Opera Running on the OLPC

An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"

I still want one

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. So when can we buy one?

When can we buy one at 3 times the target price to make a donation to poorer countries?

Will this only ever be vapourware over here?

Re:So?

[fireboy1919]

A good deed is its own reward - even for companies.

If you don't believe that, believe this - respect has monetary value. It affects who will buy, the price of stocks, the confidence of shareholders, and lots of other unmentioned things. By doing this, Opera buys themselves some respect for fairly cheap which they can cash in later at a premium.

Not enough revert from free to proprietary

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

I think I'd be happier running free software, and giving free software to developing nations. Let them tinker, let them become experts, let them become self sustaining rather than start them on a path to dependency.

Unless Opera open sources its browser...

[ezh]

Unles Opera open sources its browser, this news of little value. There is little chance closed source Opera will be installed on any standard OLPC distribution. The OLPC guys made such a huge issue out of close-source wireless Marvel chips, the only closed-source hardware component of the laptop that Marvel finally open source its drivers. So whoever thinks they would allow close-source browser on the 100$ laptops must be out of little mad...

Re:Not enough revert from free to proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, Gecko is far too big and bloated for the OLPC. It doesn't run good at all on the machine, from what I've heard (even requiring extra memory to be installed), and frankly, I don't think it has its place there. Opera might not be the best choice since it's proprietary (although it's the perfect fit for such a device given the available resources), but perhaps something based on KHTML could have found its way to the OLPC.

I think I'll post this anonymously... It's not good to bash Gecko on /. :(

Re:Unless Opera open sources its browser...

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay dude, first off... Opera didn't come with it preinstalled. Secondly... Who the hell are you to tell people what they can and can't put on their computer?

Re:Not enough revert from free to proprietary

[AVee]

I won't post anonymous, but state it here load and clear: Gecko is far too big and bloated. Period. Plus, Firefox 2 is to buggy to be taken seriously for any use at all and standards compliance seems to be defined as 'just be a bit better than IE'. Frankly, most recent Mozilla stuff sucks big time, like most other commercially sucessfull software. There it is. Now mod me down please.

Re:Just like IBM

[mmell]

just like IBM inviting MS to produce their OS

Uh, help me see it - so the guys at Opera are going to mass-produce a parallel product, OOLPC (One Opera Laptop Per Child), for which they will maintain identical standards to the competition's OLPC until their OOLPC machine becomes the standard, which they will then use to eliminate all competing laptop manufacturers? After that, I presume they will force all the OOLPC users to upgrade their hardware regularly, in accordance with some onerous and despicable "click-wrap" license?

Sorry, dude - I followed you right up to the point where you said "Just like IBM" - after that, you lost me!

Re:Unless Opera open sources its browser...

[ezh]

OLPC has its own browser that uses Gecko engine. Do you imply that Gecko engine does not work well?