Opera Habragosti: Past, Present and Future of Opera

Time flies rapidly towards the new year of 2011, not everything in the “Opera Habragost” column has turned out as it was intended, but there is one interview that I definitely would like to conduct in the current 2010 year. I am talking about the next guest on our schedule - one of the co-founders of the company, its permanent leader from the very first day of formation, Jone von Tachnere. And I did not make a reservation - Yon still plays a key role in the development of Opera, even despite the change in the official position at the beginning of this year. I think it would be correct to say that only the name of the position in the staffing table has changed - the entire burden of development concerns for both the browser and the company as a whole has remained the same for him. In general, the history of the emergence of the Opera browser is described in some detail on the web, but it will be more interesting for you to find out what kind of person who made browser development a lifelong business.

Although Opera Software and the Norwegian company, Jon himself is Icelander by birth and by citizenship. Norwegian was his father, and the future creator of the Opera browser was also graduated in Norway (Faculty of Mathematics and Science at the University of Oslo). He spent his childhood in Reykjavik, with his grandparents, who, by the way, was a composer and artist (and her father, in turn, was also a very famous songwriter in Iceland). As a child, Jon played hockey quite thoroughly, but after several injuries he decided not to get too involved in professional sports. It should be noted that the choice in favor of information technology, he made very time: the time of his study at the university coincided with the birth of the worldwide network in the form in which we all know it now. Jon was a participant in all the landmark conferences that started the Internet. Therefore, it is quite clear why the young programmer decided to plunge headlong into this revolutionary technology.

Yon is a very enthusiastic person, and his passion remains unchanged - the Internet and everything connected with it. He can talk on this subject for hours, and after each conversation there remains the impression that Jon is mentally living on another Internet, which will come only after five or ten years. And this explains a lot about the actual Opera browser, which constantly introduces innovative ideas to the market. Another hobby of Jon is collecting old computers. By the way, one of his most favorite exhibits is two ZX Spectrum, donated several years ago by the Russian Opera user Fyodor Alexandrov (one computer is factory-made, and the second is a self-made “designer”).

In general, it is possible to talk about this really unique person for a long time, but today the topic is a bit different. By tradition, questions can be asked in the comments to this article during the week, the topic of questions is not limited. But I beg you - I do not need questions about why something does not work and when it will be fixed. First, Jon does not know the answers to such questions, because personally, bugs do not rule (although almost one and a half thousand of his reports are in BTS; a small part, by the way, is still not fixed;)), and secondly, there are a lot of much more interesting things that can be sorted out by a person who wants to squeeze out Internet 120% of its capabilities and a little bit more.