Jon S. von Tetzchner has been with Opera for a long time – in fact, he co-founded the browser maker back in 1995, and led the company to great success; the desktop version may play a niche role, the various mobile versions surely do not. Today though, he has announced he will be leaving the company due to differences with the board and management.
The official press release is sparse on details, and makes it seem as if there had’t been any disagreements. “It is of course a choice that brings up a lot of emotions”, von Tetzchner says in the press release, “When we first started out, we were a few guys in a really small office – now we are spread all over the world, have over 740 employees and over 200 million users. I am very proud of what we have accomplished, and look forward to following the company closely also in the future.”
Opera’s current CEO (von Tetzchner relinquished that role in 2010) also had some kind words. “We have had a lot of fun during these years, and to say that Jon has created a great company is an understatement”, says Lars Boilesen, “He has taught me and everyone working here a lot. He believed in, and pushed out innovation after innovation that we see our competitors constantly struggling with copying, making Opera a first mover in the technological development of web browsers as we know them today. We are very proud of Jon, and of course of the company.”
However, in an email sent to Opera’s employees, von Tetzchner said that his resignation comes after disagreements with the board and management – what these were about, he wouldn’t say, although he does hint that it’s a different between focussing on tomorrow, or next year.
“It has become clear that the board, management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time at Opera,” von Tetzchner told Opera’s employees, “I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me. I have always worked to build the company for the future. I believe the foundation we have is very solid to build further upon.”
Even though I don’t use Opera myself, it’s pretty clear the browser is one of the more innovative projects in this field, and has managed to bring acceptable web browsing even to devices that no other browser could run on acceptably. Let’s hope that von Tetzchner’s departure does not adversely affect the company’s products.
Didn’t JSvT fire the board or something a couple of years ago because they wanted to sell the company, and he refused to?
Maybe he’s leaving as a protest because the new CEO is willing to sell the company?
That’s what some comments seem to indicate.
Would be a pity…
I’ve been using Opera almost as long as Jon S. von Tetzchner been with well, Opera. I remember that the installation was files were as small as a diskette size capacity. I think I started using Opera in 1996. I do hope that Opera shall continue to innovate and hopefully flourish. Opera has come a long way and I’m proud to say that I am an Opera user.
I second this…
Opera is the first thing I install in my boxes (home desktop, laptop, computer box and VMs) after the OS.
Anyway, I want Opera to continue its innovative way and I want Jon to be news with some new and fascinating project: As fascinating as Opera browser since its beginnings
Me too. In fact that’s why I started using Opera.
The 16Mb RAM 486s in my college library were dog slow running Netscape, and installation of outside software was blocked. Opera 2 fitted on one 1.44Mb floppy with plenty of space left over. With a dozen pages open it was lightning fast compared with Netscape displaying just one, and was far more stable.
Even in that early version Opera featured saved sessions (long before other browsers), so I could move between different computers and reload all my open pages on whichever one I was using. It made a great portable browser long before I ever saw a USB flash drive.
With the release of Opera 10.5 (a massive downgrade IMO) it stopped being a browser I actually enjoy using, but it still has some unique features that I’d miss, and I’ve been holding out hope that sooner or later they’ll fix all the frustrating bugs and annoyances in recent versions.
Hopefully this development won’t mean the end of Opera on the desktop. After all the innovative ideas it’s contributed to other browsers, it’d be sad to see desktop Opera go.
Good luck to Jon S. von Tetzchner for whatever he does in the future.
Wasn’t 10.5 released while Jon T was still CEO?
Considering that the new CEO has said that the desktop browser is very important to Opera as a company, I doubt it’s going away any time soon.
It’s not like there’s going to be a sudden shift now. The new CEO stepped in a year and a half ago. If there were to be sudden shifts, they would have happened by now.
Me too! I have tried other browsers and always come back to Opera. It’s just better and it’s got it all
I have used Opera since v.7
The unfortunate thing is that many site builders are not standard compliant and most websites especially banking requires Internet Explorer or Firefox and would not render certain element properly or at all in Opera.
I do believe Opera is the most standard compliant browser out there and it is the 1st to achieve 100% on Acid3 test. Though other browsers have caught up but I still prefer Opera as it has many features that are still not present in other browsers. It did take some cue from Chrome on simplicity but there’s much to improve still.
Been a devoted Opera fanboy since my first experiment at distro-hopping… from Windows 98 to BeOS R5
which came with Opera 3.x
(which BTW was when I was first came to OSNews, looking for help getting a driver for BeOS in the forums… back when OSNews still had forums!)
