By Paul Boutin
The browser wars have claimed at least one casualty: elegant software. In the rush to deliver more and more features to an exploding market, industry leaders bundle existing code and technology into hastily assembled new browsers. The resulting bloatware is often less than the sum of its parts. To Jon von Tetzchner at Opera Software, it's just bad programming.
The Opera team, in Kjeller, Norway, wrote its browser from scratch rather than using prefab code from software libraries because, von Tetzchner explains, "we found that we could do these things better ourselves." The results: Opera 3.0 beats Microsoft's and Netscape's latest in both speed and standards compliance. Several hundred thousand have downloaded Opera from www.operasoftware.com/download.html so far; version 4.0 will be released this summer.
ELECTRIC WORD
Norse Coders
