(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
Specially when you read through the Q&A session that Opera’s CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, held not long ago, and you find gems like this one:
Question from Roger: “How do you cope with being the top innovator in the field of browser features, usability and flexibility while in the same time being copied soon after release without proper credit, even by open source projects?”
Answer from Jon: “Interesting question, Roger. Being innovative is a lot of fun. The reality is that only some features have been copied. Others are probably too hard. I remember being at an accessibility conference some seven years ago. I demonstrated some of the accessibility functions in Opera, including zooming. A Microsoft guy started to ask a lot of questions about how we had managed to do it. Eventually he came up to me, looked me in the eyes and told me they were going to copy this. seven years later, they have not been able to and neither has any other browser vendor that I know of. This is just one of many functions. I also believe a lot of the functionality we have made works better in Opera, than in other browsers that have tried to copy what we have done.”
Isn’t zooming great or what? You would expect that such a lovely feature like zooming would be incorporated in other browsers right away, specially since there is a real need for it. Yet, throughout the years no other web browser has managed to do it at all, and even when they do it I doubt it would be as simple and effective as what Opera does. Just a simple + or a – or a * would do. I never thought I would be liking this feature so much as I am doing lately where more and more web sites seem to be using very small fonts in order to get more information on a single page, or just simply those other well known web sites that just do not seem to let Opera render well and yet they give you the output in very small characters. Well, a single keystroke and there it goes. I can sit back and read it again without any further issues or without thinking that my eyesight is going to hurt after a while.
As I mentioned earlier on, Opera is all about innovation but some times it is just going beyond what we, end-users, would be asking from a web browser and for that we should be very grateful, to say the least. I am glad Opera developers keep pushing the barriers towards improving the web browsing experience because with features like zooming we are off to keep on enjoying browsing the web with the least effort possible but taking the most out of it ! Nice ! Very nice !
