Face opera
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On several levels of the internet they all try to get a foot in:
1. Cloud: AWS, iCloud, Azure, Gdrive & App engine - Facebook hasn't got a storage or computation sollution
2. Social: Google+, Windows Live, Facebook - Amazon and Apple don't have real social networks
3. App stores: Apple app store, Play, Market Place, Amazon Appstore - Facebook doesn't have a real app store.
4. Operating system: OS X and iOS, Android, Windows - Facebook and Amazon don't have a OS yet.
5. Browser: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Amazon Silk - Facebook doesn't have a browser yet.
I really think that all companies will battle each other on all the levels because loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others.
So, Facebook definitely needs a browser.
2. Apple has ping, but that doesn't really count.
3. Facebook is launching an app store.
4. Amazon has its own version of Android it uses for Kindle Fire. Sure, it's based on Google's Android, but they ripped out the Google bits.
5. That's true, Facebook doesn't yet have its own browser.
I'd argue they have a good amount of social data through purchases. Just because it doesn't involve posting pictures of your cat doesn't mean they don't have it.
Why?
The browser is for the end user an important base because that is where they get directed to surf and target ad spending etc. By inserting functionality like a start page or search engine, the behavior is influenced a lot. You can also push own services and products directly.
The current status of the browser is also that it can replace the OS. (See Google Chrome OS)
Now since Facebook is the Internet for lots of lay users, I suppose they might use the same driving logic?
You guys need to realize that practically noone outside of the US has any idea of what Amazon is.
Amazon's web services are everywhere. If you're dismissing them because you don't recognize their name, I'd seriously question your familiarity with the current web landscape.
And I fail to see how amazon hosting a few sites makes it important enough in the current web landscape to be able to be compared to microsoft/google/apple/facebook. (I bet that reddit would exist without amazon)
Just one more nitpick: Amazon does not just "host a few websites." Seriously, Amazon Web Services is a noteworthy business and is widely used -- yes at the level of those other companies you listed -- whether you believe it or not.
Facebook (or any user anywhere in the world) don't care whether their packets are routed on Cisco hardware and just because Cisco has a hand in the game doesn't mean that they have anything to say when it comes to defining the future of the internet. The best they can do is be prepared and hope that the future of the internet works well on their hardware (talking services now, of course Cisco has a larger role in the technical side of the internet but that's beside the point - unless somehow Cisco hardware is so unique that the "next facebook" or whatever wouldn't be able to exist without Cisco hardware (hardly likely for either Cisco or Amazon)).
If Dell were to be gone tomorrow, how would that affect you? Just barely, if you use Dell products you might switch to HP. End of story.
If amazon goes away tomorrow (and assuming that people have had time to migrate to other services) that wouldn't affect people the slightest. Some users in the US would be mad that their kindles don't support DRM from any other source than amazon but that's pretty much it.
Amazon, compared to the rest mentioned, does not play a part in "defining the future of the internet". They are just a service provider that can be replaced in a jiffy. Yes they probably have great services but they don't make or break things that define the internet.
If apple, google, microsoft or facebook would disappear - that would make quite an impression. Of those facebook surely is the one most easily replaced but their current presence on the internet is huge and that is why they can have a hand in defining the future of the internet.
Amazon and Dell can only hope that the companies that do shape the internet use their services/hardware - knowing full well that Facebook would run just fine on HP hardware.
In terms of your counterexample, perhaps a look at the historical growth of each: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amazon+dell+stock+price.... But I'd like to move away from Dell, because what I'm addressing is the notion that Amazon is not a "player" comparable to Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Dell is a hardware company. Similar, but not enough in my opinion to make such a comparison.
I think we can agree that Amazon is apparently not as recognizable to an end-user as those other companies. I don't think that diminishes their role in the landscape, and I don't totally trust your opinion that they are so conveniently replaceable.
Pretty much nothing that amazon does will ever affect me personally, nothing wrong with that - amazon aren't even trying to define future of the internet in my eyes.
If amazon as a hosting company tries to interfere with their customers you bet they will be abandoned ASAP, doesn't matter if amazon has the best web hosting service it's still the sites they host that matter for the future of the internet and amazon has no control what so ever over that - so how can that possibly matter in this context?
The first post talked about Silk as an example of Amazons influence, really? Opera alone really feels like a small player yet Opera has way more than ten times more active users than amazon has even sold Silk-capable devices. Opera are also active in the development of future web standards, which I doubt amazon are. Again, nothing wrong with that - it's just that amazon have an entirely different focus and thus I get quite confused when you talk about stock prices - what on earth is the relevance? Seems to me that even Opera work way more towards defining the future of the internet than amazon does (or want to do).
Maybe it's just that we work in different contexts. For example, at least in my field, EC2 is the de facto scalable distributed computing provider. For most intents and purposes, Amazon is the cloud computing service. Web hosting is not unique, sure, but many of the other AWS products are. If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, there would be no equivalent for many of them.
I think my point boils down to this: just because you might not frequently see Amazon on your end does not mean they should be dismissed. They are an important part of the industry right now and are absolutely worth considering in the same breath as the others.
