Browser banter with Opera co-founder

We chat with former CEO and Co-founder of Opera Software, Jon von Tetzchner about the future of the mobile, web standards and his latest brainchild – the Vivaldi web browser.

- Siddharth Parwatay

Between the community-led model and the employee-led model of development, which approach has Vivaldi chosen and why?

Jon: We’re using Chromium as the base for Vivaldi. A number of our users have found out that this is web code, and you can actually go in and edit it. This is because some of them believe that features are not being implemented fast enough so they go in and implement those features themselves. There are plenty of threads in our forums about people doing that.

I think if you look at most of the open source projects, they don’t work the way you’d expect. Take Chromium for example. We may do a change to Chromium because we’re using it and it would be very good for us if that change went into the core. But that doesn’t happen. We could send it over to Google and Google might include it immediately because it was a critical bug fix. But if we propose a change that benefits us but doesn’t benefit them in any shape or form, they wouldn’t do it.