I almost missed the Opera meetup with Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie which I had previously blogged about. I did make it to the meet-up albeit an hour late. Håkon Wium Lie in the previous hour went through HTML5, CSS3 developments and demoed few future developments on Opera Desktop.

Nothing on Opera Mobile or Mini was discussed until QnA session.

 What’s Opera Desktop concentrating on?

Since Håkon Wium Lie is more of a CSS, HTML guy the discussion remained on the same topic. Yet, he demoed how using HTML5 Opera would be rendering news sites in future. Instead of scrolling users will not have to flip. Sounds cool.

He also demoed how Opera is way ahead of its competitors on HTML5 support. But with only little over 2% of global browser market share does it even matter? Unless the browsers with major marketshare starts integrating the new developments, web developers are not going to adopt new change (See with IE6?). Sometimes being ahead of time just doesn’t cut through.

Marketing

Upon asking why Opera doesn’t go for traditional marketing, I was given the same old rotten answer of budget problems. Personally, I do not believe that Opera doesn’t have moolah for advertising in traditional media. I am trying to get to their financial history, I’ll get back with you when I do get my hands on it.

But whatsoever, Opera needs to understand that marketing their product right now is not spending but an investment.

Bug reports and feature requests

Again, I am greatly pissed, and always, that I can’t see any progress for the features I request. Shwetank, however, has promised that Opera is working to tackle the issue. The reason that they do not make it public is because Opera works with lots of vendors and can’t make their private data public. Currently, Opera does not have any separate system to file bugs/requests for Opera users and vendors. Hopefully, we’ll soon see it.