4th Week of Class: A Libretto and a Musical Score

We're going to have an Opera Evangelist as a guest speaker in our class this week. As such, we're all doing some research into the Opera Software Company.

Opera Software ASA is a public company that was founded in 1995. It is headquartered in Oslo, Norway but has offices in other countries including the USA.

Products
Their first product was their web browser, Opera, currently in version 10. Users had to pay for the early versions of Opera after 30 days. This was changed to an ad supported model in version 5. In 2005 ads were dropped completely in version 8.5. Google currently pays Opera to be the browser's default search engine.

Opera Mini: A web browser designed for cell phones, this product is currently in version 4.2. The company is working on getting video to work on more phones but the feature is available on some Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones.

Opera Mobile: A web browser designed for smartphones and PDAs. Version 9.7 is in beta. To quote the product page this was "the first mobile browser to bring the full Web to the small mobile screen". The browser makes it possible to view full web sites on mobile devices.

In addition to this Opera offers browsers for all kinds of other devices from the Nintendo Wii to refrigerators.

Opera Dragonfly is listed on the company web site as a separate product but it's included in recent versions of the browser. It's an open source debugging tool. It works even in smaller devices and you can set breakpoints in your code.

Opera Unite: this turns the Opera web browser. I really hope the guest speaker talks about this because it sounds very interesting.

Ideas

The Opera Software company doesn't just create products and call it a day. They do a lot of work in promoting web standards. In fact their CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, is the person who came up with the idea for Cascading Style Sheets. The company regularly has tours and seminars on web standards and even has a Web Standards Curriculum. The curriculum is not yet finished; there are 10 articles on JavaScript that have not been published yet.

The Vision page on the company site states their beliefs about what the Web ought to be and how a company should be run but the one that stood out to me was their statement on accessibility. What makes it stand out? That it's even there. Most web sites don't say anything about accessibility much less explain how they intend to make it work. If they do anything they usually just have a text only version of the site. (J.K Rowling's site is the only exception I can think of but I don't know how accessible Flash can be.) Opera intends to make their existing site accessible and even stated what their goal is as far as how accessible the site should be.

I admit, I thought the statement was going to be about encouraging other web developers to do the same thing but that might be part of their standards curriculum.

News

CNet has a review of Opera Mini 5 beta

The NY Times recommends Opera mainly because of it's Turbo technology