c******f
发帖数: 2622 | 1 by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:53AM (#47303521)
(Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Opera employee; pretty much all of what's below has
been said by others before or can easily be inferred from it.)
Opera ceased selling a web browser to consumer years ago. Opera, having been
ad-free for around nine years, with the exception of a couple of quarters
in the black in 2009/2010, has been pretty profitable; this is well before
any work started on anything based on WebKit or Chromium. Since 2010, Opera
has basically been posting record profits quarter after quarter. You can
find all this in the quarterly reports (as a publicly traded company, this
is all public knowledge). The move to the Chromium Content API and WebKit
and later Blink beneath it was not driven out of lack of resources to
develop Presto; it was driven out of an unwillingness to do so.
In terms of revenue, Google, as the default search engine, have been paying
handsomely, primarily because they wanted to break into markets where Opera
had at the time significant marketshare, especially around the CIS. However,
given Chrome's rise in those markets since, I would be very nervous about
being dependent upon Google for revenue. That said, last I looked, search
affiliation deals were only about 50% of total revenue (for comparison, in
2012, 90% of Mozilla's revenue came from Google!). Considering all the
various acquisitions of advertising networks and related companies, this has
undoubtedly fallen (they will likely soon be the biggest source of revenue
for the company!).
However, it the other side of the business that drove the change to the
company: the B2B side, selling browsers to OEMs for mobile devices and TVs
and set-top boxes, etc. We've gone from a dozen or two platforms on mobile a
decade ago down to half a dozen now; these phones mostly run systems where
high quality web browsers are included by default (hey, look, they don't
just support WAP!).
"WebKit" (in about a million different forks!) has been what all the cool
kids (say, iOS, Android) have been using, and hence many companies not using
OSes including a web browser, whom typically Opera would have got a larger
proportion of the business (we're talking > 50% of the market), essentially
decided they were going to get a WebKit browser and turning either of
consultancy companies around WebKit or building their own teams in-house.
Along with this, iOS and Android's rise has led to a monoculture around
mobile, with many mobile sites practically requiring WebKit, so mobile badly
suffered (this led both the IE and Opera to seriously consider supporting
various things with explicit WebKit prefixes, as the market demanded we
support websites, and websites were unwilling to support anything that wasn'
t WebKit; both IE and Opera have decently sized outreach teams that tried to
get many notable websites to change and utterly failed).
B2B customers either wanting WebKit explicitly or implicitly (i.e.,
requiring support for sites that very much only supported, and were only
willing to support, WebKit) drove the move more than anything else, as far
as I could see. The change of management at the top, going from people who
cared about the web (go look at Opera's vision statement, it's great!) to
people who cared more about quarterly profits, certainly didn't help either.
(If all you care about is quarterly profits, why employ 100 people to
develop a browser engine B2B customers don't want?)
This was all not helped by Presto falling further and further behind the
competition; a number of engineers were let go during the black quarters in
'09/'10, the "Core" department (i.e., that which worked on Presto) let go
about as many as any other at the time. Opera 10.00 looked diabolical when
it came out (Sept '09) in terms of standards support, but this was mainly
systematic of poor development methodology rather than Presto being that far
behind (in reality, the Core department had stable releases of Presto that
already included virtually everything in 10.50 (March '10) by the time it
shipped, that Desktop wasn't shipping it is a failing of process rather than
technical incompetence). The real hurt was that when the company started
posting profits again, Core never began hiring again (only a very few hires
were made before everyone was let go or moved to other departments with the
end of Presto), and certainly not enough to keep up with the rate that MS,
Mozilla, Google, and Apple were hiring people to work on their respective
browser engines; there simply weren't the resources to keep up, yet alone
catch up the slight gap we had in 2010. As a result, Presto ended up fairing
worse and worse to what more and more of our customers wanted. By 2011 it
was inevitable Presto was dead (I know others who'd put that date back as
far as 2009!); the gap had become too large to really be viable to catch up,
even if the resources were forthcoming. That we were heading towards its
inevitable death had been obvious for years; nothing was done about it.
