Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera, is in Prague now meeting with Web enthusiasts and Czech Opera community members. He sat down with folks at root.cz and talked about the early days on the Web and his work with proposing CSS.

It’s an interesting interview with Hakon, which mostly covers his personal involvement in helping the Web move forward.

What I found most fascinating about this interview was his early vision of HTML and CSS.

After Netscape introduced the <font> tag and “color” attribute, Hakon fought hard against it.

“However, Bert Bos and I felt strongly that HTML should not degenerate into a visual language. We wanted HTML to remain a semantic language so the content could be presented on all sorts of devices, not just visual ones. Therefore we developed CSS. So, in a way, you could say that CSS was developed to save an even more important language, namely HTML.”

This vision is very much still alive today, especially with the upcoming HTML 5.

(Read the interview with Hakon)

(Hakon Wium Lie on his OLPC laptop)

Opera’s co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner spoke with MocoNews about a wide range of topics. It’s one of the better interviews I’ve seen of his in a while.

(Read the interview with Opera’s CEO)

I just finished reading a rather extensive interview with Jon von Tetzchner, the co-founder and CEO of Opera. In the interview he discusses many things, including: Opera going Open Source, Opera on Linux, extensions in Opera, features, UI, and a lot more.

(Read the interview)

Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie, who earlier today wrote an open letter to the Web community, spoke on camera about Opera’s antitrust complaint against Microsoft.

Hakon also spoke with ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan.

Note: This video is also available in Ogg Theora format.

While at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London last week, Opera’s co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner did an interview with bnetTV.

(Watch the interview)

(Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, left)

The Register published an interview with Opera’s founder CEO Jon von Tetzchner. The interview covers many areas of interest to Opera users: desktop, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Firefox, Opera Widgets, Mobile browsing, security and site compatibility.

Reactions in the blogosphere:

“I believe that the future of browsers is in open source based engines, just because the nature of browser engines suiting perfectly for open source development, but Opera keeps proving me wrong along side the massive IE.”
(Source: Northern Dialogue)

“Great interview”
(Source: Open Gardens)

(Read the interview)

Update: Here’s a Slashdot discussion on this interview.

Help Net Security published yesterday an interview with Christen Krogh, VP of Engineering at Opera. Most of the interview covers security in the Opera browser.

(Read the interview)

Back in May I solicited questions for an interview with Arjan van Leeuwen, the lead developer of the Opera Mail client (also known as M2). Arjan is currently working on a major upgrade of the Opera mail client that will include a significant speed performance boost.

Note, ‘Kestrel’ is the codename for the next major upgrade to Opera, likely Opera 9.5. And ‘Peregrine’ is the codename for the major upgrade after Kestrel.

Bill: Why has M2 been allowed to languish so long? What assurances do we have as users have that after this upcoming upgrade it will be given ongoing resources and continued to be actively developed?

A: We think that mail is an important part of the Internet, and therefore an important part of an internet suite like Opera. We are committed to keep making the best internet suite in the world, and that includes the mail client.

Heathen Dan: Will M2 ever be released as a standalone client?

A: I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. M2 benefits a lot from being an integrated part of Opera. Don’t forget that almost every mail client has to include a complete rendering engine just to show HTML mails, where we can just use the facilities that are already there.

The use of M2 from within the browser should be as seamless as possible, and there are some possibilities for improvement there still. We will work on making M2 even more a part of the system.

That said, we are looking into the option of having a separate ‘mail view’ (a window specifically tailored for mail usage) in the future, for users that prefer keeping their mail separate from their browsing. In that way, we can still have all the benefits of being integrated with Opera, you’d be able to run it as if it was a separate mail client.

IceArdor: Will we see a new M2 GUI in Kestrel or Peregrine? Will it be called M3?

A: There will be a radically changed UI for the mail client in Peregrine. We haven’t really thought about the name yet, all suggestions are welcome :).

Gail: Will the delays and freezes with mail be dealt with?

A: Yes. One of the biggest changes in M2 for Kestrel is a complete rewrite of the backend used for the storage of mail. The main goal of the new backend was to increase the speed, since the old backend sometimes froze Opera while it was doing its thing. You will see a vast speed increase when using Kestrel.

GT500: Will there be any improvements to handling of blocked images? I would love to be able to tell Opera to block all images (maybe just all images in certain views, such as ’spam’), and then have a nifty button that I can click to show images in a specific e-mail.

A: We’re looking into the possibilities for improvement there.

Rachid Finge: How would you rate Opera’s current IMAP implementation in comparison to those of your main competitors? I especially mean Thunderbird, which seems industry leader when it comes to IMAP protocol support. What kind of rework are you planning when it comes to IMAP?

and

Graste: What improvements will the new IMAP backend bring in Kestrel and Peregrine? Will the IMAP standards support be similar complete as in clients like Mulberry?

