Opera Software

A Norwegian company founded in 1995 in Oslo, whose browser ran on more kinds of devices than any other.

Opera Software was founded by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy, two developers who had started the browser as a research project at Telenor. The company grew from a handful of people to several hundred employees in offices around the world, and was listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange on March 11, 2004.

Its strategy was unusual: instead of relying on one platform, Opera licensed its engine to phone makers, operators, console and TV manufacturers, while giving the desktop browser away. The Presto engine powered all of it until 2013, when Opera moved to Chromium.

Opera was also a standards company. Håkon Wium Lie, who first proposed CSS in 1994, joined as CTO in 1999, and Opera's engineers took part in the work on CSS, HTML5, SVG and many other web standards.

History, year by year

People

Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer from 1995 to January 2010. Born in Iceland, he worked at Telenor Research from 1991, where he and Geir Ivarsøy started the browser, and holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Oslo. As CEO he was Opera's public face, from the "Bork" edition to his swim to America. He stayed on in a strategic role after 2010, before leaving the company in 2011.

Geir Ivarsøy

Co-founder and lead programmer, who wrote much of the early browser and its rendering engine, and suggested the name Opera. He died of cancer on March 9, 2006; every Opera since version 9 is dedicated to his memory.

Håkon Wium Lie

Chief Technology Officer from 1999. While working at CERN, the birthplace of the Web, he proposed Cascading Style Sheets in 1994, then developed CSS at the W3C from 1995 to 1999. At Opera he championed web standards and open formats, and received a PhD from the University of Oslo in 2006 for his thesis on CSS.

Lars Boilesen

Chief Executive Officer from January 5, 2010. As Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing from 2000 to 2005, he helped turn Opera from a desktop browser vendor into a supplier of browsers for phones, operators and devices. After serving as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent for the Nordic and Baltic countries, he came back as Chief Commercial Officer in 2009, a year before taking over from Jon von Tetzchner. He led Opera through the end of Presto and the move to Chromium.

Offices

From Oslo, Opera opened offices around the world, among them in Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the United States. These photos come from Opera's jobs pages in 2012.