Founder of Opera and Vivaldi, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner

So I'm Jon Von Tetzchner. I work for Vivaldi. We make browsers. I've been building browsers actually since 1994, so I guess it's what I do. First at Opera, and now at Vivaldi.

Well, I really enjoyed what I was doing at Opera. I was the co-founder of Opera and CEO for 15 years. I left the company because of disagreement with investors. I was thinking about what to do when I grow up, heading in a different direction. But then something happened. My old company decided to throw away 19 years of work and start with a different design philosophy. We had a certain design philosophy at Opera, and I felt that was now missing. A lot of people had our design philosophy and values, and they had chosen Opera because of that. They were distraught. They were contacting me and asking, 'Can't you do something about it?' I was no longer at Opera, my voice was not being heard there anymore. So I was left with really one choice. If I want to support those people that supported me and us for all those years, I had to build another browser again.

Part of it was just to build technology, but part of it was also that we wanted to build a user interface and software that allowed people to work in the way they'd like to. That includes people with special needs. My father is a professor in psychology specializing in children with disabilities. So from the very beginning, the thought was we want this to be usable for the greatest amount of people. You can use keyboard shortcuts, single-key keyboard shortcuts, because that's good for people with limited ability to move. We had people with rods on their head that were able to use the browser because of that. We put in things like zoom, which no other browser was doing at the time, making things bigger. We had abilities to control the colors because people might be colorblind. Part of the thinking was always that whatever we do for one group of people helps others. Even though you might say the keyboard shortcut is really important for a certain group, for a lot of others like myself it was just a way to work faster. That's been the principle: we adapt to you and your requirements. What you want is what we build. We had this at Opera and we have it at Vivaldi now. Building software based on feedback with a close relationship with the end users, which means we also have a lot of volunteers helping us. People give us feedback, help us deal with defects. We have hundreds of people helping us translate to more than 50 languages. We have this extremely close relationship with our user base, which is one of the reasons why I felt when Opera went in a different direction that that was not good.

Opera was open source, but basically we had an open source way of running the company. We had this close relationship with the end users and what they said mattered. That's how we decided how we would build things and what we would build, besides obviously having a very creative organization.

One of the most important things was actually to run on mobiles at all. When we started working in 1999, the idea that you would have an actual real browser working on your mobile was not the case. You had WAP. The idea was you would have separate content on mobile which was inferior. We thought no, we'll put a real browser. We spent all those resources getting a browser that would run on almost no memory. It was a major feat to have a browser run on these small older phones. Way before any of the current day smartphones were in the market, we were able to run on the early Symbian phones. They were smartphones but not really made to run software that requires megabytes of data. Part of what we then decided to do, which I think was in many ways our biggest success, was Opera Mini. The principle of Opera Mini is the same: we want to adapt to your requirements. In this case, the requirement was you have phones that are not able to run a full browser. We think everyone should get access to the internet. So we run the browser on the server side and a little application on the client side. The combination means you have a fully working browser for all practical purposes running on a phone that couldn't run anything else.

What went wrong with Opera is that we followed a certain pattern. We got investment money after 5 years. When you get investment money, you go public or you sell. We went public. From that perspective, we felt we were delivering to the investors. We were delivering 40 to 50% revenue growth every year, highly profitable. The problem was that a number of our investors were waiting for us to sell the company. They were convinced that this 15 years of success, 40 to 50% revenue growth, increasing user base, increasing position in the market, had to be luck and that you better sell before it's too late. That was an ongoing fight for seven years. I got tired, but more importantly the people around me got tired of this situation. I decided maybe it's better that I withdraw and hopefully the new management will get the chance to build the company. But instead, their focus was very quickly on selling the company, which they tried to do for all that time and finally managed to sell the browser to China. I think that is not the best end in any shape or form.

A number of the people working in the company are former Opera people. The nice thing is the people want to work with me again, and they want to work with each other again. There's a very close collaboration there and they like what we're doing, so they like doing it again.

