Seriously the fact the "I made a chrome wrapper" is apparently worth millions in VC funding remains absurd to me.
The only question is if they can actually make money, and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that. Opera, the browser company had revenue of around $380 million last quarter, but if you don't use their browser, which is also "just" a chrome wrapper, you'd never know it.
To put it another way, Linux distros; Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc, are all "just" wrappers around the Linux Kernel. Yet "I made a Linux Kernel wrapper" is worth at least a billion, in the case of Red Hat. If you never come near that distro, you might not even see a reason for its value, but you can't argue with their sales numbers.
And where would those millions come from? Make the browser paid? It could work if it's really that good, and it'd likely be targeted at Apple users who won't mind paying. Seems risky though, eventually if you're too popular, Google will just copy some superficial stuff you're doing and people will forget about you.
> and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that
Sure they can, losing money is easy.
That's an interesting question! Paying for things is the obvious answer, but us users have been trained to feel entitled to not paying for other people's hard work. So the most interesting one in the space of "how to get people to pay for a web browser" is Replay.io, which is "just" a firefox re-skin (it's infinitely more than that) selling to a niche audience that is known for being cheap. So rather than sell to them directly, sell to their employers (it's a business tool) and get into the enterprise space, which is its own can of worms. It's a ridiculously powerful tool, if only their target market could manage to hold it correctly.
Not super sad, because I haven’t used Opera in a decade, but still a little sad.
Personally, I consider this switch to Chromium solidified Chrome and derivatives dominance - with Presto-based Opera there was always a choice. It's also a shame they didn't released the code of this engine.
That being said I’d strongly prefer the native WebKit be used since it wouldn’t make the thing 300mb.
The value, in this case, is in the UI. The engine is a commodity.
I don't love Arc -- I bounced off it pretty fast -- but it's not insane to think that a VC would see the reuse of the most common browser engine as a good thing, as it means less work on the part of the developers and more of a focus on what sets the browser apart.
What's more absurd to me would be to use it because it's pretty and has vertical tabs as if it was the features pitched to raise money ...