In the wake of the speculation about Microsoft acquiring Opera, Google has done a one-year deal that will make it the default search engine for Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The wireless space appears to be where Opera has a good chance of thriving as opposed to the desktop where it, at best, has 1% market share. To be honest, it's a bit of a mystery why Opera hasn't done better on the desktop. It has many of the same features as Firefox but hasn't captured anywhere near the buzz as Firefox. This may be a long shot but I'm thinking Google will acquire Opera in 2006 to create the much-anticipated GBrowser. A Google browser makes complete sense. If you're going to offer a huge menu of Web-based services, why wouldn't you want to own the way people access them? A Google browser could incorporate search, GMail, Blogger, Picasa, Google Analytics and Google Local, Google Base and Google Maps – making it a Flock-like, multi-purpose browser. Google buying Opera somehow makes a lot more sense than Microsoft acquiring Opera – for whatever reason.Update: John Battelle (I think) believes mobile search will be big in 2006 based on a cryptic post he made today.
2 Comments
I disagree on the mystery. Selling software is 2 parts marketing and only 1 part technology. Moz's marketing strategy with Firefox is a well orchestrated grass roots movement. I'm unsure if Opera even have a marketing strategy.
-Randy Charles Morin
http://www.kbcafe.com
Opera is still generally and noticeably faster than Firefox however the advantage had seemed to slip. Opera also has capabilities that have still not made it into Firefox yet (author mode and other author-specified page over-rides, back-button page expiry ignoring, and many more) including privacy options. For example, one can specify Opera to identify itself as another browser. This means that this very post appears in your logs as being from an IE browser. I think this capability is still enabled by default on all PC-based Opera browsers shipped and may explain some of the meagre 1% adoption figures.
I'd be interested in the browser usage stats of perhaps more tech-savvy sites like this one since my dad (who distinctly falls out of this category) uses IE simply because he clicks an icon 'to get on the Internet'.
/Stefan