It's putting you first in every way. Just like we always adapted to the end user before, we are adapting to you now. That means we put in a lot of features because we all have different requirements. For example, with the history function, in all browsers seemingly the history is just a list. We think that's not how our brain works. Our brain works in relations to things. You remember that day I found something really interesting and it was the day I was also doing this. That can help you find back to that particular content where you don't really remember the name of anything. So we show the history as day view, week view, month view, as a calendar. We show the top sites from each day. We also show you statistics, meaning you can see when you are browsing during the day, what you are doing. You can search to see how much time you're spending on Facebook. All of this is just presentation of your local history data. We don't want your data. Another example: for everything that you do, we try to have multiple ways to do it. You can move the mouse to a certain location, you can also use mouse gestures where you hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse in certain directions to perform an action. You can record your own if you like. You can use single-key or multi-key keyboard shortcuts which can also be tailored. We have something called Quick Command where you can enter commands to perform actions. There are a lot of different ways to do things based on the fact that we are different and have different ways. I remember telling the story at Opera: I would ask people how do you go back in history? If I had a group of seven, I might get seven different answers. That's really the point. There isn't a correct way to do things. There is your way to do things, and yours is as good as mine.

They will definitely get the most from it. If you're spending a lot of time on the internet, you need Vivaldi. If you're only using Facebook and YouTube, you can probably manage with any browser. But I set it up for my mother and my mother and father-in-law. When I go through the process, for example we have something called the Speed Dial where you have your favorite sites. I show them how to put their favorite sites in there. Maybe they would have a requirement to change the zoom level, so we might do something about that. There might be other things that adapt better to their requirements. We get the techies directly, the ones spending a lot of time, who feel confident enough to download software to their computers, and then we get to the others through them.

Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We would start with Android. We're working on Android, but iOS is difficult because Apple doesn't allow competing software, especially browsers. Browsers have to be built on their engine, which means a lot more work.

We are working on synchronization at this time, so that's coming soon. We are working on the mobile version, which is going to take a little bit longer. We are working on adding more features like email.

Most everyone uses email. Some of them, like me, have a lot of email accounts.

Email in the browser. Once you get used to it, you don't want to go back.

No, others. You can use any email provider. We provide a free email service as well, which you can use today, hosted in Iceland, ad-free. That's just a service to our users. Anyone is welcome to use it. What we're doing otherwise is working with any email service you might have, particularly useful if you have many. I'm running it already. It's not ready for prime time, but it's good enough for me at least.

We are using Chromium. Building a browser from scratch, we've done that obviously before, but realistically there's a reason why Google is based on the Apple product that is based on a Linux product. Building a browser from scratch is just not feasible in this day and age.

Opera we built from scratch. It never identified as Opera. If it did, that would be a bug. Maybe it was someone having fun with you.

We still have to do a lot of work because we're doing things the hard way. Underneath you have the browser, but the user interface of the browser itself, instead of building it natively like the other browsers are doing, we're doing it in web technology. We're building the browser in the browser. That gives us the benefit of being cross-platform.

No. We are doing things the hard way. Electron would have been easier, but we didn't feel it would work. We needed certain things like being able to handle extensions. We were also concerned about building on a code base from someone else, building on a code base by someone else on top of one. There's a bigger risk in that, especially for something like a browser where everyone is obsessed with performance and speed and updates. If Electron would be late, we would be late. Those kind of issues actually matter to us.

That's one of the reasons why we're not using Electron. We spent all this time making sure that Google extensions work in Vivaldi, and most of them do.

If there are any issues with your extensions, let us know and we'll fix it.

There are actually third-party solutions you can use for now, but you're right. We do want to have the mobile client and we know that's required. We are a small team and we take it one step at a time.

That's the kind of thing I was talking about. You could use third-party services, which is a lot nicer than Xmarks.

If you look at the history of the internet, there was always the one to beat. When we were starting with Opera, the big discussion was whether we could compete with Mosaic. Our resource group was divided in two because half of us didn't believe we could compete with Mosaic. Then there was Netscape, and they seemed unbeatable to everyone except the little guys. We felt like the little things that would always keep fighting. After that there was Microsoft, and it looked like Microsoft was killing everyone off. Suddenly they were not so invincible anymore. The current situation where the market leader has about 60% of the market is pretty far from the situation where the market leader would have 90%. From that perspective, Mozilla is still around with their own code base, Apple is still around with a different code base, Microsoft is still around. We aim to make a difference. We are based on Chromium, but I think we can at least make a difference with regards to where things are going. We did that at Opera even though we were the small player, the small player with up to 350 million users. We did make a difference, and I do hope we can be that little voice that actually makes a difference out there.

