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My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

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Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#161

Regardless of the facts in this case, this screams to me that Opera is fucked, they know it, and will grab anything they can on the way down. What other conclusion could you possibly draw?

> What other conclusion could you possibly draw?

Without facts? None. But if you want some speculation: Opera's interface is consistently listed as one of the preferred features for its users (if not the preferred feature). And now a guy just gives away for free what would have been their most valuable asset (assuming they were on the right, but again, apparently we don't like facts). They would be pretty incompetent at their job if they didn't sue the guy.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#162
post #95
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many many many many many people who have stopped using Google products for various political and policy reasons. You know this right?

yes I am one of the many, check out owncloud if you want to download your data and setup your own cloud. Its pretty easy to setup. As for search, If you are not anti MSFT bing does a decent job on most topics, if you are, in that case duckduckgo, and many other engines out there are not too shabby either. I really want an alternative to youtube. Tired of being raped with 30 second ads for every vid I watch.

you do know that you can skip that ad after 5 seconds right?

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#163
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first. I used Opera for years back when it flat killed Netscape and IE for features and standards compliance. I only left once FireFox implemented all of the same features I had come to rely on in Opera, PLUS developing its growing add-on ecosystem. Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, sma…

Opera might have been ahead in the past, but is it still ahead? Having tried their browser, I must have missed something because I think Firefox with addons is way better. I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.

Compared to Chrom(e|ium), I don’t get crashes on every other website, a decent release cycle, a decent repository and, you know, a browser that does what I want rather than forcing me to want what it does. Oh, and a functional speed dial.

Compared to Firefox, it actually makes decent use of RAM, doesn’t require fifty-five trillions of addons to work remotely properly (and hence doesn’t require updating of said fifty-five trillions of addons every other day) and a decent release cycle.

Oh, it also works on my phone and I just had to copy over wand.dat to get all my passwords there as well :-)

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#164
post #78
post #63

As far as I know, the one making the accusations has to present proof. Am I wrong? Is it so simple that saying "Oh, by the way, I believe he stole my idea." is enough to sue someone? No one would (Or "should" maybe) be so stupid as to go for that.

That is enough to sue someone. It's not enough to win, but it's definitely enough to sue. There's some logic behind that. To prove claims like that, you may need the power of the court to get documents or witness statements under oath. The process is know as discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_%28law%29 Unfortunately, it also means that the party being sued has to suddenly put up a bunch of cash to pay…

> Unfortunately, it also means that the party being sued has to suddenly put up a bunch of cash to pay to defend the lawsuit.

In any decent legal system, you can get publicly funded lawyers if you are unable to pay for your own, and if you win, you get your costs back anyways.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#165
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first. I used Opera for years back when it flat killed Netscape and IE for features and standards compliance. I only left once FireFox implemented all of the same features I had come to rely on in Opera, PLUS developing its growing add-on ecosystem. Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, sma…

Opera might have been ahead in the past, but is it still ahead? Having tried their browser, I must have missed something because I think Firefox with addons is way better. I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.

I wouldn't say they're all that terribly behind. I use Opera daily and rarely have issues with websites. The last really big issue I remember was the Twitter fiasco when they found out Presto wasn't prepared for a Javascript file that was larger than average and only had a single statement because replacing semicolons with commas became the cool thing to do.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#166
post #99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I know from this and the news articles is that Opera has sued a former employee for $3.4 million because they think he gave secret information to a nonprofit. The guy hasn't worked there full time since 2006, but Opera has decided to seriously fuck up his life. What more do I need to know? Google has a thousand times as many employees, but when's the last time they sued one of them like this? Were I in Opera's s…

Isn't Mozilla corporation (not foundation) for-profit? Edit: according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation it is for-profit

When they were talking to me about the job they say the corp is required to keep salaries etc secret and otehr operational things.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#167
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use Opera on the desktop and on my mobile devices. So does my wife. OK. We just need to find the other 10. Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available? Just to add to the web another slightly incompatible rendering engine? Or do they really like the gimmicky extras that Opera offers that much?

Opera Mini has a proxy server it uses to compress data before it reaches your device. This is extremely useful when using mobile data because it's both faster and cheaper. (At least, in Australia, where mobile Internet is both slow and expensive)

The desktop browser has the same thing (under the term Opera Turbo). Really useful when you're on a bad connection.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#168

I wish I knew someone who used Opera so I could ask them to start boycotting it.

Maybe the bigger problem for Opera will be attracting talent. I'd think twice before working for a company that had a history of suing its employees.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#169

I think he meant to write "My company's former customer".

I hadn't thought of that. Not only do Opera's direct employees need to watch their steps - but contractors too. It's almost as if they want people to go in, collect their paychecks and offer up nothing above average.

Re: My former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me

#170
post #65

I find it interesting that Opera are trying to claw back revenue on old innovations while seemingly stagnating. The rendering engine they're dumping in favour of WebKit is fast and slick. The number of new user visible features and the rate of releases has seemed sluggish to me for what must be 4 or 5 years.

That's part of why they're dropping Presto for Blink, I think. One of the blogs I read on it mentioned that a lot of time and money was going into keeping Presto up to date with what developers were doing (such as ignoring anything not webkit on mobile). Switching to Blink will give them more resources to pump into UX.
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