Opera boss swings at FireFox's Sugar Daddies


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By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Published Thursday 23rd June 2005 08:25 GMT

You make the world's best browser. It's smaller and faster than Internet Explorer, and a lot more secure, and every year you think up new ideas that make browsing easier. Then a rival appears that steals your ideas and yet only manages to produce a slower, clunkier and feature limited version of your browser - and the press reacts as if it's just discovered the internet for the first time. What do you do?

So far, Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner has been pretty circumspect about FireFox - and he's always said respectful things* about Mozilla browsers to us. But he did take a swideswipe at the open source project in an interview with CNET this week.

"A lot of people don't like our ads, which is sad as we don't have a rich sugar daddy like the Mozilla Foundation. They [the Mozilla Firefox team] don't have to think about money as they're being funded. We're not being funded," he said.

A fair comment, or not?

Well, the Mozilla Foundation was founded with a $2 million donation from AOL, when the latter washed its hands of the albatross in 2003. AOL had inherited the world's most popular web browser, but thanks to the spectacular self-indulgence of the Mozilla programmers, had nothing to show for it five years later. FireFox has gone some way to redressing this reputation for buggy bloatware, but the fact remains that Microsoft's dominance is not due to nefarious channel tactics, which it had been obliged to give up when the Antitrust trial started, but to Mozilla's failure to give the public a halfway decent browser for several years. Mozilla had it, but threw it away.

But looking at the staffing levels of the Mozilla Foundation, and its marketing spend, tells a different story. With only around 20 employees, it certainly isn't SMERSH.

So we're not sure how wise this is aside from von Tetzchner is. Opera's insane focus on usability and performance certainly comes from knowing that a paying user base pays its rent. Stop satisfying the users, and Opera is no more. And side by side comparisons of Opera and FireFox invariably show the former standing proud: its blazing rendering speed and caching leave FireFox standing. FireFox's greatest strength is its extensibly, but that's also it greatest weakness: if you need to add anything more than the most rudimentary functionality to the browser it soon turns into a Heath Robinson hairball of conflicting add-ins. (And after all that, you still can't move the tabs around...) Opera is a public company that's expanding at a healthy clip, and it shouldn't need to worry.

For several years Opera was the subject of a muttering campaign in Silicon Valley from jealous developers who couldn't quite believe that something so wonderful could be so self-supporting. Opera, they said, must be receiving sponsorship: probably from the EU or the Norwegian government. These rumors were entirely unfounded: Opera has always had to make its way from honest revenue. People can, and do, pay for quality. ?

Bootnote[*] "You have to hand it to them they have made a browser that works. It's not as small as Opera, but these are not stupid guys. Mozilla is very powerful."

__________________

I have put it here since it involved both FF and Opera.

Source

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jelousy

"You make the world's best browser" 1) that's objective 2) Who won the best product of the year award form PC World?

"Then a rival appears that steals your ideas and yet only manages to produce a slower, clunkier and feature limited version of your browser" Both sides claim they had the features first... who to believe?

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but the fact remains that Microsoft's dominance is not due to nefarious channel tactics, which it had been obliged to give up when the Antitrust trial started, but to Mozilla's failure to give the public a halfway decent browser for several years. Mozilla had it, but threw it away.

Yes... Microsoft's decision to bundle Internet Explorer into every single copy of its OS sold, along with making it virtually impossible to remove from the OS, had NOTHING to do with its dominance.

Ignorant mudslinging.

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"You make the world's best browser" 1) that's objective 2) Who won the best product of the year award form PC World?

1) That's "subjective."

2) PCWorld is known to be bias. Pick up any PCWorld article about Firefox and I gaurantee you'll find plenty of errors that make Firefox look better than what it really is. The last time I read a Firefox article in a PCWorld magazine I found over 10 errors in it (that, somehow, always made Firefox look good.)

"Then a rival appears that steals your ideas and yet only manages to produce a slower, clunkier and feature limited version of your browser" Both sides claim they had the features first... who to believe?

Most of the "innovative" features that Firefox promotes were in Opera before the Mozilla Foundation even existed. Firefox is always "breaking new ground" and publishing articles like "Is Opera turning into Firefox" which are all bogus claims. Firefox is a good browser, but I really dislike the marketing-sludge and mud-slinging.

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But Opera didn't invent tabs nor mouse gestures. IIRC, i've first saw them first in sime DOS-prog.

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Opera doesn't use "tabs", per se, it's a multi-document interface. That is completely different from a tabbed interface.

Anyways, the point is that Opera doesn't parade around like it was an innovative feature. Mozilla does, though.

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Oh brother... here we go. Fanboys are going to come climbing out of their holes any second now...

so I'll say it cause no one else will.... GO MAXTHON!

this article is rediculous. It's an infant's way of talking about how jealous they are. I think it sucks, and I think that the browser people out there need to stop complaining about the competition and start working on their product to make it better. I didnt read that and go "oh, well, because Opera isnt free, it really must be better." no. I read it and went "what a friggen child. he's like 'im not getting as much money anymore... it must be because of all those free browsers out there!'"