And it’s still the first thing I set up on every new install, be it Windows, Linux or BSD.
Oh well, now that Jon has quit, he might find more time to go swimming…
Seeing as Opera has actually shifted from the defacto feauture-driven browser to a social browser in the last year or so, I hope his departure does not drive the sign of Opera’s demise.
Huh? What are you talking about?
Eh?
I hope Opera’s new direction will be more interesting than it was the last few years. Firefox, Safari and Chrome all passed it in market share almost as soon as they were released.
The only interesting things I could expect from them now would be either selling the company, closing the company, ending their desktop browser to focus on their embedded/mobile browser, open sourcing Presto, or adopting Webkit.
There’s nothing Opera can do about those browsers.
Safari is bundled with Mac, so obviously most Mac users are going to use that. This is why Safari has about 5% market share (and fairly stable).
Firefox was heavily promoted by Google, like Chrome is now. That’s the driver behind Chrome’s growth today, and Firefox’d growth (until Google stopped promoting it, and Firefox stopped growing).
Opera doesn’t have an OS to bundle with or an advertising monopoly to advertise their browser.
So what if Safari is bundled with OS X? IE is bundled with Windows.
Yeah some people may use the bundled browser but pretty well everyone I know does not use it unless they really have to.
I use Firefox on Windows, OSX & Linux. One browser on all platforms. Safari is so-so. IMHO Chrome is a lot better. IE sucks and I’ll only use it if there is no other choice such as a corporate sharepoint system.
Yes, that is my point. That gives it a huge advantage when it comes to distribution.
IE has Windows, Safari has Mac, Firefox had Google, Chrome has Google. All these are huge distribution channels, and Opera doesn’t have those.
Yes, but the point is that all those other browsers have major distribution channels that Opera lacks.
Hmmm, I guess that make sense. Except, I don’t really remember Google ever promoting Firefox.
I’m pretty sure Firefox’s success has more to do with the combination of a few things: the projects initial focus on making a browser for “mom and pop”, it’s popup-blocking feature, being a free application, it’s warm non-corporate feel, it’s viral marketing campaigns and people being fed up with Internet Explorer.
They did. They paid webmaster up to $1 for every Firefox installation they could generate from their site, remember? Google never did that even with Chrome, AFAIK.
So why did Firefox’s growth stop when Google stopped promoting it?
Well, I’m sure that helped them a lot. Plus you’re right about it’s growth ending after Google stopped promoting it (in August 2008). But by the time Google started the Firefox referral program (in October 2005) it had already long past Opera in market share and by a significant margin too.
The $1 program was not the start of Google’s Firefox promotion.
Care to elaborate on that? I can’t seem to find out about any other promotions before the Firefox referral program.
Google was promoting Firefox early on. I simply mentioned the $1 thing to show just how aggressively Google pushed Firefox. Similar to how they are aggressively pushing Chrome now, which explains most of the growth I think.
Why “initial” focus ? Don’t you think that Firefox continues to have a focus on clean UIs and usability ?
I mean, if there’s one browser which I find clean and dead easy to use and configure, it’s really Firefox (Safari being more or less on an equal footing, which is normal considering that they have heavily taken inspiration from the FF UI)
Edited 2011-06-26 14:08 UTC
Are you saying you fall into the “mom and pop” category? I seriously doubt that, at least in the spirit by which the developers were thinking of.
No, I doubt Firefox is developed thinking about these users anymore. At least that’s the impression I get from the developers and other people in Mozilla. Their main focus is more on things like promoting the “Open Web” and competing with Chrome and Webkit now.
Probably not indeed, but maybe my judgement of the relative ease of use of browsers still has a value
Well, in FF4 they have managed to clean up the firefox interface even further than it already was, freeing up screen space while doing so. And in the very process of this major UI overhaul, they’ve managed to think about having people who upgrade from Firefox 3.6 keep a familiar-looking interface (I’ve been quite impressed when noticing this).
In FF5, they have corrected a very annoying longstanding bug that prevented from closing several tabs in a row (improper automatic tab resizing behaviour).
Recently (I couldn’t tell when, but my bet is during the FF4 development cycle), they’ve opened a site that centralizes their UX bugs in a fun and pleasant interface : http://areweprettyyet.com/ (I love http://areweprettyyet.com/5/syncPromotion/ in particular)
So although they are a bit into politics and test results measurement contests at the moment, I think that UX is still a big concern at Mozilla. I may be wrong though.
Edited 2011-06-26 15:54 UTC
I guess that by “interesting”, you don’t mean something that would be good for the company or the web in general.
