The battle of the giants is really beginning: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon will be trying to define the future of the internet and they will have to attack each others core businesses to grow further.
On several levels of the internet they all try to get a foot in:
1. Cloud: AWS, iCloud, Azure, Gdrive & App engine - Facebook hasn't got a storage or computation sollution
2. Social: Google+, Windows Live, Facebook - Amazon and Apple don't have real social networks
3. App stores: Apple app store, Play, Market Place, Amazon Appstore - Facebook doesn't have a real app store.
4. Operating system: OS X and iOS, Android, Windows - Facebook and Amazon don't have a OS yet.
5. Browser: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Amazon Silk - Facebook doesn't have a browser yet.
I really think that all companies will battle each other on all the levels because loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others.
Another point here is Amazon Silk caches/records a huge amount of your browsing, it's between the user and the web, and so does Opera Mobile (not opera desktop as far as I know). Facebook in this way will capture even more than they do through their ubiquitous "like" buttons which are constantly recording where everyone goes.
I'd argue they have a good amount of social data through purchases. Just because it doesn't involve posting pictures of your cat doesn't mean they don't have it.
I wonder if this is even more valuable (in terms of predictive power) than facebook's data. After all, the latter tries to predict buying behavior through adjacent information, while the former is, well, buying behavior.
This is off course a legitimate question. I tried to really summarize it by saying: "loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others".
The browser is for the end user an important base because that is where they get directed to surf and target ad spending etc. By inserting functionality like a start page or search engine, the behavior is influenced a lot. You can also push own services and products directly.
The current status of the browser is also that it can replace the OS. (See Google Chrome OS)
Google made a browser so that Google products wouldn't be hindered by whatever the state of the browser market was. And Google was the Internet for lots of lay users.
Now since Facebook is the Internet for lots of lay users, I suppose they might use the same driving logic?
This is certainly not a inexhaustible list. Just some important areas. Media sales, advertising income, hardware design, integration with 3rd parties etc. are also major components.
Even if that were true, it's not especially important for the end user to be familiar with the brand name "Amazon." They use its services constantly. Are they familiar with Netflix? Do they read the Guardian or the Washington Post? Maybe they use apps like Yelp or Foursquare or visit websites like Reddit or IMDb.
Amazon's web services are everywhere. If you're dismissing them because you don't recognize their name, I'd seriously question your familiarity with the current web landscape.
Are you seriously trying to convince a non-US citizen with those services?
And I fail to see how amazon hosting a few sites makes it important enough in the current web landscape to be able to be compared to microsoft/google/apple/facebook. (I bet that reddit would exist without amazon)
Those are typically US-oriented services, so that's a fair point. I was trying to list brands which end-users might be more familiar with, but really that's beside the point.
Just one more nitpick: Amazon does not just "host a few websites." Seriously, Amazon Web Services is a noteworthy business and is widely used -- yes at the level of those other companies you listed -- whether you believe it or not.
That's about as relevant as saying that Cisco is defining the future of the internet.
Facebook (or any user anywhere in the world) don't care whether their packets are routed on Cisco hardware and just because Cisco has a hand in the game doesn't mean that they have anything to say when it comes to defining the future of the internet. The best they can do is be prepared and hope that the future of the internet works well on their hardware (talking services now, of course Cisco has a larger role in the technical side of the internet but that's beside the point - unless somehow Cisco hardware is so unique that the "next facebook" or whatever wouldn't be able to exist without Cisco hardware (hardly likely for either Cisco or Amazon)).
If Dell were to be gone tomorrow, how would that affect you? Just barely, if you use Dell products you might switch to HP. End of story.
If amazon goes away tomorrow (and assuming that people have had time to migrate to other services) that wouldn't affect people the slightest. Some users in the US would be mad that their kindles don't support DRM from any other source than amazon but that's pretty much it.
Amazon, compared to the rest mentioned, does not play a part in "defining the future of the internet". They are just a service provider that can be replaced in a jiffy. Yes they probably have great services but they don't make or break things that define the internet.
