Friday, October 20, 2006

InformationWeek

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Opera Says It Can Still Compete In Browser Battle

The company's CTO says Opera actually pioneered the tabbed-browser features later included in Firefox and Internet Explorer.




Even as Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 rolls out to users and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox 2.0 nears completion, rival Opera Software remains convinced it can compete, a company executive said Thursday.

Oslo, Norway-based Opera, which develops the same-named browser for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other desktop platforms, as well as miniature browsers for mobile phones and devices, owns less than one percent of the global browser market, according to Web metrics vendors. But ite.

"Credit is due Opera, and we'd like to see that reflected in market share," Lie said.

Lie was particularly critical of Microsoft's IE 7, which he said was "disappointing." The IE development team, said Lie, had been given the short end of the stick by Microsoft. "They haven't taken things seriously, and haven't given the necessary resources to IE 7. They could have built a new rendering engine, but instead they used [the engine that debuted with] IE 4.

"That's like taking an old car and giving it a new paint job," said Lie. Microsoft launched IE 7 for