, but that was a rare situation in which the for-profit company dominated a very lucrative market (search) and the open-source project had the effect of undermining one of the few strategic advantages (namely, Internet Explorer's usage share) enjoyed by their only serious competitor.

In other words, in certain situations it might make sense for a for-profit company to use an open-source project to take users away from a proprietary software product of one of its competitors if the competitor would have been able to use its control over the proprietary software product as a lever on consumer behavior in a huge and lucrative market. But those situations are rare and do not apply here.

Google's open-sourcing Chromium resembles Russia's "scorched-earth policy": the move destroyed some of Google's options or resources, but made sense because it simultaneously took those resources away from Google's biggest threat. But the circumstances in which a scorched-earth policy make sense are rare and do not apply in Opera's situation.

It may be dead weight, but there's still Opera Mini with its hundreds of millions of users, and then there's plenty of embedded products using it which will never move to the Chromium Content API (because, hey, they're last year's model!).

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