And it’s not who you’d expect…seems a little flamewar has erupted between Asa Dotzler over at Mozilla and Opera’s CEO, lemme just call him by his initials of JVT. Asa is known to be rather critical of Opera, IMO a troll dedicated to ripping them at every chance. Just read his rant from a couple weeks back, where he called Opera a bunch of liars when they claimed to have won Best Browser of 2005 from PC World, when in actuality it was a mistake due to the confusing article at PC World. He was hit hard in his blog for that one, all of us Opera users came to our defense, most of us with civility (please ignore trolls, they live in every group). You’ll notice a response from me in there as well, if you look close 🙂

Anyhow, as seems typical, he secretly cowered and posted a followup entry where he says ‘I don’t hate Opera’. Asa has a habit IMO of spouting off, then surreptitiously backtracking in later comments.

Well, in the ‘foot-in-mouth’ category, you can now add the suddenly-vociferous CEO of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner, or JVT, who has started commenting on Firefox’s usage statistics, and how he thinks their flawed due to pre-fetching. Now even though I use and love Opera, and agree with his comments, I don’t think it’s time to start exchanging barbs with Mozilla. For a couple of reasons: most importantly, because all it will be is bad press that Opera is now attacking Mozilla, and whining about something because they can’t get above a 1.x% market share. Additionally, this could then be misconstrued as commerical vs. OSS.

JVT and Opera are usually very secretive about their plans and the company, etc. Just about anything you ask about, especially related to the next versions of the software, you won’t find out until they release it. Which I’ve disagreed with, but it’s their call; but actually now I think it’s good, as I would assume such traits would transfer over the marketing/PR department, or at least be coming from their CEO. But alas, JVT decided to misstep, and make comments against Mozilla. Alot of Operettas (as I like to call Opera fans, endearingly), are coming to his defense, saying it was the press’ fault, misconstrued comments taken out of context, he wasn’t attacking them, just stating opinion. Once again, though, if you know this, should you not temper your comments against Mozilla? Make the PC comments….

C’mon, people, we’re all on the same side, fighting the same fight!