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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

So some Chinese Funds bought it for $600M a few years ago, and now they are going for an $115M IPO.

Sorry I am not following the logic here.

Edit: Turns out when they purchased it, they were on the rise and had 6% browser market shares, now it is down to 3.5%. [1]

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20151...

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Also just a note that the IPO is to sell a fraction of the company, not the whole thing. So this allows the investors to monetize part of their investment, while retaining some.

Back then they were on the presto engine. Funny I remember the CEO saying they were going to do some really great innovations after moving to blink..

And I believed them .

You're probably well aware, but for those of who aren't, he moved on to Vivaldi.

Which is itself a disappointing browser. I like the idea, but the execution is bad: mostly, for me, the UI speed. It's molasses, or glue, or <insert other favorite slowness metaphor here>. I had to move to Chrome, and I haven't managed to move back, or to FireFox yet either.

I speculate the cause is that the UI is written in HTML/Javascript, but I'm not sure. Some parts of it have to be tailored per platform, and be natively implemented, I'm sure.

I think most of the opera developers went to Mozilla when Opera ditched presto.

Really? I use Vivaldi as my primary browser and it's never even crossed my mind that it has performance issues. What I do know is that it feels a lot like the original Opera and had a ton of customization options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Stephenson_von_Tetzchner

If that's the guy you are thinking of, he was no longer at Opera when they did the switchover.

He stepped down as CEO in 2010, left in 2011, and the switch was announced in 2013.

When the Chinese fund purchased Opera it was based on Blink and had been for about two year.

Did they think that the rest of the world wanted a browser controlled by the chinese government?

What's the evidence to show that the Chinese Funds are government backed?

What's the evidence to show that they aren't?

I suppose the general reasoning is "innocent until proven otherwise", not the opposite. So my question is more reasonable as a question, although yours naturally imposes a stereotype that bears some validity but largely not meaningful in individual discussions.

And again, I am just asking a question.

If you think your question is an answer, then I have to say that this answer is not satisfactory to me.

Contextually your question is absurd, but I’ll bite. “China backs $15bn tech fund to compete with Japan’s SoftBank” (Yesterday, https://www.ft.com/content/9cdd3098-7d3c-11e8-bc55-50daf11b7..., “Fund to look at global deals even amid concern over inflated tech valuations”)

>I suppose the general reasoning is "innocent until proven otherwise", not the opposite.

You are absolutely correct, but, if anyone knows China, there is no such thing as no government backing. ( Which is a rather sad truth and hopes to be proven wrong, but highly unlikely so )

As I said, everything backed by government is a stereotype. Like what American said, everything is invented by private entrepreneurs, where in fact the most modern technologies are invented by government agency. For example, internet and ai early research is all done by darpa or nsf funding.

$115M is how much they want to raise in the IPO, not their valuation.

That’s what they are raising. So they should be worth $600M or more if they do raise around that much.

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