Started in the year 1994 and founded in 1995, by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy, today Opera Software is celebrating its 15th year anniversary.

Happy anniversary!

Couple weeks ago, Google came up with Chrome speed test video. Well, today Opera Software has released their own version of it, featuring Norwegian potatoes and Opera web browser itself.

Thanks to Garen, RamaSubbu SK and zoori for the news tip.

Today Opera Software has released a preview build of Opera Mobile 10 for Nokia N900 and N800/N810 devices.

Just like Opera Mini or Opera Mobile for Windows/Symbian platforms, it supports Opera Turbo, bookmarks synch, tabbed browsing, speed dial and many more.

Furthermore, Nokia users received a unique opportunity to play with the new JavaScript engine called Carakan and Vega rendering library, as they are now a part of Opera Mobile 10 web browser for Maemo.

There are also some known issues, be sure to check them before downloading.

Today, Opera Software has announced the acquisition of Aussie email provider FastMail.FM for an undisclosed amount of money.

According to company press release statement, this move will help Opera to expand its current messaging product portfolio and deliver cross-platform messaging to a wide range of devices, including computers, mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles.

“The newest generation of Web users will discover the Web through a mobile device. Having world-class messaging capability alongside a rich and compelling Web experience is essential. By combining forces, Opera and FastMail.fm can offer messaging on any device. This will enhance the value Opera provides to consumers, while assisting our operator partners in reducing customer churn,” said Rolf Assev, Chief Strategy Officer at Opera Software.

After tripling it’s downloads more than a month ago, Opera Software has announced, that company has now more than 100 million active users worldwide, using Opera Mini and Opera Desktop web browsers.

“Opera’s record growth shows that we are on the right track, and that as user needs grow, we are growing right along with them,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software.

• A Closer Look at Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Acceleration Through Flying Images
• Microsoft: IE9 Preview Downloads Taking Off
• Microsoft finally to close the VBScript hole in Internet Explorer
• Mozilla’s Q1 2010 Analyst Report – State of the Internet
• Aza Raskin Joining Firefox
• Firefox with Direct2D: Speed you can feel
• Firefox 3.6.3 security update now available
• Firefox 3.5.9 and 3.0.19 security updates now available
• Improved Flash Player Support in Chrome
• Dev update: Integrated Adobe Flash Player Plug-in
• We will launch 3D apps via Chrome soon
• Google Chrome Developer Update – Geolocation and Incognito Extensions
• Is Apple giving Opera for iPhone the Google Voice treatment?
• Opera Mini Sees 50.5 Million Mobile Users In February, Up 145 Percent
• Opera to showcase revenue-generating Web solutions at NAB 2010
• The big change coming to Safari 5: Kernel-level multi-processing
• Plugging the CSS History Leak
• Privacy-related changes coming to CSS :visited
• Javascript in the commandline
• Interesting times for Video on the Web
• Quake 2 running in HTML5 browsers
• First look: Skyfire for Android
• LG ships first phone with HTML5 browser
  Thanks to Andrew, Daniel Hendrycks, Demir Lugonic, mabdul, Nab and Nox for links.

  P.S. Sorry for missing last week’s recap and some news (was traveling + missed flight back), still catching up :-)

Opera Software has reported a possible problem to European Union and Microsoft, where in rare cases; ballot screen would be hidden by Internet Explorer configuration windows.

A Microsoft has also commented on this story, “This scenario is very easy to reproduce in a test lab, but would occur only in unusual cases in the real world. For it to occur with the Browser Choice screen, the user would need to have IE set as their default browser and have never configured it for use. Opera’s example, where a Windows XP user has rejected installation of IE 8 for the year it has been available but suddenly decides to install it is not realistic.”

Hakon Wium Lie, Opera’s CEO said that Opera Software has not yet decided whether to make a formal complain to EU or not.

According to Opera Software, more than a half of web browser downloads from Europe is a direct result of Ballot Screen launch.

This confirms that when users are given a real choice on how they choose the most important piece of software on their computer, the browser, they will try out alternatives,” said Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software.

Company has also shared the following statistics:

Those numbers were collected in a period of 2 days (from March 12th to 14th).

According to Rolf Assev, Opera’s chief strategy officer, desktop browser downloads has tripled in some of the countries, since the launch of ballot screen.

Although Opera 10.50 Final was released at the time of ballot screen debut (1 day difference), he added: “We compared the downloads against previous launches, such as Opera 10.0, 10.10 and 9.5, and the tripling is above what we would normally expect with a new version launch”.

Waiting for download numbers…

One of our readers, Daniel Hendrycks has spent quite some time benchmarking all the weekly/nightly builds of Opera 10.50 web browser, to give you a glimpse, on how its performance has evolved.

Here is a graph by Ichan

As you can see from this chart, Opera 10.50 performance was increasing with pretty much every build, making a final product significantly faster (10-20% improvement in benchmarks) when compared to first pre-alpha version.