Is social networking giant Facebook planning to buy Norwegian browser maker Opera Software to create a Facebook-centric browser?
A tech site cited sources who
said this could be the case—where the resulting product will allow a
user to keep his or her social life up to date.
Pocket-lint.com said one of its
trusted sources indicated the social networking giant is looking to buy
Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser.
"Opera already has a very good
mobile browser, which has seen strong growth in the two years it has
been available. And Facebook's buying the company would save it having
to build a browser from scratch," it said.
Opera claims to have around 200 million users across all of its platforms, it noted.
It added this may allow Facebook
to take on the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and even
Yahoo, which recently launched its own Axis browser.
Pocket-lint.com said such a move
may see Facebook and Google "battle it out on your desktop and mobile
for web surfing as well as social networking."
It added Facebook has more than
$16 billion from its recent initial public offering to expand - and get
into the mobile sector more and more.
"Owning its own browser to
market data from users regardless of whether or not they are actually on
the Facebook website would be one such way of doing that," it said.
A separate article on Mashable
said a custom browser would be "a significant step toward Facebook
becoming your web, as opposed to just an Internet site you visit and
service you use."
It added Opera’s mobile browser
has received strong reviews online a possible sign that a functional
Facebook browser using it could be even more powerful. — ELR
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