Comments on: Why would anyone want to buy Opera?

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 14:48:35 +0000

Just to confirm Joe Clark in saying that building the sort of tabbed browsing control (much more flexible than FF 1.0; 1.5 is closer) available in Opera, or especially its mobile browsing work is no simple task. No need to degrade it.

By: Mathew

Mathew — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 19:51:10 +0000

I didn’t mean to toss my presumptions — someone might get hurt :-)

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 18:21:18 +0000

Mobile browsing *is* difficult to do well because of the requirements to handle tag-soup “HTML” (including nested tables) standards-compliant (X)HTML, JavaScript and Java applets, images, multimedia, and conflicting CSS (including the handheld media type). If it actually weren’t rocket science, IE for Pocket PC wouldn’t stink. It is actually a seriously vexing problem, at least among those who know something about it as opposed to those who merely toss presumptions around.

By: Mathew

Mathew — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:46:19 +0000

Nice try, Chris — but it still doesn’t work for me. I’m not sure Opera’s developers are any better than anyone else’s — several versions of their browser have seemed buggy and somewhat slow to me, although I’m not a programmer, just a user. As for the mobile browser, that part can hardly be rocket science. In any case, why not just license it, and plaster Microsoft links and search and so on everywere? If Opera is willing to be commercial, they would jump at the chance.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:32:43 +0000

Fast Development
Mobile Browser
They’re willing to be commercial unlike Mozilla