Opera holds the web's most valuable secret • Hacker News Board

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#61

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 10:59 PM UTC

anonymousDan wrote: post #37

axod wrote: post #3

In summary, Opera does proxying and caching for its mobile browser. The article does very little to tell us why that's 'valuable' or indeed a secret.

Yes it does. Basically it says that opera intends to strip out ads from the pages it serves and replace them with new ads. Which new ads? Opera will simply auction the space to the highest bidder. Obviously this will only work for ads that go through its servers, but apparently it controls a large proportion of the mobile proxying/caching market. Sounds nice in theory, not sure whether it will hold up in practice. No…

You are wrong.

Opera will NOT strip out ads from pages.

What Opera will do is to let the owner of the page choose to serve ads to mobile browsers through Opera's ad network.

So any ads from Opera on a site will be because the owner of the site requested them.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#62

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 11:01 PM UTC

mfukar wrote: post #23

zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

It sort of begs the question will opera still be relevant in a few years down the line as rendering on phones gets cheaper and faster.

I doubt it. Not only phones get increasingly powerful, but the core is also evolving, transitioning to IP and LTE being just around the corner; I believe pilot deployments have already started in the US and Japan.

The problem is that most of the world is not going to be using these powerful phones, and in the parts of the world where you can use them, operators are already killing unlimited data plans.

You are living in a dream world if you think compression is going away any time soon.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#63

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 11:02 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

It sort of begs the question will opera still be relevant in a few years down the line as rendering on phones gets cheaper and faster.

Yes, because Opera Mini can run on faster phones, but most sold phones are still the cheap ones, and that isn't changing any time soon.

And with operators cutting down on data plans, limited bandwidth isn't going away any time soon either.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#64

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 11:03 PM UTC

tzury wrote: post #55

I really do not see how this all proxy thing makes it "most valuable secret"

Maybe you should read the article, then?

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#65

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 11:04 PM UTC

celticjames wrote: post #52

There's another company, Skyfire, that's been pushing a similar solution for the past few years. I've never met anyone who actually uses it.

That could be because Skyfire is, frankly, crap.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#66

Post by famrey » Sat, Nov 20, 2010, 11:04 PM UTC

DjDarkman wrote: post #59

Opera Mini is a HTML/Image viewer, not a real browser, it's too crippled to be called a web browser. Comparing Opera's cache to Google's cache is not a good idea, they work differently.

Opera Mini browses the web. It's a browser.