Rumor Mill: Acquisition Time? Is Google Going to the Opera?
I'm not one for spreading rumors but sometimes...? Feel like a hot one? OK, we've got one or should I say Dirson has one. What is it? Google is going to acquire Opera. That's right, the wonderful and powerful Opera browser from Norway …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story is a rumor, and the piece says so plainly: the tip originates with Dirson, a blog tracking Google, and claims Google intends to acquire Opera, the Norwegian browser maker. The claim carries only same-day pickup from Om Malik — no confirmation, no named source beyond the blog post — so everything downstream here is conditional on a deal that exists, as of this writing, only as talk.
What makes the rumor plausible enough to chase is the moment it lands in. Across December 2005, Google is reported expanding on every front at once — a book-library project announced days earlier, its first consumer brand advertising via 15-second NOVA sponsorships, and a rumored two-horse race against Microsoft for an Internet advertising partnership with Time Warner's AOL unit. A browser would be the client-side piece of that expansion, which is why the acquisition chatter reads less as noise and more as the next move in the Google–Microsoft contest.
First-order effects
- If the rumor proved out, Opera stops being an independent Norwegian browser vendor and becomes a Google-owned client, putting a browser under the same roof as the dominant search engine.
- Google would gain outright ownership of a distribution channel at the browser layer, complementing the rented placements it is separately reported chasing through the rumored AOL partnership with Time Warner.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft — already positioned in the corpus as Google's rival for the AOL advertising deal — would face a competitor that owns a browser rather than negotiating for placement inside someone else's.
- Opera's existing user base and partners would see the browser folded into Google's product decisions, with deeper search integration the most immediate change an acquirer would make.
Third-order effects
- Taken together with the month's other moves — NOVA sponsorship spots, the online book library, the AOL courtship — a browser purchase would mark search firms consolidating the entire path from desktop client to query, compressing the space independent browsers occupy.
- The episode shows acquisition rumors set by niche blogs like Dirson becoming agenda-setting events that larger outlets then amplify, a dynamic reshaping how deal news travels in the industry.
The trend: Mid-2000s platform consolidation is pushing the Google–Microsoft rivalry up the stack from advertising partnerships toward owning the browser itself.