If apple, google, microsoft or facebook would disappear - that would make quite an impression. Of those facebook surely is the one most easily replaced but their current presence on the internet is huge and that is why they can have a hand in defining the future of the internet.
Amazon and Dell can only hope that the companies that do shape the internet use their services/hardware - knowing full well that Facebook would run just fine on HP hardware.
Is there anything I can show you to convince you otherwise? You make a lot of gut claims that I'm worried we're straying away from what can be conveniently falsifiable.
In terms of your counterexample, perhaps a look at the historical growth of each: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amazon+dell+stock+price.... But I'd like to move away from Dell, because what I'm addressing is the notion that Amazon is not a "player" comparable to Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Dell is a hardware company. Similar, but not enough in my opinion to make such a comparison.
I think we can agree that Amazon is apparently not as recognizable to an end-user as those other companies. I don't think that diminishes their role in the landscape, and I don't totally trust your opinion that they are so conveniently replaceable.
We probably just have different ideas of what it takes to "define the future of the internet".
Pretty much nothing that amazon does will ever affect me personally, nothing wrong with that - amazon aren't even trying to define future of the internet in my eyes.
If amazon as a hosting company tries to interfere with their customers you bet they will be abandoned ASAP, doesn't matter if amazon has the best web hosting service it's still the sites they host that matter for the future of the internet and amazon has no control what so ever over that - so how can that possibly matter in this context?
The first post talked about Silk as an example of Amazons influence, really? Opera alone really feels like a small player yet Opera has way more than ten times more active users than amazon has even sold Silk-capable devices. Opera are also active in the development of future web standards, which I doubt amazon are. Again, nothing wrong with that - it's just that amazon have an entirely different focus and thus I get quite confused when you talk about stock prices - what on earth is the relevance? Seems to me that even Opera work way more towards defining the future of the internet than amazon does (or want to do).
Well to be honest, I never tried to assert that Amazon was "defining the future of the internet." I was disagreeing with your point that Amazon shouldn't even be compared to Facebook, Apple, Google, or Microsoft. And to be fair, instead of noting Amazon's horizontal stretch, I pigeonholed myself talking about AWS (which by the way, is more than web hosting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#List_of_AWS...)
Maybe it's just that we work in different contexts. For example, at least in my field, EC2 is the de facto scalable distributed computing provider. For most intents and purposes, Amazon is the cloud computing service. Web hosting is not unique, sure, but many of the other AWS products are. If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, there would be no equivalent for many of them.
I think my point boils down to this: just because you might not frequently see Amazon on your end does not mean they should be dismissed. They are an important part of the industry right now and are absolutely worth considering in the same breath as the others.
Well, in hindsight I might have been a bit unclear but it was in that context that I made my comment(s). I sure recognize Amazon as a company (and eagerly await the day I have a project that is suited for EC2).
I still don't see the value in it. It made sense when Google did it. Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had and placing an emphasis on JavaScript speed. This was critical for Google as a number of its apps make heavy use of it.
I don't use Chrome anymore, I switched back to Firefox but its undeniable that it had a massive impact on the speed of browser development and probably the progress of web standards.
Now.. if Facebook bagged Opera what would it add to Facebook or what benefit would Facebook get? A bigger say in web standards. Does this matter much to Facebook? They would have a mobile browser.. this still doesn't help them make a mobile app which doesn't suck.
I just don't see the point. The most likely result of this would be alienating existing Opera users. I would also expect Google to switch Opera to web-kit to reduce development costs. I don't see how a company like Facebook will see a return of investment by buying out Opera.
One process per tab is not a feature. It is (or should be) invisible for me, the user, and from my experience it creates more problems than it's worth (first time I tried Chrome it simply stopped my computer dead by running 10 heavy processes on a single-core CPU - so much for performance). It's a bad design decision that will only pay off when I have a 20-core CPU.
Sandboxing for individual tabs? Just about the same.
My point is that saying "Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had" is a bit of a stretch. When it came out Chrome was basically not very different from Internet Explorer 6 (feature-wise), and it seems to have stayed that way (I like full page translation but that's it).
We should be fair and say that Google Chrome has a large market share because it has Google behind it. It doesn't have much else going for it.
