FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera • Hacker News Board

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#51

Post by antocv » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 7:07 AM UTC

mverwijs wrote: post #47

nly wrote: post #3

This is more interesting for what it means for Opera than for what it means to Fastmail. First they abandon their browser engine, now a top-notch webmail offering. What do Opera even offer these days that you can't get elsewhere? What 'long term vision' is Rob speaking of?

I remember reading that one of the big money makers is Opera Mini. All the content viewed by that browser comes through proxies run by Opera. This means a HUGE amount of data that Opera can monetize on.

Monetize that data like selling it to clients or selling their customers data about their data to them? Will opera run some analysis and sell that?

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#52

Post by lessnonymous » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 7:08 AM UTC

whichdan wrote: post #25

throwawayyyz wrote: post #5

I love Fastmail and have been a paid user for many years now, but I hate the new AJAXy interface, in particular the infinite scroll as currently implemented. Slow, annoying, and makes it difficult to reach old emails.

Fastmail has one of the few interfaces that gets infinite scrolling /right/. The outer mailbox div has overflow-y: auto; and the inner div is the combined height of every message in that folder -- my inbox has 11381 messages, and the height is 364192px. When the scrollbar is moved, JS automatically determines which messages to load. Messages themselves are tiny AJAX requests that take less than 100ms each. This is fr…

That infinite scrolling is AWESOME. I absolutely HATE everyone else's version that makes dragging the scrollbar useless as it jumps around.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#53

Post by frenger » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 7:09 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #40

frenger wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sick of this nihilist attitude. > the USA just did a bad job hiding the fact that you had none. Er, no - the USA are the main ones wholesale intercepting everyone's shit - I'm not a US citizen and I don't like it in principle. I did have a pretty good expectation of privacy until they started doing that, because no-one else has the resources to do a similar whole-take surveillance effort. Anyway, I signed up for Fast…

It's not an "oh well" attitude. In fact, I'm advocating that if you actually want your data private and secure, you shouldn't be hosting on someone else's computer at all! You shouldn't be practicing security through good-will (good will assurances by a party that they aren't snooping). I send most of emails through gmail because I don't care if the NSA reads them. For my cross-border drug deals, I use carrier pigeon…

Do carrier-pigeons count as a third-party?

> It's not an "oh well" attitude.

> I don't care if the NSA reads them..

Indeed. However, I've used Royal Mail (postal service in UK) all my life without thinking that I needed to worry about what I said - I always found that very liberating, looking back. Even postcards I assumed wouldn't be read by anyone, and certainly not photographed and archived permanently against my name. Given that IP traffic is replacing the postal service, to not have this assumption any longer is painful on several levels.

> You shouldn't be practicing security through good-will Fair enough. That said, the need to defend myself against a well equipped foreign government is just not a job I'm up to on my own. I'd prefer it if the government demonstrated goodwill, which would seem to be their job.

I believe the solution is political.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#54

Post by D9u » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #19

frenger wrote: post #4

Please please make this an excuse for a move away from hosting in the USA. A claim to respect privacy necessitates that.

Where would you prefer it be hosted? I suppose an argument might be made in favour of Germany -- but I'd be surprised if they don't have a similar infrastructure in place for wire-tapping as we know know is in place in the US. UK and France is out. Russia is an open spyocracy of sorts. Iceland?

Since the .fm tld is for the Federated States of Micronesia, I was sort of hoping for hosting on some tropical island in the South Pacific, but even then the Fastmail operators would more than likely acquiesce to any US spying "requests."

Unfortunately, there are increasingly few nations which will refuse US et al spying "requests."

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#55

Post by dingaling » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 8:22 AM UTC

During the Opera tenure, FastMail moved to new, larger premises in Melbourne and took on quite a few new staff. They did a lot of work on the My Opera Mail web client, which will hopefully be folded back into the main FM product.

They also built-out data centre capacity, including facilities in Iceland.

So all around I think FM benefited greatly from the three years under Opera, though I'm not convinced the reverse is true.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#56

Post by roel_v » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 8:23 AM UTC

josteink wrote: post #45

frenger wrote: post #4

Please please make this an excuse for a move away from hosting in the USA. A claim to respect privacy necessitates that.

If I remember correctly, fastmail representatives have (here on HN) promised that they were planning a move from US-based datacenters to European datacenters, if not completely, offering it as an option for people who wanted it. I'd love to get this confirmed, and some news on when I can expect to have my account hosted in Europe. US datacenters is pretty much a no-no these days.

FWIW, 2 months ago Fastmail support told me they have no plans or intentions of moving away from their US data centers.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#57

Post by mih » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 8:29 AM UTC

jarcoal wrote: post #12

benologist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless Opera are building themselves their own little Firefox OS kind of thing they're pretty much fucked moving forward. On the desktop their move to webkit successfully destroyed every reason to use Opera and doesn't measure up against rivals, and they've been netscaped out of mobile.

I don't think many people used Opera because of it's rendering engine; they used it because of the GUI and high-level features. Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.

The Myopera forums are rife with users complaining about missing features in the Opera 15+. Any unique features which distinguished Opera have been axed and most solutions seem to point towards using browser addons to accomplish what was previously in-built. They might have gained a few users, but it appears the majority of the current userbase will be sticking with Opera 12 for the time being.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#58

Post by frabcus » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 8:32 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #43

benologist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that separate from their browser stuff?

More or less I think, they bought AdMarvel.

Interesting - perhaps it has the same market as Opera's browsers used to (e.g. carriers)?

As a geek, I often forget that a shared market can indicate why a company is doing something new, as well as a shared product.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#59

Post by lubos » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 9:04 AM UTC

the most annoying thing about fastmail is their high cost for storage. their new web-based client is top-notch performance-wise. a lot better than gmail.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#60

Post by sergiosgc » Thu, Sep 26, 2013, 9:10 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #19

frenger wrote: post #4

Please please make this an excuse for a move away from hosting in the USA. A claim to respect privacy necessitates that.

Where would you prefer it be hosted? I suppose an argument might be made in favour of Germany -- but I'd be surprised if they don't have a similar infrastructure in place for wire-tapping as we know know is in place in the US. UK and France is out. Russia is an open spyocracy of sorts. Iceland?

Portugal just opened the largest EU datacenter. Connectivity infrastructure is really good in the country (heh, international debt had to go somewhere...). The government couldn't care less about snooping, although they are US-friendly to a fault. However, court approval is required for snooping and courts are slow moving and processes are open: Service providers may inform the customer about the snooping order and may withhold data if the customer challenges the court order.

Plus, it's sunny!