Facebook To Buy Opera? Maybe.
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Edit: For those who point out Google, I would argue that Google has demonstrated only a desire to show me ads (which I actually like). Facebook has demonstrated a desire to show everyone everything.
Edit: Also if you change your default search engine to Bing, then Chrome is behaving as a keylogger for Microsoft by your definition.
Chromium is open source, it doesn't include these pieces, yet you still get to benefit from all of WebKit's awesomeness and Google's contributions to it. Like a modern realtime communication platform, new APIs enabling adaptive streaming, WebGL, NaCl and more.
Also, how else would the recommendations work except as described?
When searching online I find it vaguely insulting that my presumed default state is one of not already knowing what I'm looking for, and furthermore the question I'm asking is the same question everybody else is asking.
In the case of both features I'm treated with a flury of distracting, schizophrenic flashes where previously the UI would behave patiently and consistently while I entered my query.
Instant, suggestions, Sets, and the site preview function are begging to be hidden behind a button where you explicitly tell the engine you're confused, and need help figuring out what the vague thing you have in mind really looks like (complete with revolutionary highly visual UI that doesn't resemble a regular search). At least for a user like me.
If you find the Google experience "insulting," you are far too emotionally attached to how you interact with Google's services.
Often when I search, I have a keyword in mind, but not necessarily the wording. The autocomplete is great for helping me refine my query. I'm not really sure why Google suggesting common searches would be insulting?
Not to say all of them. I personally don't make use of either features whatever but at least I can disable both!
This applies to everyone, including Mozilla.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/11/facebook-privacy-policy-cha...
Further, I don't even understand the accusation. You have to click "Share" on a post to share it, and even then, there's an additional, quite explicit confirmation required.
And those explicit confirmations contain so much noise that it's often quite difficult to tell what you're confirming.
("friends" in the Facebook sense, of course).
And you don't have to click to share. You just have to do something in one apps linked somehow to your facebook account. Or leave a comment on a third party site. Or..
Yes, you can be attentive to all these, but that's not what I would call easy for everyone.
Facebook understands the importance of mobile. If you view fb timeline on your phone, it looks great. Facebook have made the transition to the mobile web already - because mobile will be the dominant entertainment consuming screen in the future.
In the software game, there is no point planning 10 years ahead. 10 years ago, software was very different from now. But 5 years from now, there will still be feature phones and africa/se asia will continue to be growing.
Facebook would have purchased the basic platforms it needs for future software, and would be in a good position for whatever comes next.
Personally I'm using only a dumb phone, I think it's going to be at least my daily phone forever.
Longer battery life. More durable screen. Mature technology. Cheaper. Lighter and smaller. Faster to call people. You can replace keys if they go broke. Doesn't look nasty if you have greasy fingers. And the bottom line: I don't need anything but sms and calling.
I'm sorry, but in a few years you won't be able to buy a feature phone. Smartphones will get better battery life, screens etc as costs come down (and the third world gets richer) and technology marches on.
Opera was doing very well in the first world markets 6-9 years ago, for exactly that reason. They lost the market almost entirely. So, why would the developing world be any different?
AOL, Compuserve, et al hung in for a very long time, even after people begrudgingly ditched their dialup for broadband, solely because they were so comfortable with AOL from that first experience.
Experience suggests it could very well work.
I think the bigger question is whether it would be cost-effective. i.e. to what degree would that be effective in capturing social network market share in those regions, is it the most cost-effective way to capture that share, would it be enough to simply pay Opera to 'partner' with Facebook, etc.
Opera is popular in the developing world for an entirely different reason - the Turbo/mini compression - it may lose that market if other browsers also do compression.
For example - here in Cambodia I subscribe to a 2GB 3,5G package for just $5 a month. The reception and speed is great in urban areas.
However, if you're just talking about extremely poor countries without any 3G service, then you're absolutely correct. There's not too many of them left though, just some countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Mobile data is getting cheap incredibly fast and betting a company on providing data compression is stupid. It has worked out well for Opera so far (kudos to them, I'm Norwegian), but continuing to base their income on it is a losing battle. They have to pivot in order to still be relevant and being bought by Facebook is, in my opinion, a good way of doing it.
I remember hearing that 12 years ago.
It won't.
They wouldn’t buy it just to open source it. Facebook will buy Opera for its own strategic reasons, and they will open source it only because it’s the optimal model for them to develop this kind of project.
They already open source bunch of stuff. They have the culture and the know-how.
Why would that be? Opera already has a very optimal closed source development model.
Opera makes quite some money on advertising, by channeling traffic into Google.
I used Opera desktop for something like 10 years too. When I moved to Chrome (maybe 3 years ago?) I was like, "ah, this is what these websites are supposed to be like". I was actually quite sad to say goodbye and I still miss a lot of the features (sidebar!), but it always struck me that Opera was living in a bit of a dreamland where they just hoped the web was 100% standards compliant. Admirable, but unfortunately (in the short term at least) users suffered because so many sites just didn't quite work. This may have improved since I jumped ship.
