Google to Buy Opera?

patro writes "Opera Watch writes Google is planning to buy the Opera browser. The source of the claim is Pierre Chappaz, the former president of Yahoo Europe. Google obviously can't buy Firefox, so Opera might be the next possible candidate." I can't begin to imagine why.

gbrowser.com

[abscondment]

A little WHOIS action:

WHOIS Record For
gbrowser.com


[snip]

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1278108)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US


Domain Name: gbrowser.com


Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com/ [markmonitor.com]

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
[e-mail] +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
[e-mail] +1.6502530000 Fax- +1.6506188571

Created on..............: 2004-Apr-26.
Expires on..............: 2006-Apr-26.
Record last updated on..: 2005-Nov-09 15:09:25.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.ALLDOMAINS.COM
NS2.ALLDOMAINS.COM

Sure, this is old news... but is it coming to fruition?

Why?

[nukem996]

Why would Google buy Opera? I understand they wont to compete with M$ but why not just contribute to Firefox? I know recently google just hired the lead GAIM developer to help with google talk, why wouldn't google do something similar and help firefox grow? Infact if you goto google they are pumping out many extensions [google.com] for firefox, I havnt seen anything for Opera. It seem that google is trying to help firefox.

Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?

[dada21]

Really? Google SMS has won me contracts in meetings where I discretely sent an SMS to 46645 for information I needed and had it back instantly. Google Earth helps track down where flights are for business people I'm picking up at the airport to wine and dine or work out problems with -- savings me hours over what the airlines report so I'm not stuck waiting. Google Maps integrates with my GPS and is way more accurate than any other online software I've ever used, and my PDA didn't have enough memory to store every map I needed.

Google's toys are quickly becoming the power-CEO's tools to distinguishing themselves from the CEO that has the cute little administrative assistant doing all their research work and getting back to them in an hour or two. I use Google to acquire the knowledge I need, instantly, which makes me much more worthwhile to my customers.

Google's ability to aggregate terabytes of information and prioritize them for what I need is amazing. They're seriously only limited by the interface, and I believe we'll see even more useful applications when Google has a standard interface they can program for.

Browsers for cell phones?

[Lanboy]

Opera's most unique product currently is thier small device browsers, currently the best browser available for palm and symbian.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Metasquares]

They recently removed the ads. Opera's not bad, but I prefer Firefox myself. I usually design sites with Opera in mind, though.

I know you're joking, but...

[IANAAC]

You realize that WebTV was not originally a Microsoft product, don't you?

It was something they purchased.

gbrowser.com

[sonixtwo]

It looks like gbrowser.com is registered to google, although with a different street address in Mountain View, CA as google.com.

Re:This is stupid.

[krgallagher]

" Absurd rumor mongering at its best/worst."

Yeah this is from a blog, and even the blog says 'An Opera official outright denied this claim, after I asked about it, saying "Rumors come and go. Google is not buying Opera."'

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?

[stealthzap]

Umm you're almost exactly wrong on that. I for one make good use of google maps on my travel site http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/ [californiasunhotels.com] . I use it to show the location of a hotel overlaid on street maps so my customers are able to easily see the hotel's location in relation to nearby landmarks and features.

For instance, here
http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/681_ho tel-location-info_h4404.html [californiasunhotels.com]
you can see just how close the Mammoth Mountain Inn is to Mammoth Mountain, and the ski lifts. This is something my customers use *every day* . Google's "toy technology" is helping my customers make more informed decisions on where they want to stay, and i say Thanks Google for providing this cool "toy" that helps me help my customers.

Re:I can think of several reasons

[rbarreira]

1. You can't know it's code.

It most surely IS code...

