Opera celebrates its 15th birthday

gallery

The people at Opera are lighting the birthday cake candles today to celebrate it being 15 years since work began on its web browser.

The browser started out in 1994 as a project by two computer scientists in a research lab for Telenor, Norway's telecommunications incumbent, who felt that they could do better than the basic Mosaic browser of the date.

While Opera lags behind the lies of Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in market share, today Opera says that it has 40 million users on Windows, Mac and Linux.

"Geir and I knew the web would forever change how people live, work and play - the web browser would be the tool to enable that transformation," said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera, in a statement. "Today, I am humbled by what our company, together with the worldwide community of Opera users, has achieved."

The browser itself appeared in 1996, however, so the company could be accused of celebrating a little early. The company is after recognition for introducing two technologies that are now key to all web browsers – CSS rendering and tabbed browsing. However, other features, such as its introduction of mouse gestures in 2001, have become less-widely adopted.

Opera’s browser is also well established in embedded devices such as the Nintendo Wii, and is the browser of choice for many handset manufacturers.

Recently, Opera announced its Opera Turbo technology, which it says will speed up web browsing on all web connections. Opera 10 is currently still at alpha, with a beta due out later this year.

Email to a friend

Print this page