I don't use Chrome anymore, I switched back to Firefox but its undeniable that it had a massive impact on the speed of browser development and probably the progress of web standards.
Now.. if Facebook bagged Opera what would it add to Facebook or what benefit would Facebook get? A bigger say in web standards. Does this matter much to Facebook? They would have a mobile browser.. this still doesn't help them make a mobile app which doesn't suck.
I just don't see the point. The most likely result of this would be alienating existing Opera users. I would also expect Google to switch Opera to web-kit to reduce development costs. I don't see how a company like Facebook will see a return of investment by buying out Opera.
Please, elaborate. The only feature I know is exclusive to Chrome is full page translation (since they own Google Translate it makes sense).
What else?
Sandboxing for individual tabs
Ability to drag tabs between windows
Isn't each tab a process or something so when you close it memory is freed?
I am sure there are some other things. This is all I can think of off the top my head.
My point is that saying "Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had" is a bit of a stretch. When it came out Chrome was basically not very different from Internet Explorer 6 (feature-wise), and it seems to have stayed that way (I like full page translation but that's it).
We should be fair and say that Google Chrome has a large market share because it has Google behind it. It doesn't have much else going for it.
One process per tab is a feature. If a tab crashed in FF, typically the whole browser would need to restart whereas in Chrome the tab could be closed and re-opened without affecting the other tabs. I think that's a pretty significant feature.
Auto-updating every 6 weeks is another feature. As a developer, I don't have to worry when an update comes out since I know 90%+ will be on the new version.
While I think part of the reason Chrome has a large market share is clearly because of Google, I don't think it's the main reason. There are many other factors.
The problem here is that you trade a lot of performance for stability that you should have to begin with, so in the end you have worse overall performance just so that a fringe case is covered. What's the worse that can happen if Chrome crashed? You could lose all your tabs because the default setting is "open homepage" instead of "reopen the pages that were open last", but that's your fault.
But let's investigate this more deeply - browser crashes have two major causes - internal bugs and plugins. What used to happen was that Flash (or Acrobat Reader, or whatever) would crash and it would bring down the whole browser. The solution is (of course) one separate process for the plugins. Problem solved. Going beyond that and fitting every tab with its own process to account for the fact that your business isn't really building browsers is of little comfort to me; you shouldn't be dereferencing that NULL pointer to begin with.
Opera has auto-update as well. I guess we'll have to disagree on the reason Chrome has its market share.
Opera has custom inline searches. I type in the address bar "eng cacophony" and I am being redirected here www.thefreedictionary.com/cacophony . "w Opera browser features" takes me to the wikipedia page. I can define how many custom keywords as I please. Again, long before Chrome existed.
I could do this in the year 2000.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#social_media-RU-monthly-201104-20...
Also worth noting is if the co-founder Jon and Geir's (the other co-founder) widow don't want to sell their stakes, it will make things difficult for anyone to take over and all this speculation is just academic.
If this happens--and I've seen nothing as yet to suggest it's anything other than a rumour to get the pageviews up on certain tech blogs--I'll be uninstalling it after nearly fifteen years of use, and probably making the move to Firefox. I don't have a Facebook account, so why would I want to use a Facebook browser? Instead of just tracking me across Like-enabled sites, it'll be able to follow me around the whole internet, logging goodness knows what.
I seem to remember a social networking browser was tried out before, as a forked Firefox and subsequently Chromium, in Flock. Whatever happened to Flock?
I paid for Opera years ago, and I'd actually pay real money again for a good quality, feature-filled browser that was guaranteed to not include tracking. I'd rather pay with my money than my privacy. Money can always be replaced, and earned again. Once privacy's gone, it's gone.
I have been a big fan of and user of Opera since it had banner ads in the free version. It has been a long time as my preferred default browser for home and work PC's. I'd even have it on my iPad if I could.
But when I first heard this rumor over the weekend I felt in shock (and sick). I hate Facebook along with its smug a-hole founder. Never even had an account (although I do feel I missed out on some old connections and such but refused to be a part of FB). From a business standpoint I guess it makes sense. FB would get a mature, fast and feature rich browser (One they could data mine to no end, including emails).
But the very last version of Opera that was released, shall this buyout happen, will also be the last version I ever use. Opera has a very clear and good privacy statement. I trust Opera. But Facebook, forget it!
In past few days I have spent time downloading and trying pretty much every other popular browsers. From Chrome to PaleMoon. I could live with one of them but nothing really compelling for me. They all have already been uninstalled and am done trying. Opera would be surely missed.
Stop applying emotional attachments where they don't belong.
Chrome does have a sync service, but it requires user action to activate, allows the user to pick what they want synced, and allows syncing omnibox history, not the complete browser history.
I've been using Opera since its paid days, and despite having switched browsers every year or so, I've still gravitated back to Opera as my day-to-day browsing browser. That's the value of their brand.
I mean - okay, If they start modifying it to send your data to Facebook without way to opt-out - sure, do that.
If they start showing ads in fastmail and reading your mails - sure, that's reasonable.
But I really think that doing that the moment FB acquires Opera would be quite an overreaction.