A: As Graste mentioned, Kestrel contains a rewritten IMAP backend, based strictly on the IMAP standard, with (improved) support for features such as nested folders, keywording and working offline.

I wouldn’t exactly call Thunderbird the industry leader when it comes to IMAP support - Mulberry takes that one hands down. However, I don’t think we’ll easily be able to support the amount of IMAP extensions that Mulberry supports: Mulberry is a client that’s specifically designed around the IMAP protocol, while M2 is a client with its own design that supports IMAP as one of the possible protocols for the messages it stores. In other words, our goal is not to support as many features and extensions of IMAP as possible, but to make M2’s way of handling messages work seamlessly with as many IMAP servers as possible. We take a similar approach to Thunderbird in that respect.

Operafan2006: Will M2 support html formatting?

A: We have been experimenting a lot with HTML formatting in our mail composer, but we’ve not yet been able to get satisfactory results from it. This is a feature you will see appearing in the future though.

Dan DeVaney: Will Digital Signatures or Email Encryption be available in the next generation of Opera’s mail client?

and

Andrewdied: Opera and M2 are normally touted as secure, but M2 doesn’t have support for S/MIME or PGP/GPG. Is M2 going to get any of these per-message security features?

A: We are looking into integrating encryption and signing features into M2, but don’t expect this for Kestrel.

Frank Bacher: What does Opera want M2 to be? A full email client (within the browser) that can compete with solutions intended for business use or a client for the casual user?

Currently I don’t see the direction M2’s development is headed. For a business solution its contact management is sub par and a calendar is non existent. A solution for the casual user wouldn’t IMHO need to be as sophisticated.

A: We want M2 to be a productive and easy to use email client for people who have to use their email at a daily basis, even if they have to handle a lot of mails. We want to make organizing your email as easy as possible, whether you are using it for business or just for your personal mail.

We don’t have the ambition to be a personal information manager like Microsoft Outlook is - we want to be a mail client, and we want to be good at it.

Graste: Will there be any mind-blowing new and advanced features we small Opera enthusiasts or your competitors can’t even think of?

A: Yes, but I can’t tell you about them of course :).

FataL: What are main goals (not features) for upcoming new version of the mail client?

A: For Kestrel, our main goal is to improve the user experience by providing more efficient and feature-rich backends in M2. For Peregrine, we want to make M2 easier and more fun to use by improving our user interface design.

FataL: Will news feeds client still stay as part of mail client? (Personally, I like this approach)

A: Yes.

Mark: Will the age old problem of restricting how many newsgroup messages get downloaded be fixed?

A: Yes.

Gail: Any way to archive/store old mail?

A: We are working on easier archival solutions for M2 that will appear in either Kestrel or Peregrine. It’s currently possible to manually export and import mail, but I’d certainly agree with you that that is not a perfect solution.

Rachid Finge: M2 has pioneered the approach of a database like mail client, e.g. using filters instead of folders. While this might appeal to advanced users, it seems often confusing to less demanding users, which probably are in the majority. Do you think, in hindsight, the approach of M2 was the right one? And will it remain the same for its successor?

A: Yes, I think that was the right approach, and I think that approach still has a lot of potential. Much of the redesign of the user interface in Peregrine is aimed at making very useful features of M2 that might be difficult to discover at the moment a lot easier to use.

Chesss: Will M2 become more resource hungry with the upgrade?

A: No, M2 will use less system memory and less CPU with the upgrade, and we will continue to try and find ways to improve that.

DynaBMan: Are there any plans to implement a more functional interaction between M2 and the mail server. Thunderbird has a feature that allows the user to leave the messages on the server until they are deleted from the mail client. This would be very handy to have in M2.

A: I’m assuming that you are talking about communication with a POP3 server here. That is indeed one of the features that Kestrel will have.

Suribe: I like the M2, use everyday with 3 accounts and love it! Thanks for such wonderful application. My only wish is to apply tags to messages, as the labels, but more than one. Thanks again for this excellent application!

A: You can already do that, although the feature is confusingly called ‘Filters’ in M2. Filters work like tags, in the sense that more than one of them can be applied to one message (by dragging the message to different filters), and you can easily view all the messages that have a specific filter. Expect improvements in this area with the Peregrine release.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down with Håkon Wium Lie, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Opera Software, and do a short interview with him.

Among the topics we touched on were web standards and the Acid2 browser test. On this day two years ago, Hakon announced the Acid2 test in a Cnet column. We also talked about the progress of CSS3 support in Opera and other browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), and Safari. Hakon is of course known as the “father of CSS” after proposing CSS back in 1995.

Watch the video

Lawrence Eng just emailed me a link to another video interview (the other being mine) with the founder and CEO of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner, by WebProNews. This interview was recorded at the Webmaster World PubCon conference in Las Vegas where Jon gave a keynote address on the first day of the conference.

