This is really too bad -- Norway has a severe lack of software product companies. Most graduates end up in one of the country's many consulting outfits, both due to the lack of positions in product companies and because those that do exist offer worse opportunities for career development than the consulting companies do.
Last year Schibsted hired ex-Googler Rian Liebenberg as CTO and started bringing in people from
Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Spotify and even Qt/Nokia. apparently there are opportunities for career development even in Norway. Watch this space.
Schibsted is huge and consists of a lot of companies running their own stack. I am not surprised to see some of that operated by IBM.
It is a good sign if it enables Schibsted to focus on becoming more like a Technology company. It is too early to tell of course.
Full disclosure: I am one of those ex-Googlers recently hired by Schibsted, and I am not working with IBM. I believe that what is happening is the most interesting thing happening in tech in Norway at the moment. Far better opportunity than the consulting companies Aqwis referred to.
I've always viewed Schibsted as a owner of media companies, VG, Blokket etc. Not a company that is producing software. That at least how I read your views. From the little I've viewed they don't do anything special on IT operations, quite boring. So it might make sense, and what I've heard is that the quality of the operations (at least in Norway) haven't been to good.
I recall reading an article where Opera was highlighted as a company relying hugely on outsourced developers, so perhaps this won't make a difference for Norwegian developers.
Opera bought a company that I felt was the most challenging and least rewarding (I left 3 weeks befor vesting despite employee number sub 20). Glad for those that stayed and what opera bought was a very focused version of what we started with.
Happens if you betray Power Users and move forward to an almost non customizable Chrome clone.
That should be a warning for Mozilla too, fool the users once and they fall for it, fool them twice and they fall again but try to fool them 1001 times and they give you the middle finger!
Opera went on an acquisition spree over the last few years to buy and stitch together what is now the largest independent mobile ad network. Pretty much went from nothing 2 years ago to the vast majority of their revenues this year.
Which is to say the Opera most people think about, the browser, isn't where the money is being made. In fact, Opera MediaWorks, their mobile ad network, isn't really connected to the browser in any way, and the business is structured as a nearly separate entity.
that was the shift they did when they gave up browsers (i.e. become chromium skin makers).
it was a crazy shift. they always made some money with ads. so they decided to cut the middle man, but they forgot a) they didn't have the eyeballs anymore, b) they know nothing about being a network. yeah they bought companies, but probably the clients didn't stick around otherwise people here would at least have heard they are a publisher now.
Opera is far from a "chromium skin maker". In addition to features like autosizing modes for mobile, Opera developers are heavily involved in specs as well as the entire Chromium stack:
They have an incredible team but their browser is a skin for chromium compared to what it was before they dropped their engine (shortly after the founder left due to a board "too quarterly oriented".
A couple years later the new opera is till far beyond what it was and it seems they're not even trying to fix this while vivaldi on the other hand is driven by a vision and has made much more progress in a more timely manner.
I've been using opera as my main browser since they removed ads in 2005, today I'm still using presto based opera with no plan to switch to the blink based version of opera because many of the features that made opera are missing and are not coming back which make the "chromium skin" designation a reality.
Version: Good
Ephemeral Key Support: Good
Session Ticket Support: Improvable
TLS Compression: Good
BEAST Vulnerability: Good
Insecure Cipher Suites: Good
Protocol Support: Your user agent has good protocol support.
Logjam Vulnerability (Experimental): Your user agent is not vulnerable.
FREAK Vulnerability: Your user agent is not vulnerable.
POODLE Vulnerability: Your user agent is not vulnerable.
Cipher Suites (in order of preference): TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 (0x6b) Forward Secrecy ←←←←← listed first, other ciphers elided
Protocol Details: Session tickets No ←←←←← feature is labelled in yellow, all other details are labelled in black or green, elided
If outdated TLS ever becomes a pressing concern, it's easy to put a proxy in front of the browser.
It's a little ironic for such news to end up here, because I'm pretty sure Opera (mobile) is the only one of the major browsers still supporting text reflow, which is why I use it for reading HN which doesn't have an official mobile site version.
every browser HAD text reflow at least around 2010~2012.
for whatever reason, they all removed it. Android stock had text reflow (and inverted color night reading). then on 2.3.3, gone. now they don't even have a stock browser. they ship with chrome, installed as a system app.
firefox started with awesome text reflow. then i think on fenec v16 they screwed up everything when moving to the Reader feature just to clone safari, safari for f* sake...
The nice Opera Mobile reflow works only on Android, maybe some other smaller systems. But not on iOS and Windows Mobile. Opera is the only mobile browser I can tolerate.
I think I should do a video capture how nicely pretty much any site works in this browser. Unless the text is burned into an image, you can pretty much read it all without horizontal scrolling.
This feature is badly needed in Mobile Safari, Firefox and Chrome.
I really hope Opera can continue to support this amazing browser.
I've used Opera since 2004 and the current Chromium based Opera is barely even a shadow of what it once was. It took them well over a year just to implement bookmark functionality, because they didn't feel it needed it and then realized it did.
Even the newer Vivaldi browser also based on Chromium (started by the former CEO of Opera) has more classic features (tab stacking, partial key rebinding, sidebar) than the official Opera and started far later after the Opera Chromium reboot.
Is the team incredible? Perhaps, but not in the way a long time Opera user would desire. I'd be happy if it had even half of the features of Opera 12, but as it is now, it's around 10-15%. Thankfully, Opera 12 (Presto) with some tweaking works pretty well still after being discontinued around 2 years ago.
before they were a browser maker. everyone knew them for that. the work from their team shone.
now they are skin makers. and a unknown ad network.
the work of both their awesome browser devs and ad servers are mostly unknown to anyone. it all goes to google fame in the end. or do you think people outside of this very small circle of browser developers read release notes and credits?! heck you had to link to a source tracker.
nobody knows what is the opera browser anymore, because, i was one of them, you use opera because of feature X and Y. then you install Opera 13 over opera 12, and... you have a trimmed down version of chrome! you don't have your loved feature X. Nor feature Y. and some features from chrome haven't even made it to opera 13! so you just go to chrome and forever give up feature X and Y (not sure why so many people do that), or you move forward to firefox and have incomplete versions of X and Y.
> Opera Mobile Store will replace Nokia Store as the default app store for Nokia feature phones, Symbian and Nokia X smartphones, following an agreement between Opera Software and Microsoft.
> The announcement follows a separate agreement, announced in August 2014, which will see Opera become the default browser on Nokia-branded phones, including Series 30+, Series 40, Asha and Nokia X handsets.
Just like all other browsers, they make money from Google and other search engines. Think of every time your browser redirects you to Google or Bing search ... They earn quite a lot from this.
I remember people told me Opera was dead years ago. Strange all the adjectives people use for companies pulling $600+mil/yr these days... ;)
Good to see one of my old favorites making it so well so long in a cut-throat business. Unsurprising that it might come to an end soon. I know they used to brag on their strong and interesting approach to diversity. Wonder how much that ended up helping them innovate into survival where others failed.
Their management decided they don't want to make browsers anymore, replaced the presto development team with a chromium modding team, and focussed on selling ads.
I agree that Opera the browser is not as competitive as they once were, but for the ads point you could say the same about Chrome since Google makes its money from advertising, not from the browser. I haven't seen any ads outside of the web content in Chrome or Opera (at least since version 8.5).
BOOM! Not dead yet! Bank on the Blink engine, too. Good to see the divergence continue and the power-user focus might make it fun to use as it evolves.
