Browser company stays relevant through innovation
Each month when the media report on browser market share numbers from Net Applications, Opera Software doesn’t make the cut. We usually focus on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. But you don’t have to slide your finger too much further down the list before you find Opera (for desktops) and Opera Mini (for mobile). For September, they held places five and six right after Apple’s Safari.
“We are the oldest browser company in the world,” said Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera Software, during an interview at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2010 event that is wrapping up today in San Francisco. And by older, von Tetzchner means the oldest surviving browser, having outlived Mosaic and Netscape.
Today, Opera and Opera Mini have 130 million active users globally and while that may be tiny compared to IE and Firefox, it is nothing to dismiss. The Norwegian company is profitable, the user base is growing and the customers are loyal. “Our users have tried every browser, they have made the comparisons and they land on us,” von Tetzchner said.
Of Opera’s 130 million users, 66.5 million are on Opera Mini, which is downloadable on mobile devices and also comes preinstalled on many of them, often at the direction of service providers. He described Net Applications’ numbers as “U.S.-centric,” but couldn’t cite what he considered a more reliable source of global numbers.
Net Applications says its share numbers are global and are based on which browser people are using when they visit over 40,000 websites around the world, according to Vince Vizzaccaro, an executive vice president at the research firm. “We employ country level weighting to remove any bias by country,” he stated in an e-mail.
Nonetheless, even Net Applications shows the September 2010 share for Opera (2.39 percent desktop, and 0.97 percent for Mini or 3.36 combined) are stronger than the combined 1.90 percent share from December 2007, the earliest available. So, nearly doubling market share in less than three years is also nothing to dismiss.
Von Tetzchner says Opera stays relevant by continuing to innovate, often ahead of its competitors. Opera implemented the zoom function on web pages in 1996, he said, after which a Microsoft employee approached him and said they planned to copy it. Microsoft finally implemented zoom in IE 8, he noted.
While browser watchers are currently focused on the IE 9 beta release and coming new versions of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome — and their focus on how fast their Web pages open — von Tetzchner said, “We’ve always had speed.”
And besides, Opera is focused on the next big thing. Cloud computing, for instance, is so 2010.
Opera sees the future of browsing in its Opera Unite, which has been in beta release for a year. Von Tetzchner described Opera Unite as “peer-to-peer browsing” from which the user can view content from several devices — desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and set-top boxes and TVs — but also share it.
“Do you want everything to connect to the cloud or is that inefficient or [not] secure, or would you rather have your devices connect more directly?” he asked. “If you have photos, would you rather upload them to a third party site or would you rather have people access it from a server that you [control]?”
Understanding that creating a server is no easy task for the average person, Opera Unite creates a “server component” within the browser for creating or downloading applications for peer-to-peer sharing, von Tetzchner explained. Apps can include photo sharing, file sharing, music streaming, or a message posting feature called “The Fridge,” as in leaving notes on a refrigerator door.
The way a company succeeds when it is not the biggest, he explained, “is by focusing on the end user.” That’s not a novel concept, but it’s one that keeps Opera going.
