Facebook needs Opera - to rescue it from dependence on Apple
Analysis Facebook is reported [1] to be interested in buying Scandinavian browser company Opera Software.
The facts are few, the sourcing criminally light, but the story arrives as Opera is also reported [2] to have instituted a hiring freeze that some claim is a harbinger to putting itself up for sale.
Both firms refused to comment on the reports when contacted by The Reg.
Why would Facebook want to own its own browser, especially when Opera has minuscule market share and is better at generating publicity than desktop growth?
Facebook is also interested in buying Face.com and, again, preparing its own phone having poached six iPhone engineers and one from the iPad team at Apple.
A market once thought dead has been on fire in recent years, thanks initially to Mozilla’s Firefox: that led to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s conversion to standards with IE9 and IE10. Things are so promising, even Yahoo! is making a play for a stake in browsers, with its Axis [3].
Why have a browser? As far as Microsoft was concerned at least, it was felt if you lost the browser you lost the desktop and MSN business. Microsoft likes to create what it calls “optimized experiences” and on IE today that means things like pinning web pages to the bottom of the Windows 7 screen to help you find them fast.
This sort of thinking comes from the type of company with a market to protect; today’s browser makers don’t have this but are trying to make themselves more relevant and the perceived way of doing that is performance for the end user.
Google launched Chrome despite partnering with Mozilla on Firefox because Firefox was slowing down, turning into big ol' memory hog – although that’s been rectified now. Google added incognito browsing [4], search with sites from the toolbar and tabbed synching [5]. Opera has also sped up browsing, with Turbo that compresses web pages by up to 80 per cent to serve pages to most devices – and a claimed 90 per cent for Apple’s iPhone and iPad - across narrow or spotty networks. Microsoft responded by making IE fast and look more like Chrome.
After awhile all this speed and performance goes unnoticed by the typical web user on the desktop. But this is not the target demographic; the new targets are those using specific apps, like gaming, and those on phones and tablets, which have limited onboard compute and are at the mercy of spotty networks.
That’s why Firefox and Chrome have been focusing on hardware accelerated graphics rendering; to offload traffic from the CPU and prolong battery life.
Hence, we also now have Firefox and Chrome for Android.
One company that doesn’t let you run your browser on the device unless it’s native is the company that’s got the best and most exciting market share: Apple’s insistence on native software has kept Firefox and Chrome off its phones.
The Opera Mini web browser is the exception; it’s permitted because Opera Mini caches web pages using Opera’s global network of servers to render and execute pages rather than this happening on the device. In that respect, Opera Mini is more of a service app so passes Apple’s rules without Opera needing to build one version for Apple’s phones and tablets, and another for everybody else.
Opera Mini isn’t restricted to iOS, though, and Opera claims [6] 168 million users running on Java ME, Android, Windows Mobile, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian, too. Importantly, they are largely in emerging markets: Opera has struggled in the US and Europe but is strong in growing markets such as Russia, Brazil, Africa and South East Asia.
FULL
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/28/facebook_to_buy_opera/print.html
