Facebook Rumored To Be In Talks to Acquire Opera to Create "Facebook Browser"

Photo:  CrunchBase

I promised I wouldn’t write aboutFacebook this week. Well sorry, I couldn’t help myself. A rumor has been flying this afternoon about a potential Facebook acquisition of Norwegian browser companyOpera. Pocket-lint broke the news in a post earlier today indicating that it had “heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser.”

Opera started in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, it branched out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA. The company claims to have around 200 million users across all of its platforms making it one of the top commercial browsers available. The company is also well known for its mobile browser which has particularly good HTML5 support, a growing standard in the mobile application space.

It’s interesting to note that it seems that “web browsers”  lately have become the new status symbol for major web companies, with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and Yahoo all offering it’s own take on them. A mobile browser component would compliment the mythical “Facebook Phone” rumored to be in development completing all the required components needed to launch it’s own phone platform. If the rumor turns out to be true, we may be about to see the emergence of yet another browser war. This time embedded with all your social information. A scary thought for some, but a necessary one.

The browser may very well be the the new OS after all.

Full article can be seen here:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/05/25/facebook-rumored-to-be-in-talks-to-acquire-opera-to-create-a-facebook-browser/