... actually like to see open standards prevail.
Has it helped with sites that don't render well in Opera?
There's been some of that. In some cases, sadly, they fix the site for Firefox and not for Opera. Obviously, as our market share grows, the problem becomes less and less. Mozilla is struggling with this. We've struggled with this.
I think they've gotten to a certain market share in the United States that it's starting to help them, but there are still a number of sites that don't work.
You still find a lot of sites like that?
Yeah, I don't know why this is the case. Some of these sites are just very bad at getting things to work. We try to make all the major sites work with Opera, but sometimes we really have to jump through hoops to make them work.
Typically, if there is a problem, maybe they have programmed the site around a bug in IE. Then they'll change the site so it works with the IE bug and then it doesn't work in Firefox and Opera. So there's a bit of that. Then there are sites like Microsoft sites that explicitly send bad code and things like that but...
Have you had any serious discussions with any of the big PC vendors about incorporating your browser with their machines?
There hasn't been too much of that.
Will that affect Opera's growth potential?
Well, for 10 years we had 30 to 50 percent growth in revenue from the desktop. I'm hoping we can increase that and we can also increase our market share. Our goal was to increase our market share and then be the number two browser on the desktop. I think that, realistically, being number one on the desktop requires something more dramatic to happen than what has already happened.
How did you choose the name Opera for the company?
We wanted a short, international name. There's a lot of hard work that goes into making Opera. There's multimedia in Opera and we felt that that is a good combination. Later on we actually found out that Opera means work (in Italian), which we also think is correct, because we spend a lot of time tuning the browser.
Looking ahead, do you see the bulk of your growth coming from Europe, Asia, Africa — in other words, markets outside of the US?
No, we're going to grow in the US. It's just taking a little bit of time. We are setting up to be more aggressive in the United States. We'll be doing things in the United States that will make people notice us more. It takes time. For instance, in the Japanese market...
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