True Confessions of an Opera Lover

I was testing this website I was building on all the different browsers: Firefox -- my then favorite -- Safari and Internet Explorer. So it was finally apparent that downloading and installing the well-reputed Opera browser would provide the useful information that my callow XHTML was, in fact, strict enough in the result.

DOWNLOAD Opera

I had been hearing whispers, mostly from Europeans of known wisdom and circumspection, that Opera was a good browser. In some cases the notion of very good came across but without hype and with a low-key credible sincerity. I was faintly aware that the company, Opera Software, had taken the plunge sometime in 2005 to make their browser free by download, having charged money before, and that some of the software's ardent supporters had paid money for something that was free in other forms. And you'll excuse me for not paying complete attention: it was to conserve bandwidth for the exciting developments of Firefox's market-cannibalizing run (which continues: 170 millionth download approaching soon).

I was quite aware, however, that the company responsible for Opera hails from Scandinavia, is Norwegian in actual fact. This is no surprise given that great things come from there and that they punch well above their weight in computing, those Northern People: the PC-per-Capita rates there are gynormous, in league with those of the most-productive nations (...hmmm...or are they most productive because they use PCs? Or is it other factors?)

Examples of Scandinavian brilliance are fairly easy to cite. For example, Nokia (a great company and equally great brand) is Finnish; Linus Torvalds, the originator & lead developer of Linux, is Finnish; Laika and the Cosmonauts are from Helsinki; SAAB and Volvo are (were once) Swedish; MySQL has leaders from all over the place up there; Carlsberg is Danish; the Laudrup Brothers are Danish and the Western standard of feminine beauty is located somewhere between Stockholm, Copenhagen & Oslo.

The point is that when I first encountered Opera, I had already established that Scandinavians -- although they would argue they are not equal -- have a clue, a leg up; that they possess an advantage. Just what advantage they have -- the Norwegians, in this case -- is apparent to the multi-platform technology consumer (a concurrent user & administrator like myself of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) within 15 minutes of playing around and acclimatizing to the Opera browser.

Mail-Merge

One first impression (that of an American, mind) is that Opera re-integrates email and browsing. This seems weird until you recognize that they belong together. Always have.

We cheered the Mozilla Project when they separated the Netscape email/addressbook modules out from the browser module. This made sense mostly because the thing was a lump of code, pretty inert. We cheered because the result was a faster browser: faster to load on your OS and a faster page-renderer. With this experience in mind, it is easy to make the mistake that emailing and browsing belong apart. However, Netscape had chosen earlier to put them together. There was a natural design instinct to include the two killer apps in the same package. Opera demonstrates it is a good instinct.

The Opera interface at first blush seems cluttered by comparison to the more minimal, perhaps more elegant, scene of Firefox running with your favorite theme. Opera moves some of the indicators (page-load) that are down low on Firefox up into the address- and tool bar. (There are valid design reasons evident here that we'll discuss later.) And email and bookmark links can take up a lot of space on the left side when those sections are open (these can be smoothly invoked or disappeared with a flick of the F4 function key). There is also a surprising but convenient drop-down which appears everytime you click once on the address field, offering an icon to go to either Home (your first page preference setting), your Top 10, your Bookmarks, or a few other pre-set destinations. And there's a spacial navigation feature using Shift + Arrow Keys to move sequentially through all the links on a page. Furthermore, and perhaps definitively, the Opera experience is about nothing if not extreme tabbed browsing. In fact, Opera Software invented tabbed browsing -- and quietly stands bemused while Firefox takes the credit and IE7 will copy it again.

In sum, while there are serious differences to get used to, there is nothing about Opera -- or The Opera Experience -- that doesn't make design sense (a double-negative, but there you go) or have some basis in functional relevancy to the other, smaller forms of Opera. And almost everything about Opera makes browsing more productive.

Opera is Not a Browser...

...it's a Platform.

I like to cut to the chase; even if that kills the plot, I don't care. You see, the Opera browser for the laptop and the fat machine cannot be understood as something separate from Opera Mobile or from Opera Mini, which provide little windows to the great Internet on various form-factors of phones du cellular. (Opera looks, feels & performs identically on Mac OS X, on the Windows PC and on the Linux Desktop, too.) The diffent ports & versions of Opera, they are of a piece and that's as it should be. Completely brilliant! A concept so simple (the execution is hard), no one thought of it.

Comparisons Fail

Opera is most often compared to Firefox. Firefox, the browser, is our frame of reference; it is our way in to the conversation about sticking it to The Man. Firefox is the rebirth of Netscape (whose air supply Microsoft once removed) and we're all pulling for Firefox. Firefox is the Internet Explorer-killer. Firefox, at 200 million...300 million downloads in a short while, is sweet vengance...against bad hair, bad manners and bad taste, bad digital changing pictures on the wall of your living room, puffed up salesman-like American CEOs & Aspergers. This is what's on the collective mind, our elephant on the table. We in the alternative software field can hardly escape from this weird leitmotif as from some of our most familiar nightmares.