Back when I switched from Firefox to Chrome, FF was a very heavy browser that took up a lot of memory. Chrome was very light-weight and nimble. Clearly, that has changed since then but it was a big competitive advantage.
One process per tab is a feature. If a tab crashed in FF, typically the whole browser would need to restart whereas in Chrome the tab could be closed and re-opened without affecting the other tabs. I think that's a pretty significant feature.
Auto-updating every 6 weeks is another feature. As a developer, I don't have to worry when an update comes out since I know 90%+ will be on the new version.
While I think part of the reason Chrome has a large market share is clearly because of Google, I don't think it's the main reason. There are many other factors.
The problem here is that you trade a lot of performance for stability that you should have to begin with, so in the end you have worse overall performance just so that a fringe case is covered. What's the worse that can happen if Chrome crashed? You could lose all your tabs because the default setting is "open homepage" instead of "reopen the pages that were open last", but that's your fault.
But let's investigate this more deeply - browser crashes have two major causes - internal bugs and plugins. What used to happen was that Flash (or Acrobat Reader, or whatever) would crash and it would bring down the whole browser. The solution is (of course) one separate process for the plugins. Problem solved. Going beyond that and fitting every tab with its own process to account for the fact that your business isn't really building browsers is of little comfort to me; you shouldn't be dereferencing that NULL pointer to begin with.
Opera has auto-update as well. I guess we'll have to disagree on the reason Chrome has its market share.
They stopped WebKit from being owned by Apple. Webkit supports lots of new CSS3 & HTML5 stuff, and for a while was the only way to use lots of the CSS3 stuff. This means you can get advantages of the modern web without relying on an Apple browser.
Making Javascript a first-class citizen can't be understated. Before V8 came along, Javascript was good for doing form validations and not a lot more. Chrome sparked a Javascript engine arms race that has tremendously benefited web developers and users.
That's nice and everything except now they want to kill it and replace it with Dart. Basically Google hated Javascript (and rightfully so) but used it to gain market share, and now they can't really get rid of it. To add insult to injury, now you also have server-side Javascript.
Opera has custom inline searches. I type in the address bar "eng cacophony" and I am being redirected here www.thefreedictionary.com/cacophony . "w Opera browser features" takes me to the wikipedia page.
I can define how many custom keywords as I please. Again, long before Chrome existed.
Firefox did that too. It's very nice but not quite the same as Omnibox. Also, it's a bit of a superuser feature IMO, with Omnibox being more accessible.
The article also left out another major benefit to Facebook. If they buy Opera they will get massive exposure in the CIS region where the browser products are the strongest. This can give them a hand overtaking vKontate and could be worth much to Facebook alone. Yandex / vKontate will know this and may want to defend by a counter offer so it could be interesting.
Also worth noting is if the co-founder Jon and Geir's (the other co-founder) widow don't want to sell their stakes, it will make things difficult for anyone to take over and all this speculation is just academic.
I also use Opera regularly - it's my main browser on my computer and my phone. I've been using it since the 90s, and actually paid for it back when it displayed an ad for free users! It just has so many useful little extra features, and I generally trust them not to use my data for nefarious purposes.
If this happens--and I've seen nothing as yet to suggest it's anything other than a rumour to get the pageviews up on certain tech blogs--I'll be uninstalling it after nearly fifteen years of use, and probably making the move to Firefox. I don't have a Facebook account, so why would I want to use a Facebook browser? Instead of just tracking me across Like-enabled sites, it'll be able to follow me around the whole internet, logging goodness knows what.
I seem to remember a social networking browser was tried out before, as a forked Firefox and subsequently Chromium, in Flock. Whatever happened to Flock?
I paid for Opera years ago, and I'd actually pay real money again for a good quality, feature-filled browser that was guaranteed to not include tracking. I'd rather pay with my money than my privacy. Money can always be replaced, and earned again. Once privacy's gone, it's gone.
I have been a big fan of and user of Opera since it had banner ads in the free version. It has been a long time as my preferred default browser for home and work PC's. I'd even have it on my iPad if I could.
