10e20 Blog

Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld, moderated the afternoon keynote featuring Jon S. Von Tetzhner, CEO of Opera Software. He actually does a nice intro on Jon here. I love this part of it:

Imagine waking up and finding that your two top competitors are the world’s largest IT corporation (Microsoft) and the beloved favorite son of the web (Mozilla). Further imagine that both of those competitors give their products away (IE and Mozilla/FireFox). As scary a prospect as that is - it is the challenge that Opera Software has successfully faced.

Opera has an extremely loyal following. Brett always admired the company and that’s how he got to know Jon. He was on one of the original beta test teams. He has never gotten a virus running Opera — ever.

Jon’s speech

Opera has been making browsers longer than anyone ever. That’s what they do. Their mission is: the best Internet experience on any device. How do they bring the best experience to you? Even if you are running Opera on a mobile phone, you are running the same product. It’s not watered down at all. During their first few years people wanted them to: make an operating system, make Office, make it run on cross-platform. They took choice #3.

The browser is the glue. It’s the way tour programs across different devices.

It’s a World Wide Web, so they too are worldwide. Opera has offices throughout the world. They do this so they can deliver to their customers where they are. To a certain extent they are a “mini-US.”

A world of Opera users. 39 million desktop downloads. More than 150 nations. More than 40 million cell phones shipped with Opera pre-installed. More than 7 million Opera Mini users. More than 500,000 My Opera community members.

They work with many of the best companies around the world. They are a team of 340 people dedicated to making browsers — that’s all they think about. How can they make browsers better?

Opera 9: dedication leads to innovation. They focus on people’s needs: tabs / start where you left off / integrated search / mouse gestures / zooming / integrated security.

The world we live in: there’s only one web. Numerous devices keep coming out and all are ready to connect to the web (TV, Nintendo, etc). The only way to solve this is web standards — it makes your life easier.

The world we live in: the growth of web applications. Web apps are a very important trend taking the web to the next level. Opera offers native support for real web applications (widgets and beyonds). They want their widgets to be able to run everywhere by everyone implementing web standards. That is a very exciting point Jon!

They are committed to standards! They passed the Acid2 test.

Keeping you more secure — now in Opera 9.1 — fraud protection.

They’re listening: Support for cutting edge developer tools.

Opera for Mobile: same code base — 3 different products. Opera Platform and Opera Widgets. Opera Mobile. Opera Mini. Opera for Devices. You can run Opera on Nintendo. You can run it on the Sony Mylo and many others.

Who makes the best Internet experience? Web developers and webmasters. You shape the Internet!

Q&A

Brett starts out with his own questions.

Brett - One of the biggest complaints about Opera is that a lot of sites simply didn’t work with it.
Jon - By just not coding for Opera — you are leaving out millions of people. Would you leave out a few US states? Jon says this is why they are so pushing towards standards for all browsers.
Brett – Do you go down a hitlist of the top 1000 sites and make sure they work with Opera.
Jon – Yes — we have a list. In 98% of the cases its legacy code. If opera do nothing code is the biggest problem.

Brett – Where do you find a balance between standards and user experience?
Jon – It is difficult because they find sites using things they feel they should not be doing. They always try to error on the side of security — security if very important to them. But they will try to get both (it’s secure and it works).

Brett – With FireFox gaining so much momentum and IE 7 coming - is there still room for Opera?
Jon – I feel like I have been answering this for a long time now (laughs). The first time he heard that people were asking about them against Mosaic.
Brett – So what is your plan for the next 10 years?
Jon – Reaching out to the community and get the word out. We believe we have a strong product and we want to get developers more involved. In Japan our brand is really strong. In Japan they shipped phones with their brand marketing on it — then they got requests from others to do the same.

Brett – This year we heard so much about widgets — how do you guys see widgets playing out?
Jon – We probably have the strongest growth of widgets out there. This is the way to do programming. But what we are finding today is the most effective way is through web standards. More and more powerful applications are being written this way.

Brett – Do you still code?
Jon – I wish I could say I do but it’s been a few years. I am a programmer by heart though and I still study it. I hired programmers that are a lot better than I am.

Brett – The software that runs the community — did you write it?
Jon – Yes — all in LAMP.
Brett — Would you make that available?
Jon – If there’s interest in it — sure, why not?
Brett – Everyone should check out the Opera Forums — it’s a very unique experience and should be taken in to see how to build a community around their product and support it.

Brett – When you guys went free — many thought that it was because of your relationship with Google.
Jon – In 2001 we introduced the search browser. What we found out was that we were sending lots of traffic to Google. So we said — well why don’t we get paid for it? Those searches fund Opera.

Brett – So how does search play into it?
Jon – Perhaps the most significant part is searching cross platform. Making a search on your mobile for example. This poses interesting new search opportunities.

Question from the audience: What’s the main advantage vs. other browsers?
Jon: Looking at the desktop product — we’re faster, we’re more secure (we have more security requirements), we innovate — we try to make your experience better, we are the only browser that runs cross platform.

Question from the audience: You mention widgets. Google has widgets, Apple has widgets. How do you see this playing out in the future?
Jon: We are interested in this and talking to the different companies about this. We want it to be that you can run ours on any platform or any browser.

Question from the audience: How do you see search companies partnering with Opera to create a better experience?
Jon: We already work with Google. We can make branded versions for anyone. We could easily make a browser for Google that incorporates all their widgets, toolbars, etc. We have talked to many companies who want this.

Greg Jarboe: Do you see audio search, video search, affecting Opera?
Jon: We are finding that people do exactly the same things on their mobile as they do everywhere else. They are also going to specialty sites that they would normally go to.

Question from the audience: I see Opera come through in my analytics as Mozilla.
Jon: It can come through like this for compatibility purposes.

http://www.opera.com