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My what excellent journalism skills you have Mr.Fox...

:x

Hey everyone I can write an uninformed piece of journalism too.

Oh yeah extentions for firefox are so complicated. Well beyong the realm of anyone with an IQ lower than 600. Drag and drop so complicated.

This 'journalist' should be immediatly fired.

Either that or hire someone who knows what they are talking about to edit this malarky.

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Oh brother... here we go.  Fanboys are going to come climbing out of their holes any second now...

so I'll say it cause no one else will.... GO MAXTHON!

this article is rediculous.  It's an infant's way of talking about how jealous they are.  I think it sucks, and I think that the browser people out there need to stop complaining about the competition and start working on their product to make it better.  I didnt read that and go "oh, well, because Opera isnt free, it really must be better."  no.  I read it and went "what a friggen child.  he's like 'im not getting as much money anymore... it must be because of all those free browsers out there!'"

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I didn't read it either way that you read it, it didn't even come close to saying what you're claiming. Are you sure you actually read the article? :rolleyes:

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Opera doesn't use "tabs", per se, it's a multi-document interface. That is completely different from a tabbed interface.

Anyways, the point is that Opera doesn't parade around like it was an innovative feature. Mozilla does, though.

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Yeah. Claiming that they have the fastest browser on earth for years wasnt a parade :rolleyes:

Firefox its modular, they offer a good pletora of feautres for free. Hence the momentum.

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My what excellent journalism skills you have Mr.Fox...

:x

Hey everyone I can write an uninformed piece of journalism too.

Oh yeah extentions for firefox are so complicated. Well beyong the realm of anyone with an IQ lower than 600. Drag and drop so complicated.

This 'journalist' should be immediatly fired.

Either that or hire someone who knows what they are talking about to edit this malarky.

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The article doesn't say anything about extensions being complicated.

I do wish people would try reading, and comprehending, the articles they comment on...

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Opera doesn't use "tabs", per se, it's a multi-document interface. That is completely different from a tabbed interface.

Anyways, the point is that Opera doesn't parade around like it was an innovative feature. Mozilla does, though.

586108704[/snapback]

And furthermore they don't claim that they were the first browser to be tabbed, there was some browser that used it before Opera and if I don't remember wrong Haavard (one iof the Opera staff) even mention this in his journals or possibly in a Opera forum post.

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Yeah. Claiming that they have the fastest browser on earth for years wasnt a parade

Opera does have the fastest browser. Firefox is close but there are several things that it doesn't support that makes it slower like memory caching (they just recently copied this, expect to hear about how innovative it is when 1.1 is released), the default pipelining configuration sucks, and it lacks a lot of productivity features (paste & go, quadruple-clicking to select paragraphs, etc.) Under the same configuration, Opera would even make Lynx eat dust.

Trust me, if their claims were false (they're not) then you would see them swarming in lawsuits.

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Opera does have the fastest browser.

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Oh, really? Have you tired k-meleon? No, I guess not.

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stepping in with opera support here.

i for one, am tired of people going 'omg firefox', 'omg mozilla' like nothing else matters. it's almost as bad as the linux evangelism.

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Oh, really? Have you tired k-meleon? No, I guess not.

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How convenient that you can tell me what software I have used! :rofl:

I have used K-meleon, Firefox/Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Netscape, Deepnet, Konqueror, Opera on the desktop, Opera on the cellphone, etc. I have used practically every browser available on Windows and Linux. As a web designer, that is part of my job.

Is there any other peices of software you feel like saying I haven't used?

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How convenient that you can tell me what software I have used! :rofl:

I have used K-meleon, Firefox/Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Netscape, Deepnet, Konqueror, Opera on the desktop, Opera on the cellphone, etc. I have used practically every browser available on Windows and Linux. As a web designer, that is part of my job.

Is there any other peices of software you feel like saying I haven't used?

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No... now I am feeling the urge to give you a medal, or a cookie, your choice :rolleyes:

I wonder what kind of system you have that made k-meleon run slower than opera.

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Great. Here we go again.

Here's what arrogant fanboys (on both sides, mind you) should do. This procedure is simple.

- Take the mouse. Move it all the way up.

- Now move the mouse all the way to the right.

- CLICK!

Yeah, yeah, go admire that Product of the Year award as much as you like. It doesn't mean squat for the rest of us that aren't into this BS marketing hype behind Firefox.

Speaking about marketing, I pity those that paid to have their name printed in 10 molecule high font in a NY Times ad. Only because Mozilla (or whomever) can't afford to pay for such a HUGE ad by themselves they get people to contribute.

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,Jun 23 2005, 12:22]Oh, really? Have you tired k-meleon? No, I guess not.

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prolly not

and on my side and I'm not alone, Firefox well tweaked is very faster than opera

I'd jump in the opera boat if their cookies were handled well. Right now, this is a pain, a real pain.

They should keep exemple from ie and firefox on this to manage cookies

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