The fact the Presto carried some technical debts didn't help; much of its
current state goes back to the early 2000s. Many within the team then
working on Presto held a strong view that as long as the browser followed
the standards we were sufficing, and the blame for any web compatibility
issues lay with the websites. Of course, this was completely untenable as IE
reached its monumental peak of >95% marketshare. Things started to be added
, reluctantly, to match IE, while avoiding changing others. Many of these
would come back to bite years later as CSS truly became widespread as a
layout tool. A good example of this is rounding of numbers in CSS; Presto
always performed integer arithmetic, everyone else used floats. This
probably was a reasonable implementation choice when it was made over a
decade ago; mobile devices lacked FPUs, hence avoiding floating point led to
notable performance gains, yet as the market progressed, it became clear
that it was hurting Opera (causing all kinds of bizarre layout issues) and
mobile devices gained FPUs. Still, nothing was done about it, as $
shinyNewFeature is more important for marketing purposes than having to
change types that are relatively pervasive across the layout engine.
There was also plenty of wasted engineering work until about a few years ago
. The state of testing was... diabolical, at best. This was really driven by
a view of testing as nothing but a cost (and there are plenty of terrible
releases of Opera!) and something that can be avoided by proper development
process so bugs aren't introduced in the first place (which of course is
nonsense). Regressions were aplenty, typically caught months after the code
was changed (many were only found once the Presto release found its way into
a public Desktop build), by which time nobody knew quite what was going on.
Bugs would often languish for years, eventually get fixed, just to be
reintroduced a year down the line. Thankfully, that was eventually fixed,
but really far, far too late. People only started truly caring about
automated test results in about 2009, when suddenly it became part of the
process, at which time the automated test system was basically formed of
random old scavenged workstations. You can guess how well that system stood
up to the sudden load; it became the bottleneck of merging, well, anything.
Yet there was apparently no budget to buy new hardware for it, so instead
man-years were wasted waiting on the bottleneck and trying to speed the
bottleneck up (spending six man-months for a 25% performance increase is so
much more expensive than just doubling the amount of hardware, and as
designed the system would've scaled horizontally massively beyond where was
and ever did).
Ultimately, Presto died not because of a lack of money, but because the
leadership was weak (it was obvious Presto was going to die if investment
didn't increase in 2009, and yet nothing was done; had the investment been
made in Presto we might not be talking here today, had the decision to move
to WebKit been made in 2010 the two could've been developed in parallel for
a while until the new product was in a far better state than the panicked,
rushed Opera 14/15 was when it shipped). What the Core department achieved
with the staffing levels it had was nothing short of astonishing, and there
are countless examples of really great people in the department who helped
pull that off, yet ultimately, it was all for nought. | s*****m
发帖数: 13092 | 2 说白了就是太不流氓了，一切都照着标准做，没想到chrome强行把自己的搞成事实标准
，最标准的opera反而网页有些显示不正常 | P**H
发帖数: 1897 | 3 标准谁说了算？
【在 s*****m 的大作中提到】
: 说白了就是太不流氓了，一切都照着标准做，没想到chrome强行把自己的搞成事实标准
: ，最标准的opera反而网页有些显示不正常
| s*****m
发帖数: 13092 | 4 所以说opera就是个理想主义者，而现实是个流氓强盗的世界
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 标准谁说了算？
| g******e
发帖数: 3760 | 5 这么长似乎也没有说到点上。应该还是没跟上mobile这趟车吧？话说回来，Opera最火
的时候市场占有率也是个位数吧。
been
Opera
【在 c******f 的大作中提到】
: by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:53AM (#47303521)
: (Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Opera employee; pretty much all of what's below has
: been said by others before or can easily be inferred from it.)
: Opera ceased selling a web browser to consumer years ago. Opera, having been
: ad-free for around nine years, with the exception of a couple of quarters
: in the black in 2009/2010, has been pretty profitable; this is well before
: any work started on anything based on WebKit or Chromium. Since 2010, Opera
: has basically been posting record profits quarter after quarter. You can
: find all this in the quarterly reports (as a publicly traded company, this
: is all public knowledge). The move to the Chromium Content API and WebKit
| g******e
发帖数: 3760 | 6 Windows桌面上竞争不过firefox不能赖狗吧？
【在 s*****m 的大作中提到】
: 说白了就是太不流氓了，一切都照着标准做，没想到chrome强行把自己的搞成事实标准
: ，最标准的opera反而网页有些显示不正常
| C*****z
发帖数: 2050 | 7 来用Opera回个贴。
been
Opera
【在 c******f 的大作中提到】
: by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @12:53AM (#47303521)
: (Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Opera employee; pretty much all of what's below has
: been said by others before or can easily be inferred from it.)
