> At that point doing new frontend for Webkit from scratch is probably not going to be any cheaper than buying Opera
The article notes that Opera's current estimated market cap is $670M, which is a lot of money for a browser frontend. I think it's more likely that they want to lock-in the feature phone user base.
It's not just a browser front-end, it's also a browser engine. If they acquired Opera and pushed it to increase its market share Facebook could gain a lot of influence on HTML and the adoption of web technologies.
This would actually be an awesome outcome. A bigger Opera marketshare, particularly if they eat into Webkit's, would mean that there will be stronger pressure to keep web development standards compliant.
I'm not sure it would promote the standards itself faster though. At least the WebKit side (Apple, Google), has like the exact opposite incentives for that to happen. The Facebook-Opera push would have to be quite hard.
For those not familiar: tabbed browsing (complete with closed page history and undo), whole page zoom, a search engine search bar (and then address bar searching), a download manager, middle click to open in new tab, speed dial/"top sites" for quick navigation in new tabs, and restoring open pages/tabs after the browser has closed or crashed are some of the features "Opera had first."
That's chump change compared to doing it in house, especially with the IPO in FB's pocket.
Also, I wasn't even aware that opera ran on phones, so it doesn't strike me as something they care about, unless they're looking at 3rd-world countries.
> many of the users only access the Internet via their mobile devices
Do you have a source for that? I'm finding it a little hard to believe, especially since getting a cheap computer + internet for two years is (much) less expensive than a phone + wireless. Granted, I'm in the US, which is probably very different from the demographics in Opera Mini's user base.
"The study, which was conducted between November 2010 and November 2011, found that globally, 56% of Opera users and 43% of those who use another browser only access the Internet via their mobile devices. In some countries, including Egypt (72%), Bangladesh (69%), Brazil (65%) and South Africa (61%), these numbers for Opera users are significantly higher."
> Granted, I'm in the US, which is probably very different from the demographics in Opera Mini's user base.
I can only speculate to why they prefer using a mobile, but I think that the infrastructure is so different from our countries that we shouldn't necessarily base our assumptions on what we would have done.
The article notes that Opera's current estimated market cap is $670M, which is a lot of money for a browser frontend. I think it's more likely that they want to lock-in the feature phone user base.