Opera Founder Jon S. von Tetzchner Resigns

fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch: "Opera founder Jon S. von Tetzchner has resigned from the company. In an email to Opera employees, von Tetzchner said that 'It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me.'"

Fastmail

[willoughby]

I don't use the Opera browser but I do have an account at Fastmail (an Opera company). I wonder if they'll be affected by this dustup.

Fork'd

[cratermoon]

Why doesn't von Tetzchner just fork the source and create a new project? Oh right, Opera is closed source. Pity.

Re:No surprises here

[im_thatoneguy]

Yes and No. I've beaten my head against developers who see their code as sacred and are unwilling to put it in the hands of users.

That obsession with perfection can often prevent "good enough" software from being put to good use "before it's ready". And then I often find that the developers are working in too much isolation and lose the incredibly valuable feedback from being used 'in the wild'.

Opera is going the wrong way

[Tridus]

I met Jon years ago, and found him to be a great guy. The company at the time was focused on making a good browser for power users, and they did that really well. It also helped that back then they were focused on performance and working on older systems.

At some point I noticed things changing years later. Opera got bigger, and slower. UI stuff that worked forever was broken in favor of a less flexible Firefox clone model. Attention was diverted to writing an email client. Then a BitTorrent client. Then a web server built into the browser. I only wish I was making that last one up [opera.com].

The company lost focus on what made Opera good in the first place as they went from trying to be a good, fast browser to trying to do everything for everybody. Finally I stopped using it when the drift got so bad that it wasn't really better then Firefox at anything.

This drift coincided with the company growing in size and it being less about how it started: Jon and a few other guys trying to make a good browser.

Re:Opera is going the wrong way

[afidel]

IMHO they make the best mobile browser out there, and since almost all the carriers are now going with draconian data plans it makes tons of sense to use their compression and resizing model. I was never a fan of their desktop browser, but I'm glad they were there as most of the other players stole some of their best ideas and incorporated them into browsers that fit my style better.