Browsing Histories

Is there room for yet another internet browser in the hyper-competitive browser industry? How has the internet browsing business changed, where is it headed, and when will we finally get to the promised land of the Internet of Things?

– WBJ Observer asked Jon von Tetzchner, the co-founder and former CEO of Opera Software, currently working on his next endeavor – Vivaldi Technologies

Interview by Beata Socha

WBJ Observer: Your latest endeavor, Vivaldi Technologies, officially released the Vivaldi browser in April 2016. What is it like to deliver a product in such a competitive market?

Jon von Tetzchner: I’ve been making browsers my whole professional life, since 1994. When we started working on Opera, the leading browser was Mosaic and most people today don’t even know what Mosaic was. So, starting again with Vivaldi was not unfamiliar territory. This is something that my team and me know better than anything else.

How is Vivaldi different from other browsers?

If you look at all the browsers on the market today, they’re all limiting their functionalities – if something isn’t used very often, you cut it. Some of it is dictated by the business model, some by the company’s philosophy. We have a different philosophy. We all spend a lot of time on the internet. Probably more than an hour a day. A lot of people spend three, or even up to 10 hours a day on the internet. We’ve made a tool that will adapt to you and your usage. Take tab management for instance. Many of us have a lot of tabs open simultaneously. What happens in other browsers is that they don’t get enough space and get crammed. We’ve done several things to make their use more efficient: if you close a tab by mistake, there’s a simple “undo” button. Another functionality we’ve added is “tab stacking” – you can get your tabs one on top of another, so they don’t get too crowded.

How is the market responding to Vivaldi?

Extremely well. We get a lot of positive feedback from end users and from journalists. People like what we are doing.

Do you think the browser market is saturated as it is?

I don’t think so. If you asked me if there is room for another car, I’d say yes. Look at Tesla. Even after a century of competition in a market, there is always room for improvement and change, for something a bit different. Of course, building a browser is not trivial. I’ve seen a lot of companies try and fail. It’s about whether you have the stamina, the right product etc. If you count local browsers, there’s between five and ten browsers currently on the PC market. And, yes, there is room for more, if you know what you’re doing.

What are the challenges of working on a freeware product?

It’s not a problem if you have a working business model. You don’t need to have people pay for a product. You get money through search partners and affiliated bookmarks. At Opera we had revenue of $1 per user per year. It boils down to how many people you need to create the necessary revenue. I like that we can focus on one thing: creating a product attractive enough for people to want to use it.

How has the browser industry changed over the past 20 years, since you founded Opera?

It’s been changing gradually. When we started with Opera, we only had PCs. We had to convince people that browsers would also be needed on mobiles, on pads, on television. One by one, they have all fallen into place and people have realized that mobile is a part of the internet equation. When we were doing it for the first time in 1999 at Opera, that was not the case. First we did PDAs, then mobile phones like the Nokia 9210, then smartphones and we moved from there. We made our first delivery on a web pad in 2000.

That was years before the iPad.

Yes. We believed in mobile technology and for a long time we had to convince people it was going to happen. They didn’t believe me until the iPad came out. We worked with Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola. Sadly, many of those projects never came to the market. The financial crash happened and a lot of promising projects were scrapped.

After PCs and mobile devices, what’s the next frontier for the browser business?

Television and consoles. We’ve delivered on Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, as well as Nintendo Wii. I think that television still hasn’t used all its potential and has a way to go when it comes to internet browsing.

What about the Internet of Things? Naysayers claim that if it was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

As the cost of processing power is being reduced significantly, it opens up a lot of devices to being connected. Sure, I would expect my home to be more automated that it is today. In a lot of ways we haven’t really come that far from the technologies of the 1970s. There’s a book on home automation using the Timex Sinclair 1000, a computer launched in 1982 that had 2 KB of memory! If you can control your home with that thing, why haven’t we come further with the processing power we have available now?

Why indeed. What do you think is standing in the way?

The technical solutions that are being offered have not been standardized. You need a standardization body to take advantage of the wealth of innovation that is out there. That’s what happened with the World Wide Web. The reason why the Web is so successful is because it was done at CERN and the guys responsible for it decided not to patent it. They decided that everyone could develop the Web, and they were just providing a great tool. There are a lot of small and big companies. It is possible for a big company to launch technology that is good or even great, but if it isn’t backed by other companies, it becomes limited. I remember that at the first Web conference, a person from Apple said that the Web was a copy of their HyperCard. The reason HyperCard has disappeared and the Web turned into a massive success is that the Web is open, not to mention that the people who did it were brilliant.

How can we solve the problem of standardization, or the lack thereof?

It would require all the parties that want to engage in this market to come together and agree on certain principles. Ideally it would be through the W3C – the World Wide Web Consortium. Things have been moving slowly, though. We were working on this at Opera from 2005, looking at communication between devices. I think we had some good ideas and I would like to see something come out of that.

You worked with a lot of Polish programmers at Opera. What do you think of their skills?

They were great. They were very competent and I do hope to work with them again.

Why did you decide to work with Poles instead of outsourcing to India, for example?

We did some work in India as well. But with Poles, distance is important and communication is easier. Polish people are very much like Scandinavians in the way we behave, talk, and how we engage. That’s why Poles who move abroad and work in Scandinavia integrate well with the community.