5 ms·

+1 interesting. Started using Opera since ~2000 and really liked it. Really innovative (tabs, mouse gestures, download manager, ...) and fast! Even an email cl

+1 interesting. Started using Opera since ~2000 and really liked it. Really innovative (tabs, mouse gestures, download manager, ...) and fast! Even an email client was included :) ! But replaced it with Firefox by the time FF had tabs and was fast enough, due to 'trust/privacy' reasons. For the same reasons I do not use chrome. And if FF keeps disappointing me and Opera gains trust I can imagine a switch :) (hmmh, but how if closed source?)

johansch 11y ago
"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I didn't have to make payroll for 170 people each month, so who am I to judge those decisions without having detailed insights into the financials? I guess I am expressing my frustration of the lack of a silicon valley-style funding.) To his credit, Jon a year later championed that Opera Mini needed to be free/without "in your face ads" in the critical first couple of years. This allowed it to reach 250+ million monthly actives (it still has that!). And we did came up with really lucrative monetization models later on that worked without sacrificing the user experience.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Opera was the only browser that would run acceptably on my even-then-way-old 16 MB-RAM machine back in 2000.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  I'll argue there was a later screw-up on the desktop browser (and really mobile too): Unite sucked resources from much for a long while, failure to tackle some of the technical debt (things that manifested itself such as the integer maths used for percentage values in CSS, contrary to every other browser out there, and that went unchanged as layouts became increasingly complex and the web relied ever more heavily on CSS), and in later years general lack of investment (while Opera was posting record profits on a quarterly basis) in Presto leading it to fall further and further behind the competition causing ever worsening site-compatibility issues.
  - johansch 11y ago
    Well, yeah, there was a serious of screwups. :) I don't buy the argument about a lack of investment in Presto. IIRC there were like 90 (most of them really good) people working on Presto at its peak. And we still couldn't keep up. (And most of those issues were about lacking desktop market share, which caused sites to de-prioritize Opera, anyway.)
    - gsnedders 11y ago
      From memory it was a touch more than 90—and while I never ceased to be amazed by what we achieved with the resources we had, everyone else was expanding while Opera didn't, despite clearly having the money to do so. When it comes to lacking desktop market share, it's undeniable that has an effect on site compatibility—people kept on supporting IE6 till a few years ago, after all, despite all its flaws. If Opera had more marketshare, it could've afforded to not keep up (though then we'd have articles about how Opera is the new IE!). I think, however, site compatibility was less about marketshare in later years and more about ancient incompatibilities (percentages rounding down, keyboard events, range events, selection, document loading/unloading) that were increasingly important in an increasingly dynamic web. People were deliberately deciding not to support Opera at that point because it involved more than a trivial amount of work because of bugs like those and the lack of marketshare.
- x0x0 11y ago
  Do you mind sharing a few of those lucrative / non-annoying monetization models? I'm curious. And thanks for the insights into opera!
  - johansch 11y ago
    I think that's still too recent, sorry. People might get upset. Ask me again in five years. :)
    - x0x0 11y ago
      Apologies, I didn't mean to ask for anything proprietary; I should have made that clearer. Just what someone familiar with the product would know.
      - johansch 11y ago
        No worries. Actually, when I checked just now I saw that I can share it since they actually have published a nice brochure about the scheme :). http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/5572/205427/version/2/file/12790fbe743096d63c8f4064395bffe9d75e3415__27fd26896010301d843a637c4f317969.pdf http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/5572/205427/ve... Basically the scheme was: get lots and lots of users. Then go to each operator and say.. hey.. you know these users that you are having a really hard time to monetize because you don't have a direct in-app/phone channel to them? We have an app that (for example) 20 million of your customers use every month. Our offer to you is that for a cost for X USD/month/user we will expose your services in the default speed dial of this app that your customers love to use. This worked exceptionally well.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    For desktop: Search engine affiliation deals became increasingly lucrative (partly dependent on the market), especially for the defaults (in both the search engine bar and the search box on the new tab page, which were sold separately). The other major source of income for desktop was the default Speed Dial settings. There's a fair overview available in the quarterly reports.