We are begining to see the subverting of unrelated products into business strategies. No, I don't want my browser/car/glasses/phone with any strings attached. What are we looking forward to a decade from now? iBank? FB insurence? G+ real state?
I for one will make efforts to avoid those products like the plague. If we do not strenghten small brands, we accept the rule of the big ones.
Overreaction is okay for matters of principle.
Reinforces my belief that open standards and open source really, really matter when it comes to a free and open Internet.
GE sells refrigerators, MRI machines, insurance & financing and owns a television network.
We've actually already been there.
Why wouldn't they do that? What's in your refrigerator and how long it's been there has been discussed almost as often as flying cars, within an order of magnitude.
Once checkout of items is commonly done with NFC or RFID or similar, then it's a mere matter of engineering for GE to accomplish exactly that, all taking place on the internet of things.
Additionally, Opera is the only European browser. That may sound stupid, but it's part of the things I can do to put as much distance between me and that messed up country the US of A. Getting bought by some huge US corporation is yet another vector to subpoena my shit or the US gov to influence my life.
If I'm a frog in a pot, and I see you turn on the gas, I'm jumping out, because I know ahead of time that it's going to get hot. By the time the water boils the (subjective) damage has already happened.
Which is to say, I'll leave fastmail before the ink is dry on a FB/Opera deal.
Opera users instead trust Opera on the security and privacy they claim to offer. This tends to work fine, as Opera have a good reputation for privacy, and they have not abused the trust of their users.
Facebook have, multiple times. Anyone who cares about privacy will avoid it purely because facebook cannot be trusted. Trust must be earned, and facebook have much work to do before they will earn the trust of many (if ever).
I'm not quite sure what it is, but when companies are large enough, people tend to be forgiving, as if their past sins have been cleansed without any good reason. People tend to misplace popularity with trust - if so many people are using it, can't be bad for you right?
1) Association - Facebook has a really bad image among many people, and I believe Opera has a hugely better reputation than their potential buyer.
2) Fear that Opera will stray from it's declared course of supporting the open web and creating the best browsing experience (which it currently delivers, by far).
I will not be uninstalling Opera if the acquisition takes place but will keep a very close eye on any developments.
Unfortunately Opera is the only choice for me in the current browser market - other browser can't accommodate my browsing habits, so I would be very bitter if anything were to go wrong. I think a lot of Opera users feel the same way.
Why is Gecko irrelevant? It still has a good chunk of marketshare.
I think people are not seeing the forest from the trees here. Firefox has a lot of potential on mobile phones, because Firefox has a lot of desktop users that would want the Firefox on their mobile devices, at least for the Sync functionality.
Also, on mobile WebKit may be the most popular, but there are so many incompatibilities and performance differences between Android's browser, Blackberry's browser, the webkit-powered S60 browser, Chrome, Safari and Mobile Safari that you might as well count those as different engines.
[1] http://www.gsmarena.com/1ghz_s40based_nokia_c3015_pictures_s...
The author doesn't seem to be up to speed. Opera has announced widget support will be dropped, along with Unite applications.
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/04/24/increased-fo...
I guess this decision could be reversed if Facebook buys Opera.
There's some recent proposals for p2p web standards (http://www.infotales.com/peer-to-peer-web-standards-by-world...) which may provide an alternative system to Unite with some of the same goals. Opera appear to be involved in it.
And Opera used to have a widget manager embedded in its browser, so it wouldn’t be too hard to dust it off and restart the project.
It still does. The upcoming Opera 12 will not have it. The author makes a reference to the fact that the widgets have not been receiving proper attention since they were launched and need dusting off.
My point is widgets are (and have been) basically dead, at least in terms of popularity. I'm not sure Facebook execs are aware of their existence, so it's probably unlikely they have a future. Just have to wait and see.
Owning both a browser and the applications running in it is an immensely powerful combination, as demonstrated by Google. It makes perfect sense for Facebook to want to do the same.
And as much as I dislike Facebook, I believe a buyout like this is the only way for Opera to survive long-term. They have a brilliant engineering team, but it's dwarfed by its competitors. The Presto engine is maintained by a team of just ~60 developers and ~30 testers. They're doing amazing work, but can't keep up with the faster pace of Webkit or Trident development. Combine that with the current level of mismanagement, and you're in trouble.
Without backing from a bigger player, Opera will dwindle to irrelevance as the use of its proxy browser fades away.
It's not a proper competitor of course, as one cannot install it to phones by other manufacturers, but it does still cover a pretty big chunk of the low-end devices.
Then I might switch.
The rest I didn’t use/care, but I can recall there being an extension for every one of those things.
Not saying Firefox is better than Opera necessarily, it's just that Firefox is quite powerful as well.
At the end of the day, Aurora (with several addons) is usually below or around 300MB with my normal daily use, whereas Opera Next can easily go beyond 1GB of virtual memory.
I surmise the real reason for Facebook to buy Opera is not that. Opera owns the #1 mobile ad mediation platform : AdMarvel and has augmented it with Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising.
THAT IS THE KEY. MOBILE MONETIZATION VIA ANALYTICS OF FB DATA AND ADMARVEL.