I have heard that the Opera browser allows more control over colors and
size of the displayed text than its bigger competitors. I could not reach
http://www.operasoft.com just before posting this article from today's
Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Sotto voce browser: As Microsoft, Netscape battle, quite Opera keeps
going
Sunday, December 06, 1998
By Michael Newman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The Antitrust Trial of the Century, like much else in the computer
world, is proving to be something of a letdown. Last week's highlight
was a debate about the meaning and etymology of a common term for
urination.
More about that later. The Justice Department's suit against Microsoft
is ostensibly about its tactics in the browser market, though the
testimony does veer off to some strange territory. And Microsoft's
tactics in the browser market are of keen interest to Sandra
Thorbjornsen, director of sales and marketing for Opera Software.
Opera develops and markets a browser program to view and retrieve
information on the World Wide Web, and by any measure - number of
users, number of employees, amount of disk space its program requires
- it is small. And it competes directly with the world's largest, most
powerful software company in the very market that is the subject of
the Justice Department's lawsuit.
Still, Thorbjornsen is reticent about the case. "We have our opinions"
she says. But she declines to elaborate.
"We're just working on making our browser better," she says. "We're
just going to keep a low profile. We have our hands full."
Last week Opera released the latest version of its browser, also
called Opera. Like the browsers currently offered by Microsoft and
Netscape, Opera's has been through several iterations; the current
version is 3.5.
The similarities pretty much stop there, however. To begin with, Opera
is a fraction of the size of Netscape's Communicator or Microsoft's
Internet Explorer - 5.1 megabytes with "Java support" compared to 14.3
and 16.9, respectively.
As a result, Opera says, its browser runs on new computers far more
quickly, and on older computers far more easily, than Netscape's or
Microsoft's. Indeed, Opera says users need only a 386 chip and 6
megabytes of random-access memory.
Reviews of the browser have been enthusiastic. C/Net, an online
computer-news site, said it is "blindingly fast and a refreshing
alternative to the monster-truck Internet suites." A reviewer for
Wired magazine called it "the fastest browser I've ever used."
The browser looks much like the other two, with a row of icons across
the top indicating "back," "forward" and the rest. It can also have a
separate window of sites along the side of the screen, like
Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer.
It does have unique features. Opening a new browser window, for
instance, is far faster with Opera, since it can keep many windows
open at once. Other browsers offer only one window at a time; to look
at two Web sites simultaneously, it's necessary to start up a second
version of the program
Another difference is less to Opera's advantage: After a 30-day free
trial, users must send the company $35 or the software won't work
anymore. Smaller and faster may be better, but free beats cheap every
time.
Still, Thorbjornsen estimates there are about a million users of the
browser, and new users register at the rate of several thousand per
month.
"What we have found is that people are looking for an alternative,"
she says. Many are "happily running it on low-resource computers."
In fact, Opera appears to be a happy, low-resource company itself.
Founded in 1994 by a group of engineers at the Norwegian equivalent of
AT&T, it is privately held. It has only 15 employees, most of them
based in Norway.
("We'd be very pleased to be in Silicon Valley," says Thorbjornsen,
who heads up Opera's North American operations from her one-woman
office in ... Cleveland? "Unfortunately we're in Cleveland and not
Silicon Valley. Cleveland will have to do for the moment.")
Opera says its plan, besides continuing its promotion with individual
users, is to "pursue strategic alliances with high-tech companies and
institutions."
It is, undoubtedly, a long shot. "They're slugging it out with two
rather well-heeled companies, especially now that AOL has bought
Netscape," says Jim Balderston, an industry analyst at Zona Research
in Silicon Valley.
"The problem they face is, a browser is basically a commodity - and a
commodity is driven by brand recognition and brand loyalty," he says.
"That doesn't mean their product isn't superior. Their problem is just
how to get it to desktops." In Zona's quarterly surveys of business
users, he notes, Opera doesn't even register.
But "they may play a role in the larger market of driving the quality
of the more commercially recognized browsers," he says. "They become
the freewheeling, small, agile innovator."
It is a role that Thorbjornsen relishes. "We're just carrying on doing
what we've been doing," she says. "Yes, we are competing seriously
with them," she says, referring Microsoft and Netscape. "We have a
competing product."
There is no danger, however, of Thorbjornsen being summoned to testify
in the antitrust case. She's more than happy about that, especially
given the turn the trial took last week.
In a videotaped deposition, Justice lawyer David Boies pressed
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates repeatedly about what a Microsoft
executive meant when he said the company was going to be "pissing on"
a competitor's product. After some back and forth, Gates conceded that
a fair synonym for the term was, well, to criticize strongly.
It is an impulse that, so far anyway, Opera has resisted. "We prefer
to concentrate on our software," Thorbjornsen says. "We'll let users
be the judge."
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