14 DAY TRIAL // Opera isn't winning many friends these days. After deciding to gut the desktop browser along with its own HTML engine, it's now suing a former employee and consultant, Trond Werner Hansen, over allegedly "stealing" trade secrets and sharing them with Mozilla, where he now works.
Opera believes the damage is worth 20 million NOK ($3.4 million, €2.62 million). Hansen has now responded to the suit and, while he won't address the actual accusations, he provides some background on the whole thing.
And from Hansen's point of view, Opera is clearly overreaching. Hansen is responsible for several of the innovations in Opera, including tabs, speed dial, and mouse gestures.
Clearly, he's a man who can come up with innovative new ways of interacting with a browser. He worked for Opera until 2006. A year later, he was thinking about a brand new browser, he's calling it GB, an open source project based on WebKit with a simple UI.
Coincidentally, that's exactly what Google launched with Chrome one year later. Before that, Hansen talked to Mozilla, Google, and Flock about the future of browsers and some of his ideas.
"GB existed as a concept and ideas, but was never developed, since I chose to focus on other projects. I did in fact meet up with Mozilla, Google and Flock (a first attempt at a social browser) in 2007 to talk about the future of the browser, and it was very tempting to have a go at it, but in the end I chose a different path that year. Needless to say, pursuing to develop the browser would have been a lot of work," he explained.
In 2008 though, Opera contacted him and asked him to come back and work at the company. That's when he shared his plans for GB and asked for a percentage of the search revenue from the new browser.
That was a deal-breaker, but he did eventually join Opera as a consultant in 2009. During that time, he proposed several features based on concepts from GB. At the end of 2010, Hansen decided to move on and join Mozilla.
There, obviously, he continued to pursue some of the ideas that he had been thinking about for years. Fast forward to last year, Mozilla showcased a prototype iPad browser based on WebKit, dubbed Junior, the work of Hansen at the organization.
During that same presentation, Mozilla showcased some prototype features, like Search Tabs. This is the thing Opera is suing over, Hansen believes.
"I strongly disagree with their position and I believe I have been wrongly accused, and that I can prove my case," he concludes.