: Opera ceased selling a web browser to consumer years ago. Opera, having been
: ad-free for around nine years, with the exception of a couple of quarters
: in the black in 2009/2010, has been pretty profitable; this is well before
: any work started on anything based on WebKit or Chromium. Since 2010, Opera
: has basically been posting record profits quarter after quarter. You can
: find all this in the quarterly reports (as a publicly traded company, this
: is all public knowledge). The move to the Chromium Content API and WebKit
| P**H
发帖数: 1897 | 8 真没法怪chrome。桌面上，从来连Firefox的零头都没有。
其实opera赶过Mobile的车。iOS是没办法。但Android上，opera绝对是早的。结果连
Android 原生和国产的那些套壳都没打过。
实力毕竟还是差了，或者是方向没找准。没必要找什么借口。
【在 g******e 的大作中提到】
: 这么长似乎也没有说到点上。应该还是没跟上mobile这趟车吧？话说回来，Opera最火
: 的时候市场占有率也是个位数吧。
:
: been
: Opera
| l******t
发帖数: 55733 | | l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 10 嗯, 我一直不用就是因为他们不支持super drag, 这个其实很简单的feature.
【在 l******t 的大作中提到】
: 从来就是个niche product
| | | m*******n
发帖数: 1236 | 11 我觉得还有个原因是创新的收益太低，分页浏览，鼠标手势和快速拨号都是opera首创
，马上被其它浏览器学了，这些功能要是有个专利啥的，opera就牛了 | s*****m
发帖数: 13092 | 12 只有苹果才能注册专利，其他厂家不允许。
【在 m*******n 的大作中提到】
: 我觉得还有个原因是创新的收益太低，分页浏览，鼠标手势和快速拨号都是opera首创
: ，马上被其它浏览器学了，这些功能要是有个专利啥的，opera就牛了
| b*********4
发帖数: 271 | 13 中国的软件产品干掉美国很难，干掉欧洲的比较容易。以前中国很少有人做浏览器，现
在太多了，竞争太激烈了，所以就把欧洲的opera干掉了。这世界估计就只有中美两国
了。一个高端，一个中低端，其他的活不了。 | P**H
发帖数: 1897 | 14 浏览器也分高低端。真是醉了。
opera的玩法注定就是个小众。大厂，开源，一头都不占。用户体验也上不去，说什么
都是白搭。
【在 b*********4 的大作中提到】
: 中国的软件产品干掉美国很难，干掉欧洲的比较容易。以前中国很少有人做浏览器，现
: 在太多了，竞争太激烈了，所以就把欧洲的opera干掉了。这世界估计就只有中美两国
: 了。一个高端，一个中低端，其他的活不了。
| g******e
发帖数: 3760 | 15 记得原来在Windows下中文显示效果也不好。不知后来怎么样了。
【在 l****z 的大作中提到】
: 嗯, 我一直不用就是因为他们不支持super drag, 这个其实很简单的feature.