But when I first heard this rumor over the weekend I felt in shock (and sick). I hate Facebook along with its smug a-hole founder. Never even had an account (although I do feel I missed out on some old connections and such but refused to be a part of FB). From a business standpoint I guess it makes sense. FB would get a mature, fast and feature rich browser (One they could data mine to no end, including emails).
But the very last version of Opera that was released, shall this buyout happen, will also be the last version I ever use. Opera has a very clear and good privacy statement. I trust Opera. But Facebook, forget it!
In past few days I have spent time downloading and trying pretty much every other popular browsers. From Chrome to PaleMoon. I could live with one of them but nothing really compelling for me. They all have already been uninstalled and am done trying. Opera would be surely missed.
What makes you trust Opera any more already? They're already quite capable of logging every domain you visit, via the fraud prevention mechanism (Enabled by default). Whether Opera are recording this I don't know, but you can probably be quite certain that Facebook will, if they acquire it.
That's exactly the fear – Opera doesn't have much reason to link recorded data back to you, facebook does, and is known to permanently store all available data. And it already knows way too much about you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a Google Search thing, not a Chrome thing? The Google toolbar in Firefox had the option to upload your browser's entire history to the Search History site, but that's not built into Chrome, afaik.
Chrome does have a sync service, but it requires user action to activate, allows the user to pick what they want synced, and allows syncing omnibox history, not the complete browser history.
Call me a zealot, but if there's one piece of software that I feel ought to be open source, it's a critical centerpiece of modern communication like the web browser. As such, Opera is already not an option for me. In fact, a Facebook acquisition could even change that if the new regime decided to produce a Chromium equivalent.
To me it's how a brand builds trust. Sure you can build trust with open source (afterall, if you can see the source code and build it yourself, it CAN be trusted), but you can also build trust by not being dodgy.
I've been using Opera since its paid days, and despite having switched browsers every year or so, I've still gravitated back to Opera as my day-to-day browsing browser. That's the value of their brand.
Sadly, there is no viable alternative. I use Chrome as my second browser, I occasionally use Firefox and although they are both great browsers, they offer nothing close to Opera. No configurability whatsoever and no extra features you are accustomed to.
Why would you use Chrome, but not the potential FB Opera? Google has just as much of a stake in your information as Facebook, but that hasn't led to their browser being a privacy vulnerability.
Not really. Firefox has a minimal featureset out of the box, but extensions are allowed to do a lot more. With a few extensions you can get nifty new features and UI customizations that Opera just doesn't support.
I assume that regular Opera users lean toward the geeky side of the spectrum. The same demographic has a pretty sour taste for facebook and Zuckerberg. There's no way Opera usage will remain what it is if FB is running the show.
I don't know. I'm quite worried that the whole technology space is turning into a big brand feud war arena.
We are begining to see the subverting of unrelated products into business strategies. No, I don't want my browser/car/glasses/phone with any strings attached. What are we looking forward to a decade from now? iBank? FB insurence? G+ real state?
I for one will make efforts to avoid those products like the plague. If we do not strenghten small brands, we accept the rule of the big ones.
This is what RMS and others have been saying for decades. Free software, data ownership and privacy aren't "nice" things to have or tinker with, they are absolutely crucial freedoms.
Why wouldn't they do that? What's in your refrigerator and how long it's been there has been discussed almost as often as flying cars, within an order of magnitude.
Once checkout of items is commonly done with NFC or RFID or similar, then it's a mere matter of engineering for GE to accomplish exactly that, all taking place on the internet of things.
Why? I'm already not using Facebook products because they have no respect for user privacy. IMO they have very definitely crossed a line in the past, several times even. That has consequences.
Additionally, Opera is the only European browser. That may sound stupid, but it's part of the things I can do to put as much distance between me and that messed up country the US of A. Getting bought by some huge US corporation is yet another vector to subpoena my shit or the US gov to influence my life.
Why would FB buy Opera, except for scenarios similar or exactly like you list?
If I'm a frog in a pot, and I see you turn on the gas, I'm jumping out, because I know ahead of time that it's going to get hot. By the time the water boils the (subjective) damage has already happened.
Which is to say, I'll leave fastmail before the ink is dry on a FB/Opera deal.
