Corvus Consulting

UPDATE

On April 12 Opera was approved for the App Store. I’m not sure if they should be happy to be in or insulted that they’re not threatening, but I’m glad to see it. Congrats, team Opera.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Opera browser. I used it when it was among the only ad-supported online properties, paid for a license to support them, and evangelized it to coworkers and friends. It had mouse gestures, it was FAST, it could render as a small screen interface before anyone knew why they’d want to. Then I moved to a Mac, where Opera had yet to go, and never really went back when Opera did come to that platform.

Opera has done so much right but rarely receives the credit, much less market share, that it deserves. The company’s last major strategy shift was to position their browser as the premier choice for mobile use. But Apple, Google and RIM are eating up the mobile market and all three roll their own browsers. Opera is, once again, being left out in the cold but this time isn’t so quietly accepting of its fate.

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A confluence of web memes a couple weeks back raised two discussions over lunch: what could possibly be the enduring appeal of Archie comics, and do browsers have personalities. That conversation lingered, mixing with the hazy memories of reading Archie comics during one confused pre-teen summer, and soon I started mapping browsers to Archie characters.

The ease with which those relationships happened felt like tapping into some archetypal truth, so I decided to take it further and present the results here, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Flock: Jughead Jones
Likeable, unique and a ravenous ambition that’s never quite realized. That Flock hasn’t caught on is unfortunate, because it does pull together the social and media-rich web in clever if visually busy ways. Jughead and Flock deserve better, but they have the same problem: they’re overshadowed by bigger personalities.

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Among the many rumors of products that Google would one day ship, a home-spun operating system has been among the more persistent and esoteric. What would such an OS look like? How would they ever get it into OEM hardware? Would it be sold or ad-supported? As with Android, the answer is not so much the arrival of what’s expected (g-phone, anyone?) as a reveal that re-frames the original questions.

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I’ve been playing with single-site browsers for the last couple months, specifically using Fluid, created by Tod Ditchendorf.

For the uninitiated, single-site browsers (SSBs) give a website its own window and dock icon (or place in the task bar for Windows), apart from the main browser. I made a quick (3.5 min) screencast to show how SSBs are created and how they present themselves in the desktop environment.

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