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.