If a major company could give Opera the resources to catch up to Chrome in that area, then I'd be excited for the potential to create a comprehensively market leading browser.
The only site with any problems is my Outlook Web Access and that only works full in IE.
In terms of performance though, Opera has some weird issues. Try to go to theverge.com and scroll.. it's not pretty.
Though I doubt there's much truth to this rumor.
I don't mind paying a few $ for a decent service, not tied to Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft.
The primary reason I am interested in them.
But what is stopping Facebook from forking Chromium(/Webkit) for their own use? Or for that matter even Mozilla might be open for partnership.
Just forking Chromium will make it look like Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Linux, i.e. a cheap knockoff of Redhat.
If Facebook wants to enter the game they need something more. At that point doing new frontend for Webkit from scratch is probably not going to be any cheaper than buying Opera. And they’d need to hire people to do that, which buying Opera would also solve.
The article notes that Opera's current estimated market cap is $670M, which is a lot of money for a browser frontend. I think it's more likely that they want to lock-in the feature phone user base.
I'm not sure it would promote the standards itself faster though. At least the WebKit side (Apple, Google), has like the exact opposite incentives for that to happen. The Facebook-Opera push would have to be quite hard.
Also, I wasn't even aware that opera ran on phones, so it doesn't strike me as something they care about, unless they're looking at 3rd-world countries.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/29/opera-mini-now-has-169-mill...
Considering that many of the users only access the Internet via their mobile devices I think Facebook would care about them.
Do you have a source for that? I'm finding it a little hard to believe, especially since getting a cheap computer + internet for two years is (much) less expensive than a phone + wireless. Granted, I'm in the US, which is probably very different from the demographics in Opera Mini's user base.
The article I linked says the following:
"The study, which was conducted between November 2010 and November 2011, found that globally, 56% of Opera users and 43% of those who use another browser only access the Internet via their mobile devices. In some countries, including Egypt (72%), Bangladesh (69%), Brazil (65%) and South Africa (61%), these numbers for Opera users are significantly higher."
> Granted, I'm in the US, which is probably very different from the demographics in Opera Mini's user base.
I can only speculate to why they prefer using a mobile, but I think that the infrastructure is so different from our countries that we shouldn't necessarily base our assumptions on what we would have done.
If they buy Opera they can do what they want. Partnering with Mozilla would probably be a more stressful affair as the goals of the Foundation and Facebook probably don't quite align everywhere. It's like the partnership with Google, but even worse.
Yes, this will make the web less hyper, but right now some behaviors is out of control for the user.
There are various sandboxing models out there, none of which really suitably address my privacy concerns. And most of which will break large portions of the transactional Web as it exists today (that is: websites which interact with other systems, and/or specifically transact commerce).
Of course, there's little to pushing the data sharing from the client to the server either. This is a fluid in a balloon. It tends to spill out elsewhere when squeezed in any given spot.
What I'd like to see in the short term is per-tab isolation. If I'm logged into Google/Facebook/etc in one tab and browse other sites in another tab, I want to have the ability to prevent the second tab from knowing which user I'm logged into in the first tab. This could also solve a lot of CSRF problems.
Unfortunately, Firefox -- the only browser that is likely to support such behavior either as a built-in feature or as an add-on -- doesn't even run tabs in separate processes. One tab freezes, the whole browser freezes. Urgh.
Do you know what's coooooooooooool? Coo-hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo-hooooooollll-ah?
Imagine installing a browser that forces you to have a facebook account! and facebook logins for websites all over the place. yikes.
IE6 was closed, and laid stagnant for years.
If you're not testing in more than 2-3 browsers, I seriously have to question your acumen as a "web developer". Browsers do exist outside of the Webkit bubble.
If Facebook buys Opera (who own FastMail.fm), I might as well just quit the Internet.
Or you know, just Firefox. Not cool enough for you? The above 3 are very trendy.
Ah, should be a piece of cake right? Mark simply needs to bid $1 bn overnight.
Safari is affiliated with Apple and I won't touch products of a company whose products and way of running business are antithesis to openness, freedom and hacker culture.
Chrome.. no special reason. I don't particularly like it, nothing I could point the finger at, but.. blah. Is there a way of disabling plugins in Chrome, as in: a placeholder is displayed on the page and the plugin is activated when I click the placeholder?
IE, on the other hand, has "suggested sites" feature which I'd like to test more. Maybe it helps me with discovering some new content on the net.
Or do you mean they don't bundle patented codecs like H264? They support HTML5 video just fine AFAIK.
Yes, via extensions and a native browser option
Yes, I use this all the time. it's built into the browser.
Better to do nothing for 3 months. Take some time out of the office and do some deep thinking.