Christen Krogh is responsible for all software development at Opera. Krogh received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Glasgow University and his Ph.D from the University of Oslo. On market share: “We have between 10 and 15 million users of the desktop browser, more than 10 million cumulative Opera Mini users, come pre-installed on more than 40 million mobile phones and are available to anyone using Nintendo Wii or Nintendo DS.”
…behind my everyday browser. I seem to have become an Opera user on Windows, Linux and BSD – I have just come to prefer it. Firefox’ habit of filling up my memory just got too much on a machine with only adequate memory, so that by the time I got round to work in the morning (chucking large graphics files around) my machine was as fast as swimming through glue.
Nice to see someone with a realistic view of security — his definitions were concise yet encompassing. If the rest of that company’s the same way, it sounds like you’d have a difficult but optimistic work environment to live in.
(Still not going to switch to it, for unrelated reasons, though…)
Whilst that may be true, Opera need to push forward with
a) providing automatica delta’d updates in the browser (like Firefox updates). A security update is no good if user either does not get around to download and re-installing the whole browser, or even knows how to.
b) Not encompassing security updates with feature updates that i.mask security issues from the users/public & ii.are provided with almost Apple-esque inadequate changelogs
Opera always alerts me when there is a new version available so i am quite happy about that.
With Firefox i seem to have to go and search for an update via the preferences to see if one is available – it never automatically alerts me an update is available.
It’s good to have more players in the browser market, or any market for that reason…alas, I see the market having less and less room for Opera, not for any technical reasons, though.
In a few years time the board of directors will be wishing they had sold the company to Microsoft or some other vendor that I’m sure was courting them at one time or another.
Yesterday i wanted to check the typical price for something on ebay on my phone and i realized the built-in browser BLOWS. It would just stop downloading after a certain page size, displays a message that the page is too big, then goes BACK to the last page you were on (doesn’t even show the partial page).
I’ve been happy with the quality of the Wii Opera browser and this article reminded me “Oh yeah, they make a call phone version.” Two minutes later I have a browser that actually works!
Opera’s model seems like a good one- create an agile codebase that can be ported to just about anything. That way device vendors don’t end up (poorly) reinventing the wheel, and it probably costs less to license Opera than to pay someone to develop a browser from scratch. I still use Firefox on an everyday basis just because it’s what I’m used to, but given how bloated it seems like it has become ever since sometime after version 1.0, I may be switching over to Opera.