Is this thing on?

Following up the discussion on Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA, I think HTML5 may be a huge win for accessibility. HTML4 was filled with good intentions, HTML5 should be filled with good implementations.

HTML4 became a W3C standard 11 years ago. By now we should have plenty of implementation experience with the standard, user agents, web developers, and authoring tools and what has actually made the Web more or less accessible. Ideally there should be an audit of all the HTML4 features for their impact on accessibility, whether they were designed for the purpose or not.

We also have extensive implementation experience. Accessibility was central to the design of Opera from the very beginning and part of the company culture, but that doesn't mean every initiative was a success. Other browsers and tool makers should have learned something the last decade as well. Accessibility enjoys considerable goodwill among developers, most want the Web to be accessible, but to turn good will into good products first we need to make the implicit knowledge explicit, what failed as much as what succeeded and why it failed.

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Before the weekend W3C announced that the XHTML2 Working Group would be discontinued. That hardly came as any surprise, and mixed with that feeling of relief and melancholy the death of a terminally ill patient may elicit. To me XHTML2 was the next HTML3, another ill-fated W3C spec discontinued at an early stage and superceded by a browser-supported spec, HTML 3.2. The difference was that I had an inside view of XHTML2.

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During the last few months I have gotten myself another permanent residence (especially after they got WiFi), a Chinese restaurant here in Prague. I spend more waking hours there than I do at home.

Eating, drinking, socialising, and being on the Internet has occupied large parts of my life anyway, but I enjoy organising as well. Today the first major event I've helped with, a night at the Opera, will be live this night. For Opera employees in Oslo this may be familiar, the Underwater pub nearby the Opera HQ has opera nights Tuesdays and Thursdays, and have had it for years, and it is a favourite Opera hangout.

Still, the Chinese-Czech musical connection is fascinating and appealing, we'll see how it works out tonight. See you there?

At least until tonight when we, if in Prague, will find out. Opera's Håkon Wium Lie (nice interview), will count down to its doom.

And so it begins... On the circuitous route from the outskirts of Europe to the centre, going from Oslo through Linköping and Wrocław, Opera has finally reached Prague.

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Just published my first SVG article on Dev Opera.

I came across a blog claiming that we're at war, based on Eskil having a good partisan gloat on a negative review of the Konqueror-based Nokia browser ("A special circle of Hell needs to be created..."). The blog entry is somewhat unfair as it discounts Small-Screen Rendering for reformatting pages and then goes to criticise horizontal scrolling, the very problem SSR was designed to counter (if you don't reformat the page on too small screens, you will get horizontal scrolling which wrecks havoc with readability), but I liked the site-by-site comparison.

I am fine with our "war", just like press coverage of the "second browser war" is good for anyone caring about browser rendering on the Web. That is, as long as the story is IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari/Konqueror (vs the other browsers if the journalists are thorough enough). IE vs Firefox stories are less interesting, obviously for leaving out Opera, but in particular because as long as the story is about two boxers in the ring, why should anyone care about open standards?

An unsung browser innovator is OmniWeb and I also think that everyone at Opera who have ever touched a Mac have a soft spot for iCab. Yes, it is a competitor, but it has got that Opera spunk. It has the longest odds in the world but it doesn't cease to innovate, and it is deeply committed to standards. I don't have a Mac, otherwise I would probably have bought a licence, just on principle. If you got a Mac and 29€ to spare, you know what to do. While you're at it, download Opera for Mac and do a lot of those Google searches.

The original browser war was a traumatic affair for the Web, and in my view Netscape was a greater villain than IE, but both were pretty nasty and neither cared about Web standards unless it furthered their cause. The more the current "war" is reported, the more likely the best browsers will be installed instead of default browsers. So the second browser war is benevolent, may the best browser, be it IE, Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, or iCab win.

I conditionally put IE as a competitor and not an enemy, though it has had a chequered past. From IE6 to IE7 Microsoft has played fairly as I see it, they didn't in the past and who is to know if they will in the future.

The same goes for this reported phone browser war. More than on PCs the browser you will use on your phones is the one initially installed, good or bad. If there was to be a browser war Opera vs Nokia (KHTML) vs Netfront vs Minimo, so much the better. Minimo is lacking for other reasons, but as for standards compliance Gecko is a very decent competitor. Netfront isn't up to par with the desktop browsers in that respect, but is good enough to be counted in this company. Reviews comparing all of these, for small devices as well as the not-quite-small devices, would be good for open standards, the same open standards as on desktop browsers.

So again competition is good. If we were to declare war I would suggest War on WAP, at least it got this nice alliteration.

Co-founder of Opera Software, Geir Ivarsøy, died of cancer last Thursday.

The first time I met Geir Ivarsøy was in 1998 installing Opera 3.5, when Opera got CSS support. What I didn't know then was that this very first good CSS implementation had been Geir's work in few months, but it made CSS geeks worldwide pay attention to the Opera browser. A couple years later many of us ended up as Opera employees.

When I started in Opera I was charmed by that people worked regular hours, the atmosphere was as far removed from the life of a microserf as could be. Geir, our lead developer, went to the office in the morning and home to his family in the afternoon. But what happened in between was pure gold. Dozens of newly employed Opera programmers lined up at his door whenever they had a problem they couldn't fix. Geir would pinpoint the problem and the solution within minutes.

