You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

1
0

[–] 1848177? 1 point 0 points (+1|-1) ago  (edited ago)

Why has Opera abandoned everything that made it unique, and settled for being Chromium?

Also, did Opera hire a lot of expats, and did they have trouble settling in Norway?

0
2

[–] Gordam [S] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

I don't have any privileged information on this bit, so I'm both free to say what I know here, but also don't take this as gospel (add to that I haven't been there for quite some time)

This was a decision made by the new management after Jon S. von Tetzchner left (he didn't leave by his own choice, by the way. It was a decision made by the board). Lars Boilesen is the new CEO and while he's a nice guy, he has a very different perspective on the business plan than Tetzchner. Opera is getting much more involved with advertising for one. They're using the knowhow of the browser and surrounding technology to support that business, for instance the compression that happens on mobile devices when you use Turbo, use some parts of the engine to read the full webpage and strip away a lot of clutter (that would be wasted bandwith). Opera also sell services to carriers, and I'm pretty sure I can't say which, but I have written code to read and summarize logs for Turbos performance for a large US carrier.

0
1

[–] Gordam [S] 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Also, did Opera hire a lot of expats, and did they have trouble settling in Norway?

This was a while ago, but I have no indication it has changed. About 50% of the employees at the Oslo office was non-norwegian. Some had problems getting settled, but mostly it went fine because after the first initial bad experiences that happened, Anne Christiansen which was responsible for bettering the well being of the employees (Culture manager, I think her title was?), made sure that people knew which differences you would meet. For instance, if you came from India that you were prepared of just how cold it could get, and made lists of big and small things, such as making sure you had a warm jacket with you for when you landed at the airport (Gardermoen).

She's now working at Jon's new business Vivaldi, a browser to capture the spirit of the old Opera. They're located in the US now, in a large house (or mansion perhaps?), decorated much like a normal house.