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It's not just a browser front-end, it's also a browser engine. If they acquired Opera and pushed it to increase its market share Facebook could gain a lot of influence on HTML and the adoption of web technologies.

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This would actually be an awesome outcome. A bigger Opera marketshare, particularly if they eat into Webkit's, would mean that there will be stronger pressure to keep web development standards compliant.

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.

And even more: a first-class, very innovative developer team. How many now common browser features originate from Opera?

For those not familiar: tabbed browsing (complete with closed page history and undo), whole page zoom, a search engine search bar (and then address bar searching), a download manager, middle click to open in new tab, speed dial/"top sites" for quick navigation in new tabs, and restoring open pages/tabs after the browser has closed or crashed are some of the features "Opera had first."

NetCaptor had tabs before Opera, and that probably wasn't the first browser to have tabs either.

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