Submitted by A $1.2 billion takeover of Opera Software by a group of Chinese internet firms fell through on Monday after failing to get regulatory approval in time, sending the Norwegian browser firm’s shares to a seven-month low.
The deal needed a green light from the United States and China, and one firm in the Chinese consortium said U.S. privacy concerns would have led to an investigation into some of Opera’s products that risked delaying the acquisition for up to a year.
I wonder what Opera really has to offer at this point – and I don’t mean that as in, what does it have to offer as a browser to us as consumers, but what does it have to offer as a takeover target. I’m assuming the days of Opera Mini – which did well on things like the Wii – are over, so what’s the package, here?
In the latest version of Opera on Android, it is pushing itself as a more of a news aggregation reader. It collates headlines, gives you notifications of big news events, etc. In addition, it has really matured as a browser on Android. It is very slick, quick, and includes some nice features like data-saving modes, reading modes, etc. I have it installed not as my main browser (Chrome), but as a news reader.
As for the company, there is certainly a lot of talent, but I’m unsure of their worth in terms of products. As a life-long (their life, that is) user going back to the 16-bit days (purchased 3-4 licenses), on through project Magic (multi-platform), the all-in-one browser, and now the niche mobile tool, I think they are a great company that has navigated some difficult waters. I wish them success and, if nothing else, a good retirement!
For those of you on Android, give it another go as your second browser/news reader. I think you will like it.
And no, there is no astro-turfing here – unless they want to give me money, yay!
Opera has a brand recognition in the West that a Chinese company can exploit. Remember it is competing with safari, edge/ie, chrome and Firefox.
I think the American market in particular wouldn’t be willing to use a Chinese browser that pushes all traffic through their VPN. But branded as Opera many wouldn’t even question it.
I really hope this doesn’t happen. I prefer Opera over Chrome, and I only use it because someone that previously worked at my job had special feelings toward chrome and so their intranet doesn’t function very well outside of it, and Opera seems to be one of the few browsers that are fine.
Opera has been offering b2b solutions for some time now. More known are the products aimed for TV sets (Opera TV and TV App Store) and MediaWorks for publishers on mobile platform.
None had the level of success they expected it. Mostly Sony was branding in Opera software in their television but right now with Android TV it’s no longer the case.
The number 1 priority of the Chinese government is to avoid or block any Google product. Opera is a good alternative to Chrome and not one of the Chinese spyware browsers, although there is a good chance this is what it will become.
https://www.techinasia.com/chinese-tech-companies-bought-opera gives more background. Ask how it worked out for Google to control there version of a window to the internet, chrome. Ask why they dumped billions on Mozilla. Then understand thats all driven by the same strategical business reasons.
Edited 2016-07-21 10:38 UTC
Opera Mini is still going strong and available on platforms like Android. I’m glad it is. A little while ago Firefox became completely unstable and would crash any time I tried to open a page on my Android device. (This seems to happen to me about with about every third version of Firefox.) Opera Mini is faster than Firefox and rock solid stable on the same device. So that’s what I use the one-third of the time Firefox fails to work properly.
Mini… isn’t that the one that renders all pages server-side thus giving Opera information about every little thing you do?
When Opera decided to drop support for Solaris in 2010, I had to dig deeper into how it worked to get later flash plugins working. I didn’t like how it reported *something* back to Opera every time it started but I could not trace what that data was. Due to that, I made sure not to use the additional applications they bundled at the time (mail, news, torrent)
Ever since that time, I have blackholed Opera owned services since I still liked the browser and they were ,no-doubt, learning that users’ data can be financially important to a company that gives things away for free.
Using unbound as a resolver I set the following config so that my systems are not even able to query opera owned domains networks.
I’ll leave the config here for any interested. Note, I have not queried the addresses I added in 2010/2011 since that time. All ranges were queried with Opera as the owner at the timestamps:
# Opera
do-not-query-address: 213.236.208.0/24
do-not-query-address: 195.189.143.0/24
do-not-query-address: 64.255.180.0/24
do-not-query-address: 88.131.66.0/24
# Opera 10/30/2011
do-not-query-address: 82.145.208.0/20
do-not-query-address: 141.0.8.0/21
# Opera 5/17/2013
do-not-query-address: 195.189.142.0/23
do-not-query-address: 37.228.104.0/21
do-not-query-address: 82.145.208.0/21
# Opera 11/13/2014
do-not-query-address: 185.26.180.0/22
# Opera 7/21/2016
do-not-query-address: 107.167.96.0/19
Edit:
BTW, I was also a long-term user, having versions back to Windows 95 right along with Internet Mail and News since it was a very low memory (8MB) Winbook XP.
Edited 2016-07-21 16:33 UTC