After speaking with Lawrence by email and on the phone a few times before, I finally met him in person at the conference in Las Vegas last week. In early 2005 Lawrence wrote a nice post on his blog about how Opera can better brand itself. Last summer Opera Software invited him to visit its headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and subsequently accepted a job at the company a few months ago. He now does market research at Opera. I enjoy working with him; he’s a nice guy and very passionate about Opera.

Earlier this week I caught up with Jon von Tetzchner, the founder and CEO of Opera, at the Webmaster World PubCon conference, where he gave a keynote address. I posted the video of our interview a couple days ago, but now that I have a bit more time, I transcribed it. It was a long and busy week here in Las Vegas.

Daniel Goldman: Why is it that Opera is here [at the Webmaster World PubCon conference] today?

Jon von Tetzchner: We’re reaching out to web developers, so this is a great conference to do just that. We’re getting the word out to web developers about the way the world is evolving. We’re on a mission.

Daniel Goldman: One of the biggest complaints that I get and I’m sure that a lot of Opera users get it as well is that Opera does not work in some sites. Opera has less than one percent of the desktop market share, why is it important that developers focus their attention on Opera?

Jon von Tetzchner: I believe we have something like 10 – 15 million active desktop users. That is actually quite a lot of people.

If you try to think about it, the place that I’m come from is Iceland. I was born in Iceland, that’s three hundred thousand people – we have a lot more. The place I live is Norway – we have a lot more. Actually if you look at it, the US has about 300 million people that live here, 50 states, about 6 million in each state on average. So which states have people that you would like to ignore?

So even on the desktop we have a lot of people, and we are working very hard to grow that. In addition to that, there are 40 million people that have Opera on their mobile [phones] – the full version, and there are 7 million people using Opera Mini. Opera is getting out on the [Nintendo] DS and the like.

So there are a lot of reasons why you should be supporting Opera as a product. But in addition to that, you should be supporting Opera because of web standards, and we do take web standards seriously. We actually support them better than, I guess, anyone else.

Daniel Goldman: How can Opera compete with Firefox? Firefox seems to have been catching waves lately; it seems to be the latest ‘hip’ thing to use Firefox. Can Opera compete? Is there room for another Firefox?

Jon von Tetzchner: I think there is always room for a better browser. And there are a lot of reasons why people are choosing Opera. We have the speed of the browser. We have the fact that we have a very good security record – actually the best in the industry. We have the flexibility of the browser, and we have the fact that if you would like to use the browser across platforms, then ours is the only solution.

So we have a lot of things going for us, and a lot of people are switching to Opera – especially after we decided to make the browser totally free without ads, which we did last year. And we’ve seen a nice uptake from there.

Daniel Goldman: And what about IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) now that they’ve awakened from the dead? Is that a good thing for Opera? Or not so good?

Jon von Tetzchner: It’s a great thing. What this means is that web standards are moving forward now [that] IE7 has better support than IE6.

I think you’re also finding that a lot of people are downloading IE – or being forced fed IE7 – and they’re seeing that there are some improvements in the browser. And some of them will be thinking ‘okay this interesting. Why didn’t I know about these things before? Is there more about where it came from?’ And a lot of those things came from us.

Daniel Goldman: How does Opera plan on growing its market share? Are there any ‘bigger picture’ plans besides for the techie community?

Jon von Tetzchner: The community is very important to us – the techie community, but also the overall community. And working through the community is something that is very central to us. So that mean giving to the community what they want when it comes to features and the like.

But we’re finding that a lot of people then go and talk about the fact they like Opera, and that spreads the word.

In addition to that, we’ve been hiring a lot of people. We are going to shows. We are talking to people. We’re talking to the press. We’re pounding the message. And we’re putting more resources than ever before.

Daniel Goldman: What’s next for Opera? What are the big plans for Opera coming up?

Jon von Tetzchner: There is the short term and the slightly longer. In the short term there’s Opera 9.10, which is a great new release. We’re adding fraud protection and the developer toolbar. And we have Opera Mini 3.0, which is faster, more secure, and it has a number of other things we’ve been adding. So those are some things you can download this month.

And when it comes to the slightly, further into the future [plans], we’re adding the capability to synchronize things between the different offerings, whether you’re using Opera on the mobile or the desktop and the like, which is going to make the experience of utilizing the internet across platforms seamless. And I think that’s a great thing and something to be excited about.

Earlier today I spoke with Opera’s co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner after his keynote address at the Webmaster World PubCon conference in Las Vegas (video below).

We talked about compatibility issues with the Opera browser, why developers should care about Opera, Opera’s competition, how Opera plans on growing its market share, and what’s next for Opera.

Thanks to Opera’s Tim Altman, the guy behind the video camera.