U.S. next focus of Web browser maker Opera

The Web browser market has become increasingly crowded and competitive in the past year with the arrival of Google's Chrome and the continued growth of Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has seen its market share erode in the past half decade, though it still has about 70 percent of the market.

Microsoft has responded to the competition, releasing more frequent updates to its browser, including a near-final version of Internet Explorer 8 last week.

And then there's Opera Software. The 13-year-old Oslo, Norway-based browser maker has struggled to lift its U.S. market share above 1 percent. But it is looking to change that with a marketing campaign to begin this spring and better integration with its mobile browsers, where the company has had more success.

(Opera also complained to the European Commission about Microsoft's inclusion of IE in Windows. In mid-January, regulators notified Microsoft of their "preliminary view" that the practice "has violated European competition law.")

Rod Hamlin, Opera senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas based in Mountain View, Calif., discussed the market and his company's ambitions during a visit to Seattle last week. Opera has 700 employees globally including 50 in North America and one in Redmond. The company is hiring, too.

The competition: "There's been a lot of renewed focus on the browser space. ... For example, when Google released Chrome, we saw a pretty good spike in our downloads just because of the awareness around the browser space and what people are doing. We welcome the competition."

The EC complaint: "I'm not supposed to comment on anything. ... We're just trying to go out there and win market share and win deals, and in the mobile space we continue to do really well and we haven't given up on the desktop. We think that our desktop browser is going to continue to gain market share."

Market share: "For various reasons, our market share in the U.S. is certainly not significant, and it's a lot less than what we would like and what we think it should be, and we're looking to address that certainly.

"If you look around in other regions of the world, we have significant market share. In countries like Russia, China, Indonesia, a lot of the emerging markets, Eastern Europe, Opera is the dominant browser in those countries."

Buses, trains, stadiums: "Just given its heritage, the company was really focused on the European markets and then secondarily focused on Asia given the popularity of mobile. Really our focus on the U.S. and the Americas has only kicked in recently.

"You're going to see some major and aggressive advertising campaigns from Opera (within the next quarter). ... We're going to be aggressively doing things with buses and trains and stadiums.

"We put a big red billboard out by Microsoft last year that said, 'Want to be a real Internet explorer? www.opera.com.' We got some interesting feedback on that. All of the AT&T executives could see it and all the Microsoft guys driving back home past Marymoor Park."

Mobile: "Essentially five or six years ago, Opera really made a bet on the mobile space and started to work on a lot of things, like intelligent small-screen rendering; understanding what kind of device [you're using]; does it really make sense to push this image or not? So, a lot of things that were very mobile-centric in the browser. And then we went out and really locked down a lot of key relationships with the OEMs like the Samsungs, the Sony Ericssons and the Motorolas of the world.

"We've shipped Opera Mobile on over 150 million phones. Opera Mini [a lightweight version of the mobile browser] is downloaded 200,000 times a day. We have about 40 percent of the BlackBerry market using our browser as the default browser instead of the one that ships on the device."

A key feature in Opera Mobile: "Hopefully [Microsoft] fixes this going forward, but they've been a big believer in everybody wants to see a single-column view. ...

You go to The Seattle Times Web site and I want to see [Bob] Condotta's Husky Football Blog, right? I've gotta scroll down about 27 times with my thumb to get down to that point. With Opera, you hit Seattle Times, what you see on the screen is exactly what you would see on your PC. And typically you're going to be very familiar with that site, you're going to know exactly where you want to go, so you're going to scroll over and zoom in and you're going to have the same experience you would have on the computer."

On devices: Opera is the built-in browser for the Nintendo Wii, Sony Bravia TVs and other devices.

"At [the Consumer Electronics Show] we saw refrigerators with baked-in browsers. I'm not so sure about that one. The big trend that we're seeing is everything really moving to a Web-based interface and a browser's not only becoming a way just to surf the Web, but an application environment.

In the air: "We signed a deal with a company called Thales, which delivers to Boeing. All the new Boeing planes going forward are going to be Opera-based in-flight entertainment systems with touch screens ... starting with the Dreamliner [787]."

Benjamin J. Romano: 206-464-2149 or bromano@seattletimes.com