I would like to evaluate my thoughts about Opera with the effects on the software and the costs to implement it. And I want them to go along with the strategy of Opera ASA. But as an outsider I can only roughly estimate. Additional information would probably bring me to other decisions and ideas. In the best case it will be only refining some details, but I suppose some of my work will be for nothing because I just didn't know.
There are some major topics I like to name:
First, are there strategic guidelines or no-goes by Opera ASA I should know about? For example:
- Does Opera want to be low-key with Microsoft? I don't think so but it would change a lot.
- What like will or should be the future relationship with Google? The rumours about buying Opera fit to Google, but to me it feels not like the way Opera people think and work. Nevertheless there is the possibility of a closer strategic partnership on technical level (besides the search technology).
Second there are all the technical internals, especially
- What is the architecture of all, and here especially the UI QUICK
- Which way single components are realized and connected
- What are the special boundaries and abilities of the different panels and toolbars and why they have different functionality. Speaking of this I sometimes think because panels and widgets could be or are normal web pages, whether it could be that panels = webpages = widgets (=toolbars?) and the same content could be shown everywhere? Well as I started this point I'm interested in the very special differences between them.
- What is Opera Platform in detail? It sounds like it is more than only a SDK. The special question is, how local applications in the handhelds are connected to Opera (with the applications-framework) and what would the same thing be for Opera desktop. I suppose it is either (another) kind of API to have specialized extension-like things or it might even be kind of an application server or web server built into the browser itself (I just managed to register for the Opera Platform pages – didn't manage to get access some weeks ago. Maybe I'll know more the next days).
- I suppose with every answer there will arise new questions.
I guess the core (Presto/Merlin) is a pretty capsuled module. I think I like it really much the way it will be with O9. With high (even higher) standards compliance and adding RTE for the growing WEB2 pages. The only things I would recommend is to have rendering is oriented more the same like Firefox instead of IE (what Opera already started) and that eventually missing WEB2 features should have high priority.
And speaking of features – the next post will deliver the first – bigger – idea.
