Google to acquire Opera?

Google to acquire Opera?

I am an Opera user for around 3 years now. All this time, I have heard rumors of a possible acquisition of Opera by a bigger company. Now again I hear (and read) rumors of a possible deal between Google and Opera which would see the search engine giant taking over the Opera Web Browser company.

This makes sense. Google has been lending a helping hand to Firefox. However, it does not control how Firefox is developed. They can of course launch their own Google Browser (or the GBrowser) on the Mozilla’s rendering engine, but they have not till now. Opera of course makes a lot of sense considering it is a small company and is very heavily under development.

Opera recently went free and one of the primary reasons behind that massive change in policy was said to be a deal between Opera and Google on revenue sharing on search engine hits to Google. Opera also dominates the mobile browser market which is said to be the next big to target for the web based services and Google would like to have an upper hand over both Microsoft and Yahoo!

Mozilla is still working on their mobile browser solution and Opera makes more sense with its closed nature, which would enable Google to make a customized solution optimized for Google experience. Opera also recently announced a New Year contest, the winner of which would get an amazing chance to get featured on the gigantic ABC SuperSign in New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve!

Now, this kind of investment would probably need support from a financially strong company like Google. These are rumors only at this time and we should have a better idea before the year ends. I like Google and I love Opera. I am not sure if I would have a similar feeling for the combined solution!