So the new owners of Opera are dumping the news and community site MyOpera. The former CEO and other Opera alumni have made Vivaldi a forum, email, blog hosting, community site to replace it. They have migration tools for those coming from My opera. More features to be added.
Interesting their servers are all located in Iceland, and they make special note of Icelandic love of freedom from censorship and warrantless searches.
Also, some decent browser discussion in the forums there.
https://vivaldi.net/
Wait! WHAT new owner?
I should have said new management. Not sure about new owner.
http://www.news-republic.com/Web/ArticleWeb.aspx?regionid=1&articleid=18131246
Either way, it was news to me ...and that's saying something.
I'll hold off on half-forming any conspiracy theories for now and just wait to see what shakes out.
Not sure I can dream up a conspiracy. I am disappointed Opera has abandoned its own rendering engine. It also seems like the new Opera is stepping back from the full featured browser concept to slowly going minimalist.
With all that user data? Particularly in that caching setup they had to speed things up? Given today's penchant for selling metadata, I think it's ripe for a conspiracy or two.
Vivaldi is up to something because they are not building this social network out of the goodness of their heart. See: vivaldi.com
My guess is they are building a browser. Probably more than that but its a start. I'm all for that, I'd kinda like to see something full featured like the old 12.14 ver of Opera but using Gecko rendering engine.
Back to Vivaldi.net, the email service gives you 5GB. FYI.
Vivaldi wrote 94 operas...never knew that...
12.16 is still one of my main daily browsers. Like von Tetzchner I'm not too thrilled to see whrere the newer versions are headed.
I used the MyOpera community from time to time over the years, but never saw much value in it as it was pretty unfocused. I never really got the whole blog idea. Who wants to blog on a search engine's forum site? I guess there must have been some people using it though. I truly doubt that there were 10 million active users...
>Iceland
Not sure it's s privacy issue though - probably more related to the fact that electricity and cooling is very cheap up there.
RC has me thinking conspiracies so I think Vivaldi is building a browser. It will offer data compression so they can data mine more info than they otherwise would. They would be insane to just come out with desktop browser so my guess is there will be mobile and desktop versions.
Rumbas, they do mention cheap cooling for servers in Iceland along with green geothermal energy. Considering all the current NSA publicity locating in Iceland ads a layer of reassurance for cloud services like email.
Bill, looks like my opera has evolved into more of a small social network site. I'm sure for Opera it was about stickiness and page views for ads but for Vivaldi they will use it for feedback and product trials. Seems like a pretty geeky crowd devoted to browsers. I think, it will act as a front end for all sort of cloud services
Its going to be interesting to see where this goes.
Rumbas, over here, touting that you're moving your servers to Iceland is a PR-chic way tech firms are giving the finger to government intrusion. UNLESS, however, they move their corporation and principal owners to Iceland it really doesn't give them any legal protection from subpoenas. And nothing is going to stop the NSA.
So the conspiracy plot thickens...
Looking around the members admin I see apps for calendar, to do lists, photo albums, RSS feeds, notes, friends, birthday lists. Lots of info to be gotten from these. Also if one uses Firefox as a model, these could easily be made into apps in a browser that sync with the Vivaldi cloud.
We have been in Iceland a while, followed my original ISP guy when he moved all his stuff there.
Spoke to him today and he said his back-up service (awesome BTW) has seen a huge spike from US customers looking to escape the NSA's curiosity.
Seems like a good time to invest in an Icelandic hosting company.
>Seems like a good time to invest in an Icelandic hosting company.
I'm not sure their business culture is same as in the "west", certainly the UK has had an overall bad experience with Icelandic investors.
On the positive side no effect on UK rankings by moving there, in fact maybe even a slight positive.
I wonder how hard it would be for an expat to go over there and open up shop? I'd imagine there isn't a huge backlog of people trying to get residency there.