Interview mit Johan
07.03.2004
Mit diesem Interview von Johan, Leiter des Windows-Teams bei Opera, startet eine Serie von Interviews mit Opera-Mitarbeitern.
When did you start using Opera? I first tried Opera in the spring of 99. It wasn't an obvious choice at the time since my personal computer was a Mac and I otherwise worked on different Unix versions. Our platform support has improved quite a bit since then..
"/files/interviews/johan.jpg" width="137px" height="120px" align="right"}When did you join Opera ASA and what were your jobs there? I joined Opera Software that summer for an internship, then I returned the same winter to work on chat technologies as part of my diploma work at [1]. I've been a full-time member of the Windows team since 2000.
What's your favorite feature? It's not easy to pick a single feature from a program you can't live without ;) The feature that probably saves me most time every day is the Unread view in the mailer. It just makes it so easy to 'k' (mark as read) your way through the morning mail.
Do you think features like chat, M2,.. are bloating Opera or will they make more people use it? Some people actually choose Opera mainly for other work than browsing, but in general we try to only add functionality that integrates naturally with the browser component.
E-mail often contain links or even HTML content, so tight integration with a browser is only natural. RSS is the intersection between e-mail, newsgroups and browsing, a perfect match for Opera.
Since Opera is an integrated Internet suite, the user interface of each component simply cannot contain as many options as separate applications would have if you combined them. This forces us to have a cleaner interface than most competing products in each component.
Some old users don't like the additional features but want Opera as browser-only. Will there be a browser-only version? Customization is the keyword. It should be possible to turn off or hide elements you don't need.
What do you plan for the near future (like new features)? The near future plans include shipping 7.5 final, both to the consumer market and for embedding in other software products. 7.5 is the first version on Windows that can be used as a rendering component, most notably in upcoming products from Adobe.
The most interesting new feature from the Windows/M2 team is the chat client, which currently supports IRC (hey, don't read between my lines!).
Will there be any Opera 7.x releases after 7.5 (like 7.6)? Depending on the time spent on refining 7.5x there may be a 7.6 before 8.0, but all focus now is to release a fast and stable 7.5.
Are there any plans when we'll see Opera 8? Yes. WIR.
What will be the main improvements in Opera 8 making us buy it? We're planning improvements both in the general browser navigation and browser preferences as well as support for several new technologies that we can't comment on at this stage. You may also expect preview of more of our mobile technologies, like Medium Screen Rendering ([2]) which dynamically adapts the Web page to the size of the window.