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Shiptar]

Firefox is bloated and slow. Opera has always been faster and easier to use. It's a pain in the ass to get Firefox to tab. Opera does it naturally. Maybe I got a bad version of Firefox, but it seemed like I had to configure all sorts of stuff for it to do what I wanted. Opera works right off the bat. To each their own.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Lisandro]

It needs to get used to it in the sense that the best UI features are not inmediatly apparent, like the excellent keyboard browsing or the mouse gestures. When you get used to them, they become so natural using anything else becomes annoying.

    Other than that, it's perfectly useable right out the box, and in fact not very different from other browsers. But the devil is in the details.

Re:This is stupid. Maybe not

[JazzCrazed]

Still early in development, and I don't know how excited big phone companies would be to use OSS (especially if using an Microsoft OS), but Mozilla has Minimo [mozilla.org] coming down the pipe. The existing preview builds already work in many Windows Mobile devices.

Sadly, my PDA isn't one of them [mozillazine.org].

CSS 2.1 support

[benj_e]

My wife needed CSS 2.1 support for pagination of printed web pages. Opera is the only browser (at least on OS X) that supports the pagination features of CSS 2.1.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Bogtha]

The whole forced banner ads thing kind of drove me away from it (not that I ever used it, but it kept me from ever using it again even).

Um, what forced banner ads thing? You always had the option of paying for Opera, people who actually bought it didn't have to see the ads. And even the ads for the free version have gone now. So... what's the grudge for? Do you hold a grudge against all non-free software? Or just the ones that also offer an ad-supported version?

Opera may be a fine browser, but we already have a really good (and open) thing going on with Firefox.

There are only two real advantages I see that Firefox has. The first is its extension mechanism. The second is that it's open-source, and that one wouldn't really matter to Google if they were planning on buying Opera, since they could always open-source Opera once they've bought it.

In all other respects, I think Firefox is trailing Opera. Opera got all of these first, and in many cases, Firefox either doesn't do as good a job, or hasn't implemented it at all:

• Tabs
• Popup blocker
• CSS (including lots of CSS 3)
• UserJS
• Aural CSS
• XHTML+Voice
• xml:id
• Web Forms 2
• SVG
• XML Events
• VoiceXML
• Cross-document messaging
• Handheld/phone support
• A decent amount of DOM3 stuff
• On-the-fly Javascript fixes for badly-constructed websites
• Much better Acid2 rendering

Not only that, but I just checked and an Opera download is ~4.1MB and a Firefox download is ~8.1MB.

So the advantage of going for Opera over Firefox is that it's much more technologically advanced. The Firefox advantage is sociological in nature, and Google certainly don't need any help in that department.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[speculatrix]

are still missing StrongArm/Linux

so you're saying that when I run Opera on my Zaurus 6000 or 860 that I'm deluding myself?

compared to netfront on the Zaurus, Opera is far more complete as a browser. For example, Getting Things Done Tiddly Wiki kills netfront, works (albeit slowly) on Opera.

Note that IBM had a hand in getting Opera on Arm/linux - google for "multimodal opera"

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[heinousjay]

OTOH, Windows explorer.exe is currently at 33 Meg!!! WHAT is it doing? It's just listing files!

And acting as your shell

WebCore vs. Opera on mobile phones? Heh.

[hkmwbz]

"There are beta versions of WebCore browsers for Series 60 'phones and the '770 floating around, and they stack up quite well against Opera"

Really? Have you actually tried to run this new browser on a normal mobile phone, and not a monster with 50-100 MB RAM, which is the only thing they've been running it on so far?

Opera runs comfortably on extremely low-end phones. WebCore does not.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[tommertron]

Once you get used to it, you just can't go back.

I almost got used to Opera a few months ago, then I realized it didn't have extensions. Which means no adblock. Whoops. So it was back to Firefox for me.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Kamots]

Goto Tools - Apperance, and select the Windows Native skin. Evidently people like us that don't like that cutesy skinned look are in the minority. *sigh*

At least we've got a choice.

You might give Opera a try, I tried FireFox when it came out (and again every few releases) and I keep finding it slower and the UI not near as polished.

