IMS_Blog

Via Download Squad, John Dvorak suggests that Microsoft should buy out Opera. I think this is actually a bloody good idea, for both companies. Microsoft has an awful lot of work to update the outdated Internet Explorer for the current century and no matter how hard they try are basically going to piss people off by not being able to produce all the bug fixes and feature enhancements needed on such a short timescale. Opera on the other hand already has all the features (even if the UI isn’t my cup of tea, and it seems top heavy). It also handles proper (i.e. standards compliant) web pages a hell of a lot better (and I think Dvorak’s wrong when he says it pretends to be IE. I can’t be bothered to check right now but I seem to recall the latest version actually has it’s own user agent string rather than mimicing IE). Oh, and it’s cross platform. Opera has the problem that basically it’s playing second fiddle a lot. It’s losing out to Firefox (which is after all the best browser around ;-) ). On Macs and linux boxes it has even more competition than under windows. If it were Microsoft Opera though it would suddenly be catapulted to main player.

The benifits to users and developers are obvious. Users would be getting more stable features and modern web standards support than Microsoft can realistically hope to provide, in a package which is probably more secure. Microsoft would gain a damn fine development team and a “finished product” (OK, they’d probably want to still work on integration into Vista because they have some bizarre idea which says integration like that is in some way a good idea). It might even be one up on Google.. Developers would no longer have to worry about supporting yet another quirky IE (so the whole * html debate goes away as just supporting a legacy browser).

Go on Microsoft, buy Opera. It”s cheap (by your standards) good and useful.