[hiena03]

It's a shame Opera didn't go to the open source route. Opera with Presto was a great browser.

[Eisenstein]

It was tragic when they they switched from the Presto engine. I was an Opera user from the exact day they stopped charging for it, but they slowly stopped innovating in ways I found useful and when they ditched their engine I ditched them, reluctantly.

[ivlad]

It’s very hard to make money from, you know, a freeware browser without earning them somewhere else, i.e., in targeted advertising.

[hakfoo]

Their big business idea was embedding and customization; the Wii's browser was an Opera derivative, for example.

I suspect they were an inadvertent victim of the smartphone/cheap data revolution. Products like Opera Mini (was that the one that did a lot of the lifting server side) were rapidly obsolesced when we moved from spotty data and Blackberry scroll-wheels to touchscreens and 3G/4G

[Eisenstein]

I agree, it was a terrible business plan. I loved the browser though.