

Opera acquires Skyfire labs for $155M - anigbrowl
http://mashable.com/2013/02/15/opera-acquires-skyfire-labs-for-155-million/

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rosenjon
I never would have thought that Opera had $155 million to spend on an
acquisition. Does their browser make any money?

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pavlov
I don't see how the desktop browser would make money, but Opera Mini is
preinstalled on a large number of low-end devices. I imagine these bundling
deals are quite profitable to the company, since Opera Mini is seeing a lot of
use on those low-end phones.

Wikipedia has some recent numbers: "In February 2013, Opera reported 300
million unique Opera Mini active users and 150 billion page views served
during that month." [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini>

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dirtyaura
The Desktop version gets payments from search vendors, Google pays significant
sums to browser vendors to be the default search engine. But of course the
bigger part of their income comes from the mobile.

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Indyan
I submitted the original source 3 hours ahead of Mashable's rehash:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5224687>

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jmspring
Congrats for Skyfire.

Knowing a few people there good to see them acquired by an interesting
company. They've certainly changed a bit from the early days with the initial
product being on WinMo (i was an early engineer there). The move makes some
sense with Opera's embracing of WebKit.

I do agree with the other poster - opera had $155m? You learn new things every
day.

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thoughtcriminal
It's suspicious, since nobody uses the browser. It's certainly unreliable in a
work environment and the worst browser on the iPhone.

Sorry to be the wet blanket at this love-in, but maybe, just maybe Opera isn't
what it appears.

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untog
Believe it or not, the rest of the world aren't all using smartphones. Opera
Mini dominates the less-than-smart phone space.

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AlexDanger
Does anyone have info on the Opera Unite story? I remember it being well
received when it was announced but clearly it never gained traction. I see
Opera have now canned it.

Perhaps a bit ahead of its time? In the next few years my country (.au) will
be wired up with fibre to the home which makes this browser p2p thing more
attractive. Also WebRTC seems timely.

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andrewl-hn
I joined Opera just before Unite was released. People told me that the idea
was very old. They've been prototyping and re-working the product and were not
100% happy about it whet it was finally released.

It seems to me that at that time it would be a great idea to wrap the API into
some mix of standards that emerged over time (IndexDB, AppCache, etc.) That
way writing Unite applications would attract web developers interested in
HTML5. It didn't happen and most web developers saw some proprietary API for a
browser with a small marketshare. No wonder it didn't took off.

Something similar may appear on top of WebRTC like you suggested.

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nicholassmith
Busy week for Opera, a transition to WebKit and a big acquisition. I wonder if
the Skyfire purchase indicates Opera is going to make a far bigger push to try
and capture market share in mobile browsing, where at the moment there's far
fewer competitors and an ever increasing marketshare to tap into.

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rplnt
Mobile can be way to capture desktop too. If you decide to use Opera on
mobile, sync (Opera Link - <http://www.opera.com/link/> ) can convince you to
use it on desktop as well.

I would especially love having sessions accessible on both devices. I believe
it's not possible at the moment.

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nicholassmith
Nice point! That'd certainly have a draw for a lot of people, and I don't
believe people have as much invested in their browser choice than they used
too.

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thoughtcriminal
Opera really needs to focus on their core product: the browser. Its truly lost
its way. I uninstalled the desktop version a few months back because of it's
so flaky and unreliable.

On the iPhone, it's being _blown away_ by upstarts like 360, Mercury and
especially the slick Dolphin browser.

Chrome is still the best browser IMO, but like I said in an earlier comment,
IE9 is surprisingly snappy. Stop being a snob and try it out.

As for Opera, can't truss it.

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freehunter
Is the desktop their core product? Or is the feature phone their core product?
Opera Mini is big.

