I have been building browsers for 30 years now. First Opera and now Vivaldi. My estimate is that more than 1 billion have used one of my browsers or both. Have you?
That reminds me of the earlier days of the Web, when there was an export restriction on encryption from the US. Thus non-US versions of Netscape and IE had 40 bit keys, while the US ones had 128 bit.
Opera was a Norwegian company, so we could deliver 128 bit keys outside of the US.
Still the banks in Norway and elsewhere would recommend Netscape and IE.
@jon We get Edge, Chrome or Firefox. I once installed Brave on my work machine (I have admin rights), but then I looked at a dark web site (The Verge news reporting site) using their TOR function and got pulled over by the network police.
Since then, no more “non-standard” browsers for me.
I believe it’s simply a matter of software support. Only so many browsers can be made available. 😔 And no one can argue I don’t have choice.
The FUD from Microsoft has worked. At the same time Microsoft is blurring the line between what is local on your computer and what is in the cloud, which IMHO is a security issue. So is the tracking that most of those browsers engage in.
There is a reason we are making Vivaldi. It is because those 4 choices are not good enough for our users.
I am co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi. Sadly I am not contributing much on the coding side anymore. I did more of that at Opera, where I was also co-founder and CEO until 2010.
The Linköping office was very important. We started with a handful of people and we grew to a bout 100 in that office. It was a purely technical office and had a lot of really talented developers.
Linköping is a really nice town.
I spent a lot of time visiting all our offices around the world as well as have user meetups in different parts of the world. We had at most 15 offices in 12 countries.
@jon
I should probably go a little deeper than just a simple yes. I have tried Vivaldi on a number of occasions, and it's just got too big of a learning curve for me. I also don't much care for using anything with a Google engine on it, regardless of how much privacy is supposed to be included.
We all make our choices. I am biased, but I believe Vivaldi can be a great option for you as well. There are things to learn, but that is because we have more to offer.
I also believe we can play an important role with regards to Chromium as we grow.
The first time I came into contact with Opera was with version 5, if I remember correctly. 🤔
It's been a while. I can still remember the advertising banner in the browser. Those were the days... 😅
I first used Opera (7.11, with classic UI). Instant love for tabs and the fact that it did not share its history with IE (it was on a family computer on Windows ME…). Then I continued to use it from versions 9 to 12.x.
I did not switch to Opera 15, too limited for my habits and needs. But I had to switch for Firefox (with a lot of extensions to mimic Opera as much as possible).
When Vivaldi was announced, I was happy, but I did not use it as my main browser before the final version 1.0. And I still use it nowadays.
@Geniusak , I guess the focus is on my time there, but either way you are using a browser from a company I founded. I just have nothing to do with what Opera is doing now.
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