From a geek’s POV, yes, the open sourcing of Presto would be a good thing but aside from satisfying curiosity about a proprietary engine nothing (before WebKit) held a candle to, I don’t see these options as “good” per se.
For the rest, I think @MacMan has it right.
You misunderstood me. Those were just things I could expect from them (Opera Software) that would be interesting. I wasn’t listing their options or anything.
As to weather it would be good or bad for the company, that’s none of my concern. Also, I doubt anything Opera does would have a much of an effect on the Web considering their small market share.
Yes, maybe I misunderstood you.
Then, you would be dismissing the fact that Opera introduced several things that are now commonplace in most (if not all) browsers: tabbed browsing, what FF calls “magic bar” (I mean searching from the address field), speed dial, pop-up blocking. Even their competitors acknowledge them as far as innovation goes. Just these examples can drastically change how people’s browsing experience. Not having them would change mine, for worse, that’s for sure.
Movers don’t need to be big, trend-setters aren’t necessarily the most popular ones, no need for a big mouth to be persuasive, and last, innovation doesn’t solely go hand in hand with market share.
It’s called “AwesomeBar” and it works far better than the equivalent in Opera due to having a prediction component and having nifty little features like tag support and switch-to-tab among others. It also works slightly different by not having a full-text index to dig through (which I would welcome for a future Firefox version).
Yes, “AwesomeBar”! My bad. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
We’re talking about it’s influence on the Web not Web Browsers. How many web developers even pay attention to Opera?
Also, it’s debatable just how much browsers copy off of Opera. For instance I believe Mozilla’s tabs were actually a port of NetCaptor, which actually was the first browser to have tabs.
Let’s see… HTML5 started out at Opera. The father of CSS works at Opera. And so on.
Yes, Opera’s influence on the web has indeed been massive. Everyone is talking about HTML5 these days. That they may not be aware that HTML5 started out at Opera (and then Mozilla joined shortly after) is irrelevant.
NetCaptor was not the first browser with tabs. And where did you get the idea that Mozilla copied it?
Why are you so extremely eager to pretend that Opera didn’t massively influence both browsers and the web itself? All facts point to the contrary.
I think HTML5 was a joint effort from the start. No one person or company can be credited for it. Even Ian Hickson, the guy who is often credited for it’s creation, seems to confirm this:
http://www.webstandards.org/2009/05/13/interview-with-ian-hickson-e…
You’re wrong. Netcaptor was indeed the first browser with Tabs. Also, David Hyatt, the guy who implemented Mozilla’s tabs, said he got it from the MultiZilla extension who had basically cloned NetCaptor.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dave/archives/2002_09.html#002809
Nope. It started at Opera. It wasn’t called HTML5 then, and the scope was smaller. But it started at Opera, and Mozilla joined shortly after.
Nope. InternetWorks had tabs before Netcaptor.
What’s your source on the HTML5 thing and the InternetWorks thing? This is really all besides the point because we’re still essentially talking about influencing other Web Browsers. Not the Web. The Web is only influenced by Web Browsers with significant market share.
Basic knowledge which anyone who has paid attention will possess.
No, we are talking about HTML and CSS. Can’t get any more fundamental to the web than that.
The Web is Web Sites/Pages not Web Standards.
The last thing we need is yet another WebKit based browser.
Even though I personally don’t use Opera (more or less tolerate Safari currently), I encourage to try Opera Chrome and FF. The more standards compliant browsers, the better IMO, this keeps any one browser from hijacking standards, and forces lazy ass web devs to make sure their stuff works in multiple browses. The last thing we need is another IE6 scenario.
Has Opera gotten a decent AdBlocker yet? That is the main reason I dropped it, as what it had sucked compared to Firefox a couple years ago.
It sure does
https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/opera-adblock/0.4…
I’ve never been an Opera fan on the desktop (because when my IT age of reason came I started using the BSDs, where Firefox and Konqueror were the only native, usable browsers), but Opera Mobile is the main reason why browsing the web with my Nokia N97 mini is a good experience, whereas using the integrated, Webkit-based browser can be frustrating sometimes. Thanks Jon.
I hope the issues is nothing to do with the current trend towards dumbing down and minimalism.
The features is why I use Opera.
The features are still there. A cleaner default interface doesn’t mean that the features are removed.
Some of my favourite Opera features (mainly MDI related) were removed/broken in 10.5. While some have been worked on since then, there are still quite a few classic Opera features that are missing or badly bug ridden in 11. To me none of the features added since then even come close to making up for the lost functionality.
