Firefox success is music to rival's ears

Page 2 of 2 -- Yes, the Opera browser is a form of ''adware," a kind of software that attracts much well-earned suspicion these days, but von Tetzchner says Opera refused to cross the line that separates adware from spyware. The software will either display generic advertising, or ads from Google, the Net search service. Google displays ads related to the website you're visiting. Go to the website for Better Homes and Gardens, and you get ads for landscaping services. But von Tetzchner said that Opera's contract with Google forbids collecting data on people's Net reading habits. ''They're not allowed to track you," he said.

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Opera brought in about $15.8 million in revenues last year, but two-thirds of it had nothing to do with desktop computing. The company is a leading maker of Web browsers for television set-top boxes and hand-held devices like cellphones. That's a grand business for the future, now that companies around the world are starting to deploy ''3G" cellphone systems, capable of receiving high-speed data transmissions. Opera is ready; during a recent visit, von Tetzchner proudly showed off a Sony Ericsson cellphone with an Opera browser. It displayed a small-screen version of The Boston Globe website that was just as colorful as its big brother, and almost as accessible.

Von Tetzchner boasts that the handheld version of Opera is nearly as powerful as the desktop version, because both use the same software core. Indeed, the Opera guys are cross-platform fanatics, designing their browser to work basically the same on machines running Microsoft Windows, Linux, or Apple Macintosh software. They make versions of Opera for Sun Microsystems' heavy-duty Solaris operating system, and for platforms most people have never heard of, like FreeBSD and IBM's archaic OS/2 operating system, which dates back to the early 1990s.

Not even Firefox runs on so many computing platforms. But then, Firefox is a noble crusade, while Opera is a business. Von Tetzchner knows that with each passing year, more people will use nontraditional devices to get online -- phones, handheld computers, TV sets, portable game machines. By creating a powerful browser that will run on anything with a chip in it, Opera is getting into position to dominate Web markets that are sure to grow faster than the desktop browser market.

Which explains why von Tetzchner is happy to let Firefox and Microsoft fight it out. He's got smaller fish to fry.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.