| b*********4
发帖数: 271 | 16 那是因为你在美国呆多了，不知道广大穷苦人民的痛苦，以为美国就是一切。低端浏览
器重要特点就是省流量，围绕这个大作市场宣传。多看看印度非洲的新闻。技术不是一
切，体验那是美国人的讲法。不过没有做过市场营销的说了你也不懂。
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 浏览器也分高低端。真是醉了。
: opera的玩法注定就是个小众。大厂，开源，一头都不占。用户体验也上不去，说什么
: 都是白搭。
| I******n
发帖数: 5952 | 17 Opera这么个破玩意儿卖了十多个b，还有啥不满的吗？ | P**H
发帖数: 1897 | 18 美国的流量不说最贵，也是很贵的。相比之下，中国，俄罗斯，罗马尼亚这些地方的流
量便宜得不要钱一样。
省流量并不是低端，而是功能。chrome也提供。
高低端的概念对于浏览器根本就没有意义。用户完全可以同时期使用多个浏览器。切换
几乎没有成本。随时都可以互相比较然后选择。不同于汽车或者收费软件。
最后用户比较，选择下来的结果就是这个样子。
【在 b*********4 的大作中提到】
: 那是因为你在美国呆多了，不知道广大穷苦人民的痛苦，以为美国就是一切。低端浏览
: 器重要特点就是省流量，围绕这个大作市场宣传。多看看印度非洲的新闻。技术不是一
: 切，体验那是美国人的讲法。不过没有做过市场营销的说了你也不懂。
| j*****v
发帖数: 7717 | | c*****z
发帖数: 1211 | 20 单价高低只是一方面，美国人收入高所以用的多，1M 0.1美元也用的哗哗的。中国的农
民工或者学生，一个月手机费最多几十块人民币，去掉电话短信费用，1M一毛钱人民币
能用多少，所以省流量很重要。
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 美国的流量不说最贵，也是很贵的。相比之下，中国，俄罗斯，罗马尼亚这些地方的流
: 量便宜得不要钱一样。
: 省流量并不是低端，而是功能。chrome也提供。
: 高低端的概念对于浏览器根本就没有意义。用户完全可以同时期使用多个浏览器。切换
: 几乎没有成本。随时都可以互相比较然后选择。不同于汽车或者收费软件。
: 最后用户比较，选择下来的结果就是这个样子。
| | | b*********4
发帖数: 271 | 21 你还是太年轻，要么对浏览器行业历史不懂。你看看chrome什么时候会告诉你能省流量
，有这个功能也不会去宣传，美国人根本不在乎这点省下的流量，说出来都丢人。另外
chrome这个省流量的功能什么时候出现的， opera或者UC浏览器什么时候出现的，肯定
比chrome早很多年。年轻人，美国呆多了就是井底之蛙，民主普世就和这浏览器一样，
这世界穷人多的你难以想象。
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 美国的流量不说最贵，也是很贵的。相比之下，中国，俄罗斯，罗马尼亚这些地方的流
: 量便宜得不要钱一样。
: 省流量并不是低端，而是功能。chrome也提供。
: 高低端的概念对于浏览器根本就没有意义。用户完全可以同时期使用多个浏览器。切换
: 几乎没有成本。随时都可以互相比较然后选择。不同于汽车或者收费软件。
: 最后用户比较，选择下来的结果就是这个样子。
| b*********4
发帖数: 271 | 22 体验这个词就和美国人的民主普世一样，恭贺你已经成功被美国人洗脑成功。第三世界
打法不讲体验。不过估计你也很难体会到井底之蛙这个词的真正含义，否认自己有时很
难。
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 浏览器也分高低端。真是醉了。
: opera的玩法注定就是个小众。大厂，开源，一头都不占。用户体验也上不去，说什么
: 都是白搭。
| s*****m
发帖数: 13092 | 23 Opera从一开始win 95时代就是以精简快速省流量崛起的，当时56K modem，用opera比
netscape又快又省流量。一直到最后的手机上的opera mini都是这样。
【在 b*********4 的大作中提到】
: 体验这个词就和美国人的民主普世一样，恭贺你已经成功被美国人洗脑成功。第三世界
: 打法不讲体验。不过估计你也很难体会到井底之蛙这个词的真正含义，否认自己有时很
: 难。
| a9
发帖数: 21638 | 24 其实就跟AMD一样，水平高的都去intel了，谁愿意待在市占率只有别人零头的公司。
倒是Firefox应该好好想一想折腾了这么多年被Chrome一下就打的落花流水。
最火
【在 P**H 的大作中提到】
: 真没法怪chrome。桌面上，从来连Firefox的零头都没有。
: 其实opera赶过Mobile的车。iOS是没办法。但Android上，opera绝对是早的。结果连
: Android 原生和国产的那些套壳都没打过。
: 实力毕竟还是差了，或者是方向没找准。没必要找什么借口。
| l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 25 不支持super drag, 差评, 呵呵.
【在 j*****v 的大作中提到】
: opera比chrome強太多了。
| d****y
发帖数: 312 | |
|
