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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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That's why you're shipping Chrome with a very attractive skin and set of add-ons, by modern measure (reminiscent of Britannica electronic versions from year 2001 or I don't know what), that's still not as functional, convenient and generally awesome as Opera 12.
I'm not qualified to give anyone business advice, especially JvT, just think that in web browser market the field is so dead (as in captured by oligopoly) that retrospectively they were more likely to succeed forking a subset of Web standards and explicitly positioning continuations of Opera as a client for that and not mainstream Web.
Or claiming compliance with W3C standards and rejecting WHATWG etc.
And, of course, making it a paid product again, perhaps with a free version with ads and part of features locked (as it were before they made the browser free but with Google search and Google payments from that, what could go wrong ; I suspect those people were still psychologically a Norwegian state telecom company project and wanted some "public" sort of funding with product free to use, and remember how Google was positioning itself almost like a non-commercial entity). Compared to the amount of ads on webpages, this is nothing, and back then people were still a bit more computer literate in general and that they'd understand.
That's not a heavier task than competing with Chrome/Safari/etc was as Opera Software, and perhaps that's not even a heavier task that Vivaldi is doing.
I mean, W3C standards at least end somewhere and are not defined by what their combined competition collectively decides as fast as they need.
But it's been 13 years already, and back then seriously thinking of dropping/forking the Web as a platform, or at least Google "standards" of it, wasn't possible. Now there's Telegram attaining more and more functionality, and other messengers and siloed services, and non-siloed ones, like NOSTR and Gemini (hypertext, not AI).
Anyway, there's just one thing I don't understand about them, if Google killed their business, why try it again depending on Google again? Couldn't they base it on WebKit? On Firefox?
Google didn't kill their business. Opera moved to chromium to save money.
The end user does not give a shit what engine their browser is built on. They care that [a] it has the features they want and [b] works well. Webkit still does not satisfy [a] and neither would running a subset of web standards. Firefox I'm not sure about. That said, running off chromium has worked fine for them so far.
That's all fine except it turned out that most of Opera users did give a shit. It was a very convenient browser, with much of its convenience connected to the engine. Usability features connected to webpage source viewing and editing in place, caching of page snapshots, being rather fast on most websites ( yes, some crazy shitload of JS could hang or even crash it, but for most of the Web it was faster and used less memory ), various display settings ( like adaptive page width ) to override shitty websites.
Their main product was usability, but it was a somewhat tall building hugely based on features of their browser engine.
Anyway, this doesn't even matter, Chropera as a browser is something most people don't even notice. Opera before Chrome was one of the main browsers.
It also had a torrent client, an RSS client, and a few other things, all very convenient.
And yes, Google did kill their business (that shell still possessing the brand isn't interesting).
My best guess is that everyone is optimising their websites for Chrome for the most part, so forking Firefox would potentially be seen as a negative for users. Most likely why almost all companies fork Chrome instead of literally anything else.
Oh yes, there were plenty of fools crying "oh Google, oh holy Google, deliver us from having to test for many browsers", so that was a pressure too, people just can't learn that oligopoly is bad and monopoly is worse.
I mean, if firefox didn't kneecap themselves every so often then probably people would also optimize for firefox. One example, WebUSB. I can configure my keyboard from a website. No need to install any 3rd party native app. On chrome, you have webserial on Android even. So I do have PWA that I can use to read sensor over serial via OTG. Not only that, chrome also support PWA install even on desktop. Firefox removed PWA ability to be installed on the desktop. That's why technically electron is not needed if companies aren't so greedy to spy on your pc using more invasive method. Just ship the html, css, assets and js then let the browser be the sandbox. No need to ship the browser itself.