The only thing that FireFox has that I miss is the easy extensibility, but meh, I haven't seen any functionality added through that that makes me think that I'm missing out.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[oddfox]

The first result for Googling 'adblock opera' brings up this page [nontroppo.org] with a list of possibilities for adblock-like functionality within Opera. I've used the C++ Adblock for a long time with Opera and it does great.

As far as I know, Opera has extension-like functionality, you aren't stuck with the base browser if you don't want just the base browser. Don't see what much else you'd need other than Adblock, but lots of people swear by those Greasemonkey extensions, dunno if that's in Operaland yet.

Moral of the story (and many others): Google it, damnit.

Re:This is stupid. Maybe not

[kmartshopper]

Okay, cellphones.

So why not use minimo [mozilla.org]?

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[NetRAVEN5000]

"It's not what's cheaper, it's what can they get on more hardware. Opera not only supports the usual OS's (Windows, OSx, Solaris, Linux, and on and on) they are also a big player in the mobile market. This would get google a jump into the mobile market that MS and Yahoo can't touch at the moment, not to mention massive support across current PC platforms."

Right now the number of people who browse the Web from a PC greatly outweighs the number of people who do so from a phone/PDA. On PCs, Firefox has more users than Opera, and Firefox has a lot more "word-of-mouth" - this time last year almost no one at my school had even heard of Firefox, this year Firefox is on every computer on the school; how many non-geeks have heard of Opera? Right now among non-geeks Firefox is the hero to come along and smite the big blue "E" that has caused them so much trouble, and Google supporting Firefox gets them extra "cool-points" from both geeks who know about all of IE's problems and non-geeks who just know that Firefox is more secure and faster.

Also, MS can and has touched the mobile market with Windows CE or whatever their handheld version is called. I don't own one of these devices, but I'm sure they have IE.

And much of the handheld market seems to be leaning toward Linux - not only do we have cellphones and PDAs running Linux, but we also have things like the Nokia 770 [nokia770.com] - as well as multitudes of hackers hacking network-enabled things like the PSP and the Xbox. Anything that can run Linux can run Firefox, and since Firefox is fairly common on PCs (at least compared to Opera) people will be more familiar with it and more likely to be comfortable with using it on both their Win/Linux/Mac PC and their PDA or hacked Xbox or whatever.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Kelson]

Additionally, I don't think you can get Opera in "just the browser" flavor. Last time I checked, it forced you to download this really crappy email client of theirs and address book and other things.

It's small enough that the non-browser features don't add much to the app size, and current versions are willing to keep everything you don't use hidden and out of the way. When I use Opera it's "just the browser" and has no problem talking to Thunderbird or KMail for email.

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[Bogtha]

lots of people swear by those Greasemonkey extensions, dunno if that's in Operaland yet.

Opera had it first. Opera calls it UserJS [opera.com] and they even added Greasemonkey compatibility after it became popular.

appears to be a false alarm

[bismark.a]

http://thegooglist.blogspot.com/2005/12/opera-cfo- denies-google-acquisition.html [blogspot.com]
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=ht tp%3A%2F%2Fchappaz.blogspot.com%2F2005%2F12%2Frume ur-google-achterait-opera.html&btnG=Search+Blogs [google.com]

Re:Lets hope they open source it

[skiddie]

This demonstrates the upside and downside of extensions-- each response telling how easy it is to open tabs in Firefox has given a different answer ('huh? all you have to do is ...x...'). For me (presumably a function of what mouse gestures extension I use-- All-In-One Gestures-- and the way I've got it set) all I need to do is middle click on a link. That's all I need to do in Opera as well.

I think that functionality wise the two are pretty much equal-- I use opera at work where I share a computer and I don't want to spend much time customising it, but at home I use Firefox because I wouldn't be without all of my extensions (most notably, adblock and the adblock filterlist, and some google-related extensions).