[wantreprenr007]

I always wondered why, for the longest time, they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea when they didn't have any compelling durable advantages and had distinct disadvantages like not being able to set alt search engines as default until recently and it's basically Chromium with "richness" tweaks and branding.

Their investors were lucky to get an exit.

The well-upholstered lady sung the swan song, I'm afraid... I hope those guys refocus on something that does change the world for the better rather duplicate what others are already did.

[vetler]

> I always wondered why, for the longest time, they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea

Because Jon von Tetzschner was and is passionate about building a good browser, and didn't really care that the odds were (are?) against him.

But when Opera is brought up, the focus is always on the Desktop browser. However, the money was always in devices - Opera has traditionally been really big on a plethora of devices.

Also, Opera both on desktop and mobile, has long been big in markets other than the US, especially eastern Europe.

[umeshunni]

>> they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea

The reality is that they pre-date Chrome and Firefox, but never gained much traction.

[wantreprenr007]

NCSA was before them, and Netscape (and later Mozilla after server business didnt materialize) basically clean-room copied NCSA from scratch. Pioneers in new directions can define space but still get slaughtered because the next entrant (Chrome) doesn't have product inertia and has/should learned lessons of what didn't work.

Some of it maybe popularity/marketing of not having a huge org behind them, but odd rough-edges did more to sabotage stickiness. Plus, competing with deep pockets giving away something for free is an unnecessary competitive war of attrition, especially by not differentiating: most secure browser or best browser for X/Y/Z.

[Aeolos]

TBH, Opera was a much better browser than either Firefox or Chrome until version 11 or so.

Unfortunately, technical prowess is not enough to gain traction. Being closed-source and costing money (until version 8) was a much bigger factor for their failure.

Still, back then there was simply nothing that was as fast or usable as Opera. Rest in Peace.

[bananaoomarang]

I do wonder what would have happened if they'd open sourced it. The browser landscape might be quite different.