We have a business model. Mozilla is making half a billion dollars a year just on Firefox. The business model is we need to get some users. The revenue per user we had at Opera was about a dollar per user per year. Not a lot of money, but if you have enough users it adds up. Our focus is to get 3 to 5 million users to pay the bills for the current organization, and then we can grow from there. If people get to us and support us and start using the browser, that's all we need. We need users. I think we can make a difference.

It's basically search, and some of the bookmarks we include. If you use the bookmarks like we have a Booking.com link, there's a revenue share on that. No one is paying us to be there, we just include it as a revenue share.

Because we're based on Chromium, you'll find it's more or less the same. Some people report it to be a lot faster, but I think it depends on how you're using the browser. The bigger value than looking at a stopwatch for page loading is in the actual usage. You could see a massive difference because we have things like being able to handle a lot more tabs with tab stacking, tab stack tiling, being able to save sessions to reopen later, undeleted tabs easily available, keyboard shortcuts. If you want to talk advanced, you could put a folder with your favorite bookmarks that you want open, put a keyboard shortcut for that, and then put a bookmark with a nickname. For example, you could have a Twitter bookmark that opens 20 tabs. Try to do that in any other browser and it will take you a lot longer. If you have a certain way of working and you tailor to your way of working, you'll work a lot faster or spend less time redoing the same things. To me, the basics of the other browser is Groundhog Day. You start fresh every time with an empty window unless you do something special. You're not really supposed to use the bookmarks, which is why they make bookmarks that are not really good. You're not supposed to use history, which is why they do history poorly. They want you to search, which is what the business model is about. In our case, we just want you to be happy.

It's important to have competition. The fact that Presto went away, which personally I believe in many ways was the best engine, is a massive loss. It handled memory better than anyone else, could run on anything, we could run it even on the server side. At Opera we had more people writing web standards than anyone else. But it is what it is. At least we have a few engines, so let's be happy with that. As a company, we can do things on top. We can move the web forward through the things we do in the user interface. There's a lot of things we can do there. Just watch what we'll do. We have a lot of fun and we'll build great stuff. The positive is that the days of those horrible irritating differences between browsers as a designer are not as bad as they used to be. In the early days, web standards were not that well defined. We had web browsers like Mosaic that tried to guess what you were wanting to do. The problem is when you do that, you have to guess the same thing. Their engine was not really future proof, not structured, not logical, but it worked. The other browsers were built on that because Mosaic became IE and the Mosaic guys made Netscape. It took a really long time where things were incompatible. For companies in that position, they didn't want to change that because for Netscape it was good that pages only worked for them, and for Microsoft it was the same. Now we have a situation where we are more aligned and the web has moved on. It's really important to keep it that way because a lot of the big companies want to own the platform. For the world as we know it, that's a really bad thing. There are still a few trying to do that too much. We are seeing it to some extent on the mobile side. I think the ones most guilty of it now are probably Apple, which I think is going to sting them in the long run. They are making their platform more closed. iOS is closed, you cannot provide any browser. Microsoft is doing the same with their mobile platform and Windows 10 S. It's always claimed for security and performance, but that's not the whole truth. It's a more subtle way of doing what they did in the '90s. When Microsoft was trailing to Netscape, they implemented web standards better than Netscape and looked like the good guys. Then they realized it was the embrace, then the extend, then the extinguish. History is repeating itself. When a formula worked for these guys, they use them again. For us as end users and for societies, we need to keep our eyes open.

For us, it's continuing to develop the browser. I've already mentioned the mobile version, sync, mail. There's a long list of ideas. Tomorrow someone is going to tell me a new idea that none of us had thought about, and that might be our next big feature because that's how we work. We work in an untraditional way. For me to be at Pioneers, it's getting the word out and talking about the bigger pictures. I did touch on the bigger picture during my talk. I didn't just talk about building companies, which was the main focus, but I was also talking about privacy.