johansch 11y ago

"We" (I have since left Opera Software) really screwed it up with the desktop browser around 2004. Management (i.e. the then-CEO Jon) was too worried about recurring revenue to pull that obnoxious ad banner in the free version until it was too late. At the time the desktop Opera had superior performance compared to Mozilla/Firefox.. but wasn't free/ad-less. It was really depressing to watch. (But at the same time, I didn't have to make payroll for 170 people each month, so who am I to judge those decisions without having detailed insights into the financials? I guess I am expressing my frustration of the lack of a silicon valley-style funding.) To his credit, Jon a year later championed that Opera Mini needed to be free/without "in your face ads" in the critical first couple of years. This allowed it to reach 250+ million monthly actives (it still has that!). And we did came up with really lucrative monetization models later on that worked without sacrificing the user experience.

StavrosK 11y ago
Opera was the only browser that would run acceptably on my even-then-way-old 16 MB-RAM machine back in 2000.
gsnedders 11y ago
I'll argue there was a later screw-up on the desktop browser (and really mobile too): Unite sucked resources from much for a long while, failure to tackle some of the technical debt (things that manifested itself such as the integer maths used for percentage values in CSS, contrary to every other browser out there, and that went unchanged as layouts became increasingly complex and the web relied ever more heavily on CSS), and in later years general lack of investment (while Opera was posting record profits on a quarterly basis) in Presto leading it to fall further and further behind the competition causing ever worsening site-compatibility issues.
- johansch 11y ago
  Well, yeah, there was a serious of screwups. :) I don't buy the argument about a lack of investment in Presto. IIRC there were like 90 (most of them really good) people working on Presto at its peak. And we still couldn't keep up. (And most of those issues were about lacking desktop market share, which caused sites to de-prioritize Opera, anyway.)
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    From memory it was a touch more than 90—and while I never ceased to be amazed by what we achieved with the resources we had, everyone else was expanding while Opera didn't, despite clearly having the money to do so. When it comes to lacking desktop market share, it's undeniable that has an effect on site compatibility—people kept on supporting IE6 till a few years ago, after all, despite all its flaws. If Opera had more marketshare, it could've afforded to not keep up (though then we'd have articles about how Opera is the new IE!). I think, however, site compatibility was less about marketshare in later years and more about ancient incompatibilities (percentages rounding down, keyboard events, range events, selection, document loading/unloading) that were increasingly important in an increasingly dynamic web. People were deliberately deciding not to support Opera at that point because it involved more than a trivial amount of work because of bugs like those and the lack of marketshare.
x0x0 11y ago
Do you mind sharing a few of those lucrative / non-annoying monetization models? I'm curious. And thanks for the insights into opera!
- johansch 11y ago
  I think that's still too recent, sorry. People might get upset. Ask me again in five years. :)
  - x0x0 11y ago
    Apologies, I didn't mean to ask for anything proprietary; I should have made that clearer. Just what someone familiar with the product would know.
    - johansch 11y ago
      No worries. Actually, when I checked just now I saw that I can share it since they actually have published a nice brochure about the scheme :). http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/5572/205427/version/2/file/12790fbe743096d63c8f4064395bffe9d75e3415__27fd26896010301d843a637c4f317969.pdf http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/5572/205427/ve... Basically the scheme was: get lots and lots of users. Then go to each operator and say.. hey.. you know these users that you are having a really hard time to monetize because you don't have a direct in-app/phone channel to them? We have an app that (for example) 20 million of your customers use every month. Our offer to you is that for a cost for X USD/month/user we will expose your services in the default speed dial of this app that your customers love to use. This worked exceptionally well.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  For desktop: Search engine affiliation deals became increasingly lucrative (partly dependent on the market), especially for the defaults (in both the search engine bar and the search box on the new tab page, which were sold separately). The other major source of income for desktop was the default Speed Dial settings. There's a fair overview available in the quarterly reports.