During Opera's 10 years party, a few key people had an IRC chat with the community. Below are a few extracts. It's quite striking to see that despite very different approaches (proprietary codevs Open Source; public company vs non-profit organization), Opera Software and people participating to the Mozilla project may have similar visions and opinions:
Howcome (Hakon Wium Lie, CTO) about Mozilla's standards support:
Mozilla is pretty good. Their and our support for standards are comparable, I'd say. I respect them a lot, even though I - of course - prefer our product.
Howcome's laptop:
I use my laptop always and everywhere. I's an IBM thinkpad X30 - 1.2GHz or so, 512MB memory, 60GB disk. 1024x768 pixels. Light. Runs Ubuntu LInux.
Howcome's text editor:
I've been using gnu-emacs since 1987 and have found no reason to quit.
Howcome about ActiveX:
Active-X is a security threat and a windows-only solution. I don't think it would do us much good to support it
Howcome about Microsoft and the Internet:
Although windows, word, powerpoint and other applications have made computers easier to use for many, I consider the PC - as MS developed it in the 80/90s to be a dead end. Only the internet saved it, and we didn't need MS for that.
Howcome about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer:
I believe they are hardworking successful man that, unfortunately, not have accepted the responsiilities that comes with their size and power.
Jon S. von Tetzchner (CEO) about IE7:
I think it is great that MS is finally doing some work on IE. Hopefully they will be taking standards more seriously. That will move the web forward.