Representatives at browser maker Opera denied that the company is in the process of being sold to either Google or Microsoft, and said the Norwegian firm has no other acquisition plans in the works. Opera markets an eponymous desktop Web browser as well as several mobile browser technologies. A number of published reports appeared early Friday that implied that industry giants Microsoft and Google could be engaged in a bidding war over Opera. The company called those stories mere rumors.
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I don't see Google buying Opera now. With their deal with AOL, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Google Broswer based on AOL explorer or even AOL explorer, under Googles influence, switching over to Mozilla's rendering engine.
But I think it's a bit exciting to see that AIM and Google Talk will now communicate with each other.
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2005-07-06
...as far as reliability goes, CoolTechZone is far WORSE than The Inquirer, and that speaks volumes about this whole ordeal. This "insider news" is nothing more than a bunch of cheap tricks and non-sense. And as far as John "FUD" Dvorak goes, ha, don't even get me started... 
Edited 2005-12-25 02:50
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I thought this was bogus from the start. Why would MS buy insignificant (at this point, at least) Opera, when it has IE? What would they do with it? Replace IE with Opera? Eliminate Opera from the market? Would either be worth the investment?
Suppose for a moment that Opera replaced IE...How would that work exactly? How would this integrate into the current and existing MS development platforms? What would be the ramifications for developers?
Not going to happen, never was going to happen. At most, MS could make a bad investment to crush a very minor competitor.
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IE is not a "development platform". It is a browser. A poor one, which is all but defunct, like Microsoft "Bob" or Microsoft Access.
Dude, time to upgrade your bigotry. IE is most certainly a development platform. It comprises a ton of Internet-related APIs that include everything from cache/state management, remote Uri access, browser hosting, navigation, scripting, controls, and ... yes, layout, rendering, and markup.
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More to the point IE "all but defunct"?
IE has much more than a majority and will have it for a long time. As much as I hate it, it's what our customers use, so I have to test in it for every user interface I write.
Even more to the point, I never did think Microsoft had any desire for Opera, but I was curious about Google. I think this news goes to show that Google is committed to supporting multiple browser platforms rather than trying to become their own.
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I thought this was bogus from the start. Why would MS buy insignificant (at this point, at least) Opera, when it has IE? What would they do with it?
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*Have instant access to millions of portable devices (phones, etc) where IE cannot, will not, and does not run?
*Have access to the the best, most lightweight, feature-complete rendering engine?
*have the best small screen rendering tech?
Kill it to crush it?
All these are valid reasons to buy it. Opera has some of the most advanced tech on the market, and there's more to web than desktop and notebook PCs.
But frankly I'm sick of rumours (and the people who start them) and it makes me feel dirty even thinking of the monopolist getting its grubby hands on everything.
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[/i]*Have access to the the best, most lightweight, feature-complete rendering engine?[/i]
I partially agree with the feature-complete rendering engine part. It is the most standard-compliant rendering engine, but not the most full-featured. If you use it you'll find it quite limited, for instance regarding Active X, or also it can't have an embedded WYSIWYG editor such as the fckeditor (http://www.fckeditor.net/) due to technical limitations (check the compatibility). Remember haw we had to struggle to force Opera to be compatible with Gmail?
So if they used Opera instead of IE, obviously many things would break because Opera almost doesn't have any IE proprietary specifications implemented.
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