The CEO of Opera Software, Jon S. von Tetzchner, has promised he “will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland” if the number of downloads passes 1 million by Saturday. Sure, we’re falling for this cheap publicity stunt, just as they hoped we would. But I can’t help but hope he ends up having to make good on his commitment.
Doesn’t this just make it sound like he’s confident that the number of Opera downloads won’t do so well?
So now I wonder how many people are going to download it -again- just to make sure they get over a million? Although, seeing as how a lot of us got it off of torrents, the true number of downloads will be higher than what they report. I can’t blaim him though, this does make for good publicity. This way they get back in the news headlines so downloads don’t drop off as much. Smart move.
It should be said that Norwegians (even the half Icelandic ones) are second to none, except maybe the Brits, when it comes to binge-drinking and making wild boasts while doing it.
6 beers: “I’m the best salesman this company has ever produced!”
12 beers: “I can head-butt tshrough this wall! Jusht you watsh me!” *Klonk* *Thud*
(Full disclosure: I’m half Norwegian and twice as bad myself.)
http://bitsofnews.com
Oh this’ll be great. Anyone see Open Water?
I would try it out, but they only have Solaris SPARC, not Solaris X86 version available
installed it, saw it had ads, then uninstall. A free browser with ads? I get that enough in GMail.
Agreed. They could also provide Sparc/IA-64/PowerPC versions for Linux and FreeBSD. I am sure it is a trivial matter to compile on those archs once you can compile to another arch for the same OS.
In any case Opera 8 runs great here. I wonder if this version includes the latest IMAP backend code (in the v8 preview 5).
600k downloads in first 48 hours is quite an achievement. People know what is good.
If he makes the swim, i’ll BUY opera.
-Kevin
If you remove the “main” toolbar (the one w/ the big buttons), the ads shrink to a very thin line, just like normal google ads. No longer noticable.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around- if the number of downloads DOESN’T reach one million, THEN he swims. I can’t imagine what the joy is in swimming in the cold sea. Somebody explain this.
Unlike other places where talk is cheap in the upper management, I believe we will soon see pictures of a very wet CEO if they get the downloads. Don’t expect him to swim very far, but he sure will hit the water:-)
Why is this on OSNews? It’s obvious that he is just kidding, as such a feat is clearly impossible. Slow news day, huh?
What will sink the CEO of Opera first : too much alcohol, a mini iceberg, a killer whale or a US submarine ?
If you remove the “main” toolbar (the one w/ the big buttons), the ads shrink to a very thin line, just like normal google ads. No longer noticable.
And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…
And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google..
Not a very big problem, is it? Just buy yourself a license, and get rid of them!
Personally, I just fell in love with the voice functions in the new version. I’d gladly pay for a license if I could choose to keep the Google ads (yes, I do have use for them).
That thing is fast ! And the Mac version has the mail now. Great ! It’s the best mail I ever seen (access points rules).
… is quite strange : it launches Textedit with a “wysiwyg” view of the page, and you can’t see the code ! Must be a bug.
For all the people who complain about a cluttered interface, look at this: http://www.opera.no/docs/screenshots/800/03/
Can’t be done much cleaner than that and still keep basic functionality (menu, location bar and tabs). The home/back/forward buttons is even inside the location bar.
> And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…
Exactly. Nothing wrong with that.
Either he hasn’t yet heard of something called “download.com” or they just added the downloads (numbers (highly unlikely)).
If you go here – http://www.download.com/Opera/3000-2356_4-10383457.html?tag=lst-0-4
it says Opera 8 has 4.8 mil downloads. Maybe he was just talking about 1 mil from their server?
Anyway, doesn’t it seem weird that Opera 8 gathered over 4.5 mil downloads while it took Firefox 1.0 like 5 months (?) for 20 mil. btw Firefox 1.02 has around 2mil on that site, but I guess Mozilla’s mirrors have been stable.
Does any of you Opera guys know if it’s possible to make the tabs behave like in Firefox? So when I close one I don’t get thrown on the last tab I was on, but on the previous tab in line (like Firefox).
On my linux system i can say that opera is the best browser.
Definitely many will argue that firefox is better, but its bloated ui is too slow for my 200MHz system. And I dont think it a good idea that many basic browser facilities can only be provided through third-party extensions.
Too bad :p
Back to Safari.
YAY, so this article is an example of what is meant by “exploring the future of computing”.
THX
>And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…
You select whether to get content-based ads or random ones when you install Opera. If you select random, then no URLs will be sent.
If he swims as well as Opera parses Javascript on the Mac he will drown within sight of the Norway’s coast.
😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Lecomte
…despite this being a nice, lighthearted article, the responses prove that most of the frequenters of this site have absolutely no senses of humor or whimsy at all.
“> And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…
Exactly. Nothing wrong with that.”
thats called spyware. if you dont see anything wrong with it *shrugs*
“And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…”
Well I don’t mind…
Ben
I downloaded it hope I was counted. runs geat on FreeBSD 5.3p9-RELEASE. I like Opera’s interface better than mozilla firefox,
Well I have been fat and happy with IE for many years but based on the Spunk of these guys I’m downloading it now and giving it a test drive. If only they had Opera for BeOS 😉
“If only they had Opera for BeOS ;-)”
They had Opera for BeOS. 😉 I think the last version they released was 3.62.
“> And all the urls you’re requesting are transmitted to Google…
Exactly. Nothing wrong with that.”
thats called spyware. if you dont see anything wrong with it *shrugs*
there’s a difference, spywares like dap or kazaa don’t warn you that you’re spyed
http://www.opera.com/adsupport/index.dml
http://www.opera.com/docs/ads/
http://www.opera.com/privacy/ads/index.dml
moreover, you can choose between google ads or random ads or pay the version.
I really think that some program need money to be improved. and Opera is getting more an more attractive. firefox/mozilla have been, for many features, inspired by Opera – but Opera never complained.
Opera software is a business company, but if all the business companies had such a respect for customer, for quality, and security, windows would be a dream.
Reminds me of a few years ago Richard Branson (Virgin) tried to fly around the world in a balloon. Sounds fun but I’d stay dry thanks
“thats called spyware”
No, that is NOT called spyware. Spyware does it behind the user’s back. With Opera, you SPECIFICALLY have to enable it, which means that you know exactly what’s going on.
If you are going to call Opera spyware, then anything you do is “spied on” since it goes through your ISP anyway…
and torn to pieces by sharks while swimming …
Ha! I herby commit to crawl from our corporate office to the corner pub if we get 1,000 new registered users on My SciTech before close of business today… If wee fail to meet that goal you may see me crawl out – LOL
So its now in your hands:
http://my.scitechsoft.com/navigate.php
…because:
* it does not honor “no-store” response header when going back in session history. They say that they go by the HTML spec, which they are not. Right, spec reads that session history should be left intact despite that page is marked as non-cachable. But “no-store” header overrides this requirement. So, I cannot sync my pages with the server, and I get stale pages.
* It builds up session history not based on location, but for _every_ request, even if it the request to the same exact URL. Granted, this functionality is not defined in the spec, but it makes things look ugly when server responds from the same location several times via redirection. MSIE and Mozilla show only one page, which requires only one click on “Back” to get to previous logical page. Opera requires as many clicks as many times page was shown.
Opera is not suitable for web apps, it is OK for hypertext browsing only, since it caches everything.