MS has been working on IE7, and unless they want their browser to steadily loose market share by inactiveness, there will be an IE.next(). MS is unlikely to license or buy Opera and I don’t think it will ever happen. And I think if they tried, other companies that have interest in the independence of Opera will prevent the company to be bought (note though that there is absolutely no probability that MS will ever try).

Boy.. Where is that topic at again? Oh- there it is! MS buying Opera! uhhhh it’s probably a bad thing.

I do have a lot of respect for you and your points of view and ability to see the best of all worlds…afterall- I once nominated you to run for President! …of what, i’m not really sure

So what then is a good enough marketshare to be considered good enough to test a browser? I thought choice was good? I thought we were supposed to move away from locking into one “view” of what a browser was supposed to be?

I’d much rather have everyone test their websites in a standards compliant checklist (what interpretation of the standards? *shrug* -I don’t know) and when Opera or lynx, or flock or Opera mini/mobile doesn’t show it correctly I can post to the browser devs. I’ve chosen the browser I’m using, so I’ll choose another one if the vendor can’t fix the problem. But that’s between my browser vendor and what I’m willing to put up with… not me vs. every website in the world.

I know about “the real world” and the legacy upon legacy of faulty, crooked, or otherwise different interpretations (of what the “alt” and “title” attributes are supposed to be) of stadards are for. But if all this sounds too idealistic, than I think anyone who clamors for “Free, Open Software” that you can take and modify as you see fit is fooling themselves into another generation of vendor-locked, “optimized for Firefox” kind of world… since nobody is going to let your recompiled hybrid, tailored for your needs browser in the front door of their website (assuming you actually modify it enough to no longer be recognized as “mozilla/firefox”). But if it’s all about the “freedom to choose,” what good is it if there’s only one or two choices?

When is going to be ok to just have a small, effective, dedicated, growing marketshare?

When it’s enough to convince everyone to test their websites in Opera instead of ignoring or actively blocking it.

…we also see Opera in the game and kicking like mad to catch up to the browser community.

I’ve caught them for a long time. When is going to be ok to just have a small, effective, dedicated, growing marketshare? What do they have to “catch-up” to? I’m sure Thomas Mahon, bespoke savile row tailor isn’t worried about “Catching up” to the Men’s Warehouse as far as the number of people wearing his clothes (or insert any name brand you can think of *is* good, *and* sells a lot) Like Opera, his style of tailoring may not be for everyone (I thought choice=good, monopolies=bad?), but the people it is for is a perfect fit.
…now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Opera “catching up” at all- I’m happy everytime a new deal or announcement is made.

Of course this speculation doesn’t cover what MS’s agenda would do to Opera’s quality…

If however, they take all the source code to Redmond, assign it to a hundreds of developers across a slew of deparments with more management layers than developers, and the support forums turns into “Knowledge Base Article Number 129098123…”

…well then, I’d just roll this version 9.10 until the wheels fell off and then try out that new-fangled Firefox I’ve been hearing so much about..maybe IE7 if I could get cached browsing history and mouse gestures.