Opera Software
More info
- Creator
- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Geir Ivarsøy
- Released
- 1995
- Type
- Browser developer
- Website
- opera.com
Norwegian browser company that invented half of what you take for granted in a browser and rarely got paid for it.
Opera was spun out of Telenor in Oslo in 1995, and the browser shipped the following year. For a long time it cost money or showed ads, which kept it an enthusiast's product. But tabs, Speed Dial, mouse gestures and built-in pop-up blocking all appeared in Opera first, and its own Presto engine followed the CSS standards more faithfully than most. Hardly surprising: Håkon Wium Lie, who proposed CSS in the first place, was the company's CTO.
Opera Mini (2005) compressed pages on the server side and was for years how hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia got online. In 2013 Presto was retired in favour of Chromium and Blink; in 2016 the company was sold to a Chinese consortium. Tetzchner, who had left in 2011, had by then started Vivaldi to rebuild the old Opera.