Ask Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner

Opera Software has gotten all kinds of media play lately, including rumors that both Google and Microsoft were buying the company. Whether you love or hate Opera, you've got to give them credit for building a decent browser and grabbing a small but noticeable market share in the face of competition from both MSIE and Firefox. Co-founder/CEO Jon von Tetzchner is obviously reponsible for at least some of this success -- and for much of the company's high press profile, due not only to the Opera Browser itself but to at least one whacky PR stunt and at least one high-profile beef with Microsoft. So who is this guy? Ask and find out. He's obviously not your typical software company CEO, so we don't expect typical CEO-type answers from him. We'll send him (direct, not through a PR person) 10 or 12 of your best questions Friday afternoon (US EST), and run his answers during the first week of 2006.

Re:What can we look forward to?

[bob whoops]

Native user agent switching

Sure it does. Go to about:config->general.useragent. There you can edit it to whatever you want. Sure, it's not as easy as in Opera where you can do it from the menu, but this gives you more control (you can only choose from a list in Opera, not make it whatever you want, IIRC)

Re:But they couldn't!

[critter_hunter]

Actually, Opera even when identifying itself as internet explorer still has "Opera" in the UA string.

And no web browser blocks ads out of the box, as far as I can tell. I don't think any ever will, either - it would be tempting for a lot of large ad-supported content providers to block a browser that will never give them ad views anyway. I mean, you're running a website, and you know that anyone using Opera is sucking your bandwidth and not helping you pay for it. Why would you let them on?

Re:Firefox vs Opera

[b4k3d b34nz]

The main reason for me (though not the only one) is speed. Firefox feels like driving a tractor trailer through a slalom after using Opera. The memory footprint in Firefox doesn't help its case either.

Re:Rendering and identify

[jp10558]

The UA.ini featuers (and upcoming site specific features) can be "push" updated in 8.0 and up. That will fake out problem sites. Moreso, browser.js allows Opera ASA to rewrite javascript on problem pages and "push" that as well in updates. That's why the Help -> Report a site problem is useful, and important.

You can also edit Userjs yourself, and UA.ini.

If you want to go beyond js editing in Opera, there is always the venerable and still most powerful proxomitron if you're on windows.

Re:Firefox vs Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason for me is that Opera's zoom feature magnifies both images and text, whereas Firefox's zoom feature only makes the font size larger.

This is an important feature for visually impared users like myself, as many websites (e.g., cnn.com) use images containing text and are umost unreadable on high DPI screens (my laptop has a 15.4 inch 1900x1200 screen). I find that most websites render nicely under Opera on my laptop with the zoom set to 200%. Under Firefox, however, most websites render with tiny images and the right 2/3 of the display contains nothing but whitespace.

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