Aaannnnd ... I don't use their email except as a backup (a destination backup, not a place to backup my email). I don't use their browser, but that's mainly because I don't like it. The tinfoil fedora does chafe a bit when I do pop Chrome up.
One problem is that we might not know (what) it's sending to facebook, as we don't have access to the code to review it. Sure there's tools to analyze/reverse engineer the client, but that isn't really a practical option.
Opera users instead trust Opera on the security and privacy they claim to offer. This tends to work fine, as Opera have a good reputation for privacy, and they have not abused the trust of their users.
Facebook have, multiple times. Anyone who cares about privacy will avoid it purely because facebook cannot be trusted. Trust must be earned, and facebook have much work to do before they will earn the trust of many (if ever).
I'm not quite sure what it is, but when companies are large enough, people tend to be forgiving, as if their past sins have been cleansed without any good reason. People tend to misplace popularity with trust - if so many people are using it, can't be bad for you right?
The reason Opera users don't like the idea of Facebook buying their browser is twofold.
1) Association - Facebook has a really bad image among many people, and I believe Opera has a hugely better reputation than their potential buyer.
2) Fear that Opera will stray from it's declared course of supporting the open web and creating the best browsing experience (which it currently delivers, by far).
I will not be uninstalling Opera if the acquisition takes place but will keep a very close eye on any developments.
Unfortunately Opera is the only choice for me in the current browser market - other browser can't accommodate my browsing habits, so I would be very bitter if anything were to go wrong. I think a lot of Opera users feel the same way.
>Trident is not for sale, Gecko is irrelevant and possibly too heavy for mobile use, and WebKit is interesting but rather crowded. Presto, Opera’s engine, is the only one that’s available.
Why is Gecko irrelevant? It still has a good chunk of marketshare.
I use Firefox on my Android. It's a little heavy but it's OK. I like it a lot because I'm a desktop Firefox user and it knows how to sync my bookmarks and my saved forms data and my history back and forth. The UI is also much better than Android's built-in browser and it's been making a lot of progress.
I think people are not seeing the forest from the trees here. Firefox has a lot of potential on mobile phones, because Firefox has a lot of desktop users that would want the Firefox on their mobile devices, at least for the Sync functionality.
Also, on mobile WebKit may be the most popular, but there are so many incompatibilities and performance differences between Android's browser, Blackberry's browser, the webkit-powered S60 browser, Chrome, Safari and Mobile Safari that you might as well count those as different engines.
What OS do they run? It's hard to imagine porting to another OS with insanely tiny marketshare and weird APIs. What is the app publishing ecosystem on these phones?
This phone runs Nokia's Series 40, which is running 1.5 billion phones - supposedly the largest mobile operating system. Perhaps this is a bad example though as S40 only runs Java ME & HTML5 apps. Still, I can easily see these feature phones running Firefox within a year. Firefox is, after all, open source.
Opera really could set any price they want. The browser itself is worth far more than some crap like instagram - and Facebook really need it quite badly. I'll be disappointed if they don't get at least $2bn for it. :p
Facebook probably wants to do things with the web that are not currently possible. Without their own browser they are dependant on other companies to make those things happen.
Unite was awesome. The problem is hardly anyone used Opera. A company like Facebook could actually do something with it. Imagine the possibilities for apps and games if a big chunk of Facebook users had it.
Unite is really awesome and I'm sorry to see it go, I used it for quick sharing with friends. Much more convenient than Dropbox when you just want something right there and then.
I think Unite suffered from not being open enough. You required an Opera account to use it, and there's no open specification for building compatible tools and services. What you could build into the browser itself was quite limited. (Plus you had to leave the browser open all the time, which can be a pain.)
It still does. The upcoming Opera 12 will not have it. The author makes a reference to the fact that the widgets have not been receiving proper attention since they were launched and need dusting off.
My point is widgets are (and have been) basically dead, at least in terms of popularity. I'm not sure Facebook execs are aware of their existence, so it's probably unlikely they have a future. Just have to wait and see.
I've spent seven years of my life at Opera, quitting just a few months ago. I've reached the exact same conclusions as ppk.
