14 DAY TRIAL // The Firefox and Internet Explorer rival, Opera Software, plans to assault the US market by opening a new office in Silicon Valley and sign deals with Internet giants Google, Yahoo and eBay. The partnerships are meant to be made by 10 employees who will work in the recently-opened office but the parent company aims to increase the number of the engineers in the next months. According to Reuters, the new office might also work with several telecommunications companies and mobile phone producers from the area in order to improve their solutions. If you didn't know, Opera is a browser compatible with several platforms, including mobile phones, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
"We're getting a lot more aggressive in the U.S. market," Opera Senior Vice President Scott Hedrick said on Monday according to Reuters. "The U.S. has been a significant contributor to our business. But we see a much greater opportunity."
This is quite an interesting move because, until now, Mozilla's Firefox was the favorite browser of the Internet giants as both Yahoo and Google developed several solutions compatible with this browser. Also, the two companies have toolbars that add new function to the application, as well as instant access to their own solutions.
In the past, Google and Yahoo were both opened to partnerships with Internet Explorer, the famous browser included by Microsoft into the popular Windows operating system. After the release of the 7 version of Internet Explorer, Google and Yahoo created special versions of the browser, bundled with their own solutions such as toolbars and instant access to their products and rolled them out on the Internet. At that time, the Mountain View company Google was accused by the Sunnyvale rival Yahoo for copying the page of the Internet Explorer personalized by Yahoo and published it on a Google domain.