Microsoft Inks Search Deal With Opera Browser

Redmond, Washington — The Redmond, Wash., software colossus Microsoft continually striving on expanding its Bing user base, and the company’s giant marketing campaign has so far been paying off. Microsoft has inked a deal with arch-nemesis Opera Software, convincing the Norwegians to make Bing one of the, um, “default search engine choices” on their latest desktop browser. You can see for yourself by downloading the new Opera 10.60 beta here.

Barely a week ago, we reported that Bing is now an out-of-the-box search-engine option on Apple’s Safari 5 browser. This week, Microsoft announced the same sort of deal with Opera Software. This swift turn-of-events is rather astonishing as Microsoft and Opera were at loggers head in the recent past. Opera had complained to EU that Microsoft’s move of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was hurting competition. Concerned complaint by Opera had sparked a probe that eventually forced Microsoft to allow users to download other web browsers.

Opera’s new search box pull-down gets Binged

Commenting on the issue by Microsoft Bing general manager Jon Tinter said, