#facebook opera

There's story spreading that Facebook is interested to buy Opera browser to create its own custom "social" browser and compete with the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft. It's been revealed that one of Facebook's biggest challenges is in mobile (one reason why they bought Instagram), the odds are stacked against it compared to in the desktop arena. That leaves Facebook very little to wiggle around when it comes to prime access on the mobile web, except of course thru the iOS and Android apps. While the idea of owning and deploying a Facebook Browser might make sense, I am not as equally sure if Opera would be the right candidate for Facebook. Yes, Opera claims it has over 200 million users (both desktop and mobile) so that's a lot of users that Facebook can also acquire (we're not yet discounting the overlap of users here which is probably more than half of that number). Nevertheless, that's hundreds of millions of users that Facebook will just eventually lose to either Chrome, IE9 (when Windows 8 comes), and Mozilla. So if Facebook is going to buy Opera, the only really useful part of that trade would be the mobile users. In the end, they will just waste half the money on Opera. Read more in our articles including "Facebook should buy Dolphin Browser instead of Opera" and "Facebook launches Your Profile, Your Home game".