Owning both a browser and the applications running in it is an immensely powerful combination, as demonstrated by Google. It makes perfect sense for Facebook to want to do the same.
And as much as I dislike Facebook, I believe a buyout like this is the only way for Opera to survive long-term. They have a brilliant engineering team, but it's dwarfed by its competitors. The Presto engine is maintained by a team of just ~60 developers and ~30 testers. They're doing amazing work, but can't keep up with the faster pace of Webkit or Trident development. Combine that with the current level of mismanagement, and you're in trouble.
Without backing from a bigger player, Opera will dwindle to irrelevance as the use of its proxy browser fades away.
Re Opera Mini and them having no competition in proxying browsers: Nokia's S40 Browser actually does proxying these days. This was released as a beta in late 2010, and is now the default in all S40 phones. (http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/nokia-browser-for-series-40-b...)
It's not a proper competitor of course, as one cannot install it to phones by other manufacturers, but it does still cover a pretty big chunk of the low-end devices.
You guys are really making a big deal here. You guys are hackers / engineers yourself. Companies need to make money. Almost every company "uses" your data and make money/ How do you think Gmail has "relevant" ads next to your email browser? No matter what fancy mechanism they put there, they are still using your information. If you really hate people using your data, just build your own mail service. Even small brands use your data. To what level do they use? Who knows. I am pretty sure people would lie about how their products use your information (oh yeah we don't store this and that...) BS. lol It's business. Your credit card and bank information all has to reported to credit companies. These companies make money off your information. So are you saying we should stop using credit cards? Even as "trivial" as college admission - you receive numerous stupid admission invitations, wtf is that? Apparently, College Board or somehow someone decides that information are "shared" to colleges as partnership....
And vertical multi-column tabs! And good performance for 100+ tabs on single core CPU-s! And speed dial! And integrated email/RSS client! And trash can! And notes! And so many more.
You can get very very close to Opera features with Firefox extensions. For mouse gestures there’s an extensions called FireGestures. It’s actually more configurable than Opera’s. Speed dial is in Aurora, but it’s very basic right now.
The rest I didn’t use/care, but I can recall there being an extension for every one of those things.
Not saying Firefox is better than Opera necessarily, it's just that Firefox is quite powerful as well.
The problem is that by the time you reached the functionality of Opera with extensions, your browser is bloated and takes ages to load, and a large chunk of RAM.
I’d have agreed with you just a year ago, but not anymore. Firefox made TONS of performance improvements and Opera actually got significantly worse at memory consumption.
At the end of the day, Aurora (with several addons) is usually below or around 300MB with my normal daily use, whereas Opera Next can easily go beyond 1GB of virtual memory.
1. Opera is really not useful. On mobile phone it uses more memory does my built-in android browser, and it doesn't even run many of the websites smoothly... damn
2. Acquiring Opera doesn't really help Facebook. It generates some revenues, but doesn't help FB to maintain its large operation cost, and doesn't help its ads moving either.
What people are looking at is the obvious= browser.
I surmise the real reason for Facebook to buy Opera is not that. Opera owns the #1 mobile ad mediation platform : AdMarvel and has augmented it with Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising.
THAT IS THE KEY. MOBILE MONETIZATION VIA ANALYTICS OF FB DATA AND ADMARVEL.
This post might just be to push people to leave Opera probably. Opens up a huge market for the other not-so-good browsers to prep up their marketing on app stores!
On several levels of the internet they all try to get a foot in:
1. Cloud: AWS, iCloud, Azure, Gdrive & App engine - Facebook hasn't got a storage or computation sollution
2. Social: Google+, Windows Live, Facebook - Amazon and Apple don't have real social networks
3. App stores: Apple app store, Play, Market Place, Amazon Appstore - Facebook doesn't have a real app store.
4. Operating system: OS X and iOS, Android, Windows - Facebook and Amazon don't have a OS yet.
5. Browser: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Amazon Silk - Facebook doesn't have a browser yet.
I really think that all companies will battle each other on all the levels because loosing one level will cause the collapse of the others.
So, Facebook definitely needs a browser.