ZDNet Interview with Opera Softwares CEO

David Berlind, Editor of ZDNet discusses the potential stance of Opera in the near future on ZDNet's Between the Lines Blog with Jon S. von Tetzchner, Opera Software's CEO. With Firefox gaining a lot of publicity as of late with all the promo's by the firefox community, the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 has tabbed browsing confirmed along with tighter security, for Opera the question would be how well will it be able to cling on? Opera software's CEO seems pretty confident.

Against the backdrop of the way the browser playing field is changing and in the context of Opera’s business model, can the small, Oslo, Norway-based company survive the might of Microsoft and the juggernaut of the open source-based Mozilla Foundation?

According to Opera Software CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner, that question has been asked over 100,000 times in the last 10 years and the answer is the same as it was ten years ago: "Yes." Not only is the company riding a wave of popularity on mobile devices, particularly in areas outside the US like Japan, the company is about to release version 8 of it’s browser; a version that von Tetzchner says will not only titillate Opera’s cult-like following, but that will raise the bar to Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple’s Safari in terms of what it means to be the best browser.

The transcript is available in MP3 audio format from the ZDNet Blog. Opera's CEO discusses How Opera plans to head on into the future, it's active involvement with the W3C and the future web development, whether or not Opera should open source it's technology and more.

Opera 8 will come with a lot of new features such as support for ATOM RSS feeds, native support of SVG graphics and User Javascript. No release date has been confirmed so far, but according to Opera's website, version 8 is "launching soon".

View: Between the Lines, ZDNet