> If either of the two of them wanted to copy Opera's browser features they would just go ahead and do so.

They mostly do. Dozens and dozens and features. But it works other way around as well, and it's a great thing in the end. The most beneficial features are virtually on every browser.

As an aside, feature copying was one of the greatest sources of irritation my friends had when Opera was still this really weird, unique thing that I used and they didn't. It was quite regular to have them excitedly tell me to switch to Firefox because "Dude, there's tabbed browsing, it's SO great!" Uh, thanks, I've... I've had that for years. But I'm glad you're discovering it too!

Opera is a huge hit in asia. And this is where Apple and Google struggle the most to get market share. That would make a lot of sense for either of them to try to acquire Opera.

> Their rendering engine was a massive piece of original IP.

How can it be worth anything when the competition is free?

If it runs faster, with less memory, or is easier to port to new platforms that the other browsers have problems reaching.

Do you remember how long it took Google to port Chrome to Android? There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.

But that wasn't a problem with Chrome's rendering engine: there were plenty of WebKit browsers on Android from the start (including Browser).

Yes, but they were all using the platform version, which was older. Porting the new features took time.

>>There was a Firefox and Opera release for Android even before Google got their own browser ported to their own OS.

That's why I installed opera on my phone. It works so good, I never bothered to install chrome on it. So it looks like I'm an Opera user. Granted I still use chrome/FF on everything else...