While this complete command of the Opera source code was impressive, it wouldn't fit the organisation we were to become. It must have been around 2002 when he told me with some satisfaction that he didn't personally know the code anymore. And the rookie programmers were rookies no more. It is their work you see in Opera today.

When we needed to jump ship, both continuing on what was to become Opera 6 and developing the next generation engine, Geir and Karl Anders were the architects of Presto, based on experience from the past as well as the requirements from the future. Presto is a large collaboratory effort but it was also probably the most sensitive engineering project we have ever undertaken. We had dozens of projects hanging in the balance, we could not afford to fail and we didn't.

As Opera Software has grown from a handful people to a quarter thousand I still recognize most of the same company culture as when I started. The Asterix-like attitude, never to be fazed by incredible odds (part of what makes it fun to work for this company), the drive to make something that is actually good, and never cease to improve what's there.

Some of this Opera culture can be pinned on individuals such as Jon's endearing conviction that nothing we ever do is second-rate. Less obvious but just as present is Geir's influence, both on those who met him, and those who did not. I would not call him shy, but he was intensely attention adverse, you would never see him first in line when Opera won prizes. He didn't brag even though he had better reasons than most everyone. He focused on doing the task right and doing it well, and the proof was in the code. To this day you won't hear an Opera programmer brag, even when they have good reasons to, and they often do.

Geir's understated sense of humour complemented those of us who enjoy being rather overt in our merry glibness, like elsewhere Geir was subtle but clear. He was immensely nice, likeable, unassuming, but not easily impressed. As the saying goes the good Geirs die young, but in this case his renown will last for a long time.

Now that Opera is feeling free, inevitably the question of open source comes up. There is nothing wrong with open source, even if I sometimes wonder about some of its evangelists, but still we have opted for having the Opera source code closed.

Could Opera benefit from being open source? Yes. Does it benefit from not being open source? Yes. To us the benefits from being open source are small, the benefits from not being open source large. For other products, maybe one of ours if we had any, the bottom line might be different. This is a commercial decision and not one of ideology. Maybe we are netheads with a cause but fundamentally we are in it for the money, and not to promote purity of thought. If we don't make money from producing a browser, we will do something else.

One reason an open source Opera wouldn't be such a good idea is that there are already two healthy open source browser projects out there, based on the Gecko and KHTML layout engines, and three would be a crowd. If we all were the same browser under different names, there would be no variety or competition left except for the respective marketing departments. It is real, open competition we need (something that has been hard to get on the Windows platform).

Open competition depends on fair business practices and open standards, that in turn spurs innovation and variety. I prefer Opera, you might go for Konqueror, while your uncle might not even realize that it is a browser he's using. Competition comes with gains and losses. As time goes by you can expect Opera to take some users from Firefox and Firefox from Opera, but as we are different neither would kill off the other. One might end up the majority browser and the other a minority browser, but there is no reason we will be worse off than now and we are already doing good.

I can't say who is going to end up on top: we, Mozilla, Konqueror, or some browser yet to come. Hey, maybe a standards compliant IE? Of course it would be nice for us to have the biggest slice of the pie, but realistically the top browser has changed several times in the past and is going change several more times in the future. As long as that top browser speaks the same language as the rest there will not be another Netscape vs IE vendor lock-in. The browsers may have different features and strong points, but the promise is that if something looks good and behaves nicely in one of Opera, Mozilla/Firefox, or Konqueror/Safari, it will do so in the others too. Then you can make your choice of browser solely on which one you prefer, not on which part of the web you are dependent on.


One of my concerns with removing the banner is that having a free Opera for desktop could make it appear like free as in cheap. Unsurprisingly many pundits, including Daniel Glazman, believe that the desktop browser is just a lossleader for devices. That is forgetting that Opera for desktop is profitable, now more than before, and I expect it to be much more profitable in the future.

True, we are only earning half as much on desktop than we are on devices, and by losing the banner we have momentarily taken half away of that again, but the cost of producing a desktop browser is also so much lower. There are only three substantial desktop platforms left in the world, Mac, Linux, and Windows, and they are so alike it is hard for a non-expert to tell them apart. Devices on the other hand are all different to each other almost for the sake of being different, and practically all of our platform-specific efforts lies in adapting to that array of disparate devices. Relatively speaking making a desktop browser is easy money.

As the banner waves us goodbye we should recognize that it has had its days, and it has served us well. Before it arrived in December 2000 we shut out all users that hadn't paid up after a month of real use (except for the opera.com web site, so if you never leave the My Opera community you might never have realised the lock had changed).

We got a small core of paying users that way, but this was too exclusive for an ambitious browser that was going places. As Opera was freed with Opera 5.0, the number of users exploded. The banner itself gave us next to nothing at the nadir, but our paying users did and with many more were exposed to Opera we got all the more users supporting us so we could develop a better browser. In time the banner too turned profitable, and advertising's promise of something for nothing is appealing, but like the licence model before it it has been holding us back. The banner may be missed, but there is no time for nostalgia, we have an IE market share to decimate.