In addition, some of the new features added can’t easily be turned off. For example, there’s no option to disable automatic image resizing, while that’s just the kind of thing that would have been added to opera:config in the past.
Up until 10.10 it was possible to make Opera look and feel like pretty much any previous version with a little tweaking. That stopped being possible from 10.5 onwards.
They’ve definitely moved away from offering a highly customisable “power user” browser in favour of eye-candy and flashy gimmicks. The new UI feels a lot slower too.
I can’t really think of any missing features. MDI is working fine here.
You don’t need it in opera:config, since you can just add an extension to disable it now.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Opera is as customizable as always.
You obviously don’t use it as MDI is still a mess in 11.5. Cascading of tabs doesn’t work, restored tabs become tiny little windows, tabs open in the background are hidden if any other tabs are minimised. There are loads of little problems that add together to make it barely usable.
So because Opera didn’t allow this to be customised someone else had to make an extension to do the job (unfortunately it seems to have some glitches and compatibility issues). That hardly makes the point that Opera’s developers are still dedicated to creating a highly customisable browser. In the past this kind of thing would have been a user choice without needing outside extensions to be installed.
No, the point is that they made it possible to control this using extensions, so they no longer needed to waste their time maintaining it.
It doesn’t matter how it’s done. The point is that it is possible to do.
Yes it does. Extensions = more customization.
Newsflash: in the past they didn’t have extensions that could be used to do it. Now that they do they can spend less time supporting irrelevant corner cases.
Having played with the extension to disable image scaling, it’s a far from perfect solution.
It relies on JavaScript, and if this is disabled on the site it stops working completely. In addition it has issues on some sites that integrate their own automated image scaling. The image auto-sizing also removes the ability to drag and drop images within Opera.
These problems and limitations would have been avoided if Opera themselves had made this feature customisable. Offering their users choice is a much better solution that relying on 3rd parties to fix the browser.
+1 to your entire post except that I stuck with 10.63 because I hate the (reportedly Chrome-like) behavior where pinned tabs (oh, “locked tabs” as Opera now calls them) lose their title, shrink to the favicon and are shifted to the left side of the tab bar. And, with 10.63, I have exactly the same look and feel (including shortcuts) that I had in version 7 or 8.
But yes, what you said is true, especially this: “They’ve definitely moved away from offering a highly customisable “power user” browser in favour of eye-candy and flashy gimmicks.“
This is complete and utter nonsense. Extensions alone opens a new world of customization possibilities.
There’s nothing wrong with eye candy, and Opera is as power user friendly as it has always been.
If you think making these changes is new to Opera, you are obviously an Opera noob. Have you any idea how frequently and massively Opera has changed through the years? Obviously not.
The topic at http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=975522 is enough to support my claim, the one that you call “complete and utter nonsense”, which, by definition, should admit no counterexample. Btw, the topic was opened by me and the number of “+1″‘s is also enough proof that I am not simply babbling.
And no, no noob here. I am a long-time user of Opera, since 2000 actually.
That’s the most pathetic example I have ever seen. Was the behavior customizable in the past?
Your claim was: “moved away from offering a highly customisable “power user” browser in favour of eye-candy and flashy gimmicks”
Your example shows nothing of the sorts. All it shows is that a tiny thing changed (for the better), and you are whining about it.
No, it is proof that people don’t like change.
You have used Opera for more than 10 years, and were still not aware of all the massive changes? So if you aren’t a noob, then what are you? A guy with extremely poor memory?
They just took away the drop down button from the address bar, and then reluctantly allowed it to be added back via opera:config.
I like this comment from a user:
“Reluctantly”? What are you whining about? They added an option for it. Is that supposed to be wrong all of a sudden? This is the way it’s always been done.
Wow, some people…
He sounds like a moron. “Oh no, someone did something I personally don’t like! They must be evil!”
Fail.
Edited 2011-06-27 08:05 UTC
And so the real reason why Jon resigned has been revealed:
Jon: Why do you want to do this to my browser? That’s evil!
Board: Sorry, Jon. This is the way it’s always been doneâ„¢
Jon: Since when? I am the freaking founder!
Board: Since the release of Chrome, Jon.
Jon: Okay, you win.
This doesn’t even begin to make sense. What does Chrome have to do with anything?
Are you saying that Jon didn’t want Opera to succeed?
Not surprising: it’s a corporate mindset in a business world. Usually, what JSvT refers to is assets growth: managing boards want more growth for their assets and they’re are willing to take risks and make (silly) decisions for that.
However, I am curious as to the real divergences in opinion between him and the others. Too bad he didn’t say.
Edited 2011-06-27 10:22 UTC