Away on Vacation

I’ll be going on vacation for the next week. So unless I get internet connection at the place that I’m vacationing at (which I doubt), I won’t be posting anything new until September 5th or 6th.

I know this is probably a bad week to take vacation. After all, I’m expecting some major Opera news sometime over the next week. I’ll be missing the big Opera party as well (perhaps Opera can postpone it for one week). Unfortunately I planned this vacation a while ago, so postponing it isn’t an option.

At this time I would like to invite my fellow Opera Watchers to become Opera Watch contributors. If any big news breaks while I’m gone, please share it with others by posting it to the comments of this post.

Major changes for Opera's desktop revenue model; Will Opera be ad-free???

In an effort to gain a bigger foothold in the desktop market, Opera will announce an alternative business model for its desktop browser.

Opera’s main strength is in the mobile browser where it saw a profit in the last fiscal quarter. The desktop browser revenue, however, was down from last year.

One Opera employee said that the place is buzzing in Opera (the company) over this announcement. “You have something good to look forward to”.

There is a lot of speculation as to what this announcement entails.

Could it be that Opera will remove its advertisements from the browser in an effort gain a greater foothold in other markets which are much more profitable?

I don’t want to over analyze this, but at a recent shareholders meeting the CEO of Opera said in reference to the desktop browser “we are finding ways to monetize our user base a lot better than before, but licensing revenue is not part of that.” Is he implying that licensing revenue is not in the future of the desktop browser (i.e. it would remove the ads from the browser)?

Until version 5, Opera didn’t have a free version of its desktop browser. In the year 2000, however, it introduced the free version with ads.

Here is what Opera said at that time: “Before this release [version 5], between 1 and 1.5 million people worldwide used Opera. A sizeable number, but we were dwarfed in comparison to our competitors. Finding one’s niche and prospering can be good for many companies, but for us it posed a particular problem. A lot of sites were being constructed just to work with one browser, in effect shutting Opera users out. Therefore we felt the time had come to let Opera out in a free version, so that millions more could enjoy Opera’s Internet experience. Opera 5.0 for Windows was ‘set free’ in December of 2000, and during the first month 2 million users downloaded the browser.”

Removing the ads would have an even greater effect on the number of Opera users. The rest of the Opera products would also benefit from such a change.

I’ll post more about this as I get more info. Stay tuned.

A Virtual Party, as Opera Turns 10

Opera will host a virtual party online in honor of its 10 anniversary.

The party will be located at http://my.opera.com/party and it will feature music, games, prizes, photos and a HUGE surprise!

All Opera users are invited.

Date: Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Time:

• 3PM Central European Time (CET)
• 9AM Eastern Daylight Savings Time (EDT)
• 13:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Update (8/24/05): The party will be online for 24 hours.

Opera Mentioned on Public Radio

The Opera browser has been profiled today on The World, an international public radio station.

The radio segment lasts close to six minutes. Listen here.

Opera Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary

Opera is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today.

The event is being marked by a special party for Opera employees.

Congratulations Opera!

1,000,000th Post on the Opera Forums

Congratulations to the Opera community on reaching 1 million posts on the Opera forums today.

The first message posted to the Opera forums was on September 7th 2001.

It has successfully grown to have more than 180,000 members, with close to 100,000 threads.

The Opera forums ranks 43rd of the top English software forums on the web, according to Big-Boards, which tracks the most active message boards and forums on the web.

The Opera Community site is expected to get a major overhaul sometime soon. This would be a great treat for all of us.

Comparing browser download size

So how small can the size of the download file for the Opera browser get?

With the recent release of Opera Mini, the answer is pretty amazing, just 55KB. Compare this to the size of Opera version 2, which was about 800KB.

Opera’s programmers have been able cleverly add lots of features and functionality to the Opera browser, while keeping the download size relatively small.

Recently I wrote about the growth of Opera’s file size over time, but how does Opera compare to the rest of the browsers?

I’ve compiled a list of some of the major browsers with their download size.

• Opera Mini – 55KB
• Opera Mobile – 1.5MB/2.5MB
• Opera 8 – 3.6MB
• Firefox 1.0.6 – 4.7MB
• Internet Explorer 6 – 12MB
• Safari 1.2 – 7MB
• Mozilla 1.X – 11MB
• Netscape 8 – 12.9MB

As you can see from the list above, Opera is pretty impressive when it comes to their download size. What make it even more impressive is that Firefox, Mozilla, and IE don’t even have most of the features that come standard with Opera, and yet Opera is much smaller.

When Opera added BitTorrent support to the browser, it only added an additional 24KB to the file size.

Bigger is not better.

Opera partners with Answers.com

Answers.com, an answer-based search engine, and Opera announced today a partnership to incorporate Answers.com content directly into Opera’s browser and Web portal.

Opera users will have access to the full suite of Answers.com content and services via a co-branded version of Answers.com accessible via Opera’s built-in dropdown search toolbar.

Answers.com will also be available through the Encyclopedia, Dictionary, and Translate menu items in the right-click context menus, as well as through Answers.com content that is directly integrated into Opera’s portal homepage.

The companies will share revenue generated by users visiting the co-branded content pages.

Opera currently uses InfoPlease for its Encyclopedia and Dictionary.

Answers.com became very popular after Google started using their service in its search engine.

User dumps Firefox for Opera after Asa Dotzler's rants

I just came across a blog posting by someone who says he switched from Firefox to the Opera browser after reading a series of attacks by Firefox’s Asa Dotzler on the Opera browser.

For those of you who aren’t aware who Asa Dotzler is, he is the Quality Assurance (QA) lead for Mozilla Firefox.

Asa has made it a habit to attack Opera in his blog. For some period of time, I would write rebuttals to his attacks; however I figured that this only adds more coal to the fire(fox) so I stopped this practice.

Now, I’ve been using Firefox since summer 2003, when it was Firebird 0.6.1, and back then it was simply the best browser around – much better than IE – and I’d been using it ever since.

However, this spring, Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Q&A chief, made a series of slurs against the Opera web browser. As these went on (becoming more and more unfair), I decided to give Opera a spin to see if what he was saying was true. I was sure I’d try and it leave it.

Well, I installed and started Opera and I’ve never opened Firefox again. The difference in the quality of the code is simply stunning, but that’s the difference between hobbyists (open source/free software) and professionals (proprietary software).

Opera Mini: A web browser for virtually all mobile phones

Opera introduced today Opera Mini, a new kind of web browser for virtually all mobile phones.

Opera Mini is designed to enable the web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser.

Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone (see illustration below), which makes it perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.

Pages are reformatted and compressed before being sent to the phone, so they only use about one fifth of their normal amount of traffic.

Opera Mini will store the cache, history, cookies, and passwords for pages you visit on the your service provider’s server, which may raise some privacy concerns.

For the moment Opera Mini is only available in Norway, with wider availability to be announced in the future.

The new Opera Mini will be free to download and use and does not require any registration fee. Though your service provider may charge you for the network traffic.

Opera Mini runs on all phones that support Java, which most already do. It is estimated that there are more than 700 million Java enabled mobile phones in the market.