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Comment by sidmitra | Hacker News Reader

I still think buying Opera, and adopting/adapting would be a good thing for Microsoft. It would give them a major playing hand in the mobile browser market too.

From Opera's perspective, they might gain a lot of users overnight, which may or may not be a good thing. But i do think Opera as a browser is the neatest, most feature-rich and yet unbloated piece of software i've seen. And they deserve a bigger desktop market share than they currently have.

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I really don't see the reason for them to acuire Opera. They should calm their egos and just use Webkit like Google and Apple do instead of wasting innumerable resources on new layout and rendering engine for IE8/IE9.

And then what? Have a committee that standardizes Webkit and talk about what features are in and what features are out?

No thanks, I'd prefer them to keep their own fucked-up engine that slowly loses market-share.

Opera is the most popular browsing platform on mobile devices. That maybe one of the reasons.

I strongly doubt that will ever happen due to fears of additional antitrust complaints. What I think eventually will happen, however, is that they put their support behind Webkit. Wishful thinking perhaps, but I don't think it's outside of the realm of possibilities.

Upvoted solely for having the same wish. Some may say I'm a dreamer.

I'm sure they will eventually. However I fear that just like with a lot of other Microsoft implementations the IE Webkit will be bloated, processor intensive, and generally a painful thing to use.

Why do you think they will? When has MS ever done something like this?

All you have to do is compare page render times, JavaScript parsing and execution times, and other major metrics between IE and Firefox or IE and Safari and you will see that IE tends to be considerably less efficient that its competition. I'm just saying that I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens with a Microsoft Webkit implementation.

Microsoft products are getting better in recent years, but I still wouldn't get my hopes up too high.

Compare render times between Netscape Communicator and IE and you will see that Netscape tends to be considerably less efficient than its competition. Doesn't mean a decent browser couldn't be salvaged from it, though.

I like my Opera as it is thanks.

Yeah, i'm not saying the MS change the product dev/team thats behind Opera. I would just look at it as a brand re-building exercise. It doesn't have to be revenue generating, but MS needs to get some developer goodwill behind them.

Buy stake in Opera, maybe adopt it as a default browser, but i would definitely leave the dev process alone. But judging from how large companies act, dreaming this is just silly on my part.

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