Opera CEO's interviewed in slashdot

[urlwolf]

Opera has been an innovative browser for some time; it was one of the first to offer popup blocking, tabs (or MDI of some description), sessions, mouse gestures, and so on. However, since then, other browsers have implemented them as well; Firefox has extensions offering mouse gestures and sessions, and popup blocking and tabs are now commonplace. After offering so many features, would you prefer browsers such as Firefox and IE to come up with their own ideas instead of taking them from other browsers, or prefer the sharing of ideas so the web is better off overall?

Jon von Tetzchner:

Although our competitors have opened their eyes to some of our features, many are still only to be found in Opera and we aim to continue adding new ones. I am happy that we are considered the most innovate browser company and that is something we will be working hard to maintain. It is quite flattering that our features are being copied like that and I would prefer us to be in the position of being copied and not the other way around.

from
[link from slashdot.org]

[Josh]

"Our concern with regards to extensions has been security and general usability. We have seen the number of security issues Microsoft has struggled with and many of them have been related to the APIs between the different applications. However, we do see a demand and we do tend to listen to demands from our users."

How many of you interpret that as them seriously considering adding extensions or an API to allow for 3rd parties to addin to the browser?

[JavaJones]

Reasonably interesting interview, even if many of the answers were pretty uninformative. As some of the /.otters commented, I would have expected, or at least liked to see some more straight-up, technical answers for the /. crowd. Also, why did it take him a year to answer?

As for the plugin support, well this was a year ago, before Opera 9, and Opera 9 seemed to make no movement toward better plugin support (that I'm aware of). So unless it's in Opera 10 I'd say that was just lip service, sadly.

- Oshyan