So it is easy to see why Opera gets the "browser" tag: Firefox does tabs, Opera does tabs; Firefox has extensions, Opera has extensions; Firefox renders pages (fast), Opera renders pages (faster). See? And they both have layers.

Opera could be the new Firefox. Well, that may even be true. But you know about David Bowie's secret to success: 'I like to be the second one to a new sound.'

Pull back the lens here. The PC is cool. It's okay. There's something like half a billion of them and with olpc there may be several billion out there on the velt and in The Bronx within 10 years. But there's over half a billion cell phones today and the industry hasn't even reached adolescence yet. If large numbers of people are going to be accessing the Internet -- you need to talk to Japanese kids about this, or use a Palm Treo (which I just bought for my wife...the 650, not the yucky Windows version...amazing!) -- then it's going to be through the cellie. PC too, but mostly cellie...quite a few different sizes and shapes of cellie.

If you look at what Opera Software -- the Norwegians -- are focusing on, it's the levers & knobs of a single Internet experience across all relevant platforms. The Opera Experience. From this perspective, and considering that the operating system as we knew it can fade sharp-ish to a transparent dial-tone (Linux will soon be a quick-boot like a cell phone), Opera more resembles Windows than Firefox.

Opera is the platform.

There's another difference between Firefox and Opera that's germain. Firefox is the opposition, it's self-definition is a contrary...contrary to an old, obsolete thing. Firefox is governed and run by a foundation, a not-for-profit. Opera is run and has grown under tough commercial imperatives. Lacking the drive for filthy lucre, and with an inescapable past/identity tied up in historic platform wars, Firefox has no mobile strategy and so is destined for semi-relevance in a world of connected devices cluttering our purses -- which may be to say 'irrelevance'.

Focus, Humility, Self-Effacement, a Quirky Sense of Humour & Focus

Did I say 'Focus'?

And they listen, those Norwegians. Part of being successful in business, as in personal relationships, is the ability to listen (personally, I'm only just learning this myself ;-). This means co-equally an ability to take in new information and to learn. The Opera Software people in Norway are evidently good at this. A few years ago, Opera was hardly visible and its brand was ragged and just forming. The software is not open source, but managers have brought on the most effective techniques in community management. They have also iterated their go-to-market, in one case by making the browser free for the PC (it can't have been an easy decision). Above all, there seems to be a comfortable meeting of being human with technological awareness which has made it possible for Opera Software to pursue the difficult objective of bringing the Opera Experience across vastly different platforms -- at a time when the benefits of doing this are non-obvious.

Being successful in business is about deciding who you are, what you are doing (as well as what you are NOT doing) and then being yourself while you line up your resources to achieve the agreed goals. I think we can learn from the Nowegians about this one. Opera Software may be the best case study in commercial open source business practises (doing well while doing good) that we have.

My Front Pages

While they render okay in Firefox, my web pages break when viewed in IE, Safari and Opera. Except for IE, it's not necessarily the browsers' fault. My XHTML skills are just so lame that I have no idea what's wrong with my CSS file when I can't see my footer. (Maybe Patryk will take some old motherboards in exchange for a good long tutorial?)

But there's something I can see in Opera. It's the heart of a few Norwegians and the soul of all the new machines.

Comments

[chaals]

Hey, nice comments - thanks.

Actually we're not all norwegians (I'm Australian, and I think we'll hit 35 nationalities in a little while) and we're no lnger all in Norway - lots of people in Asia (where mobiles are big) and a handful already based around the US.

But I like to think that you are right about us trying to apply the principles of open source development. There are a surprising number of people who are big supporters of open source working at Opera, and I hope we are reasonably wll known for our support for open formats...

I hope we keep helping you to get work done efficiently, so you get more time to write nice stuff :)

[Bruce Morgan]

A thorough and well written overview & commentary.

However, I wanted to point out one factual error.

The first browser to implement what we would recognize as tabbed browsing was Netcaptor, not Opera. Opera's multiple window approach was based on MDI and didn't originally use a "row of tabs" to as the UI to navigate from subwindow to subwindow. This is similar to "tabbed browsing", but not the same.

[Duckworth Lewis]

Nice article. The best features of Opera are not even visible in the first few weeks of use. Now that I consider myself a well educated Opera user, I can tell you the best feature in Opera has been part of it since long ago widgets and m2 etc came into being. The best feature is the ability to use the keyboard for everything. When using Opera I use mouse about 50% less. That means less muscle strain due to constantly moving my hand from mouse to keyboard and back. Most people are surprised when they see how fast I work with Opera. It almost looks magical to a lay man when I use even simple things like pressing Z & X keys to move through browsing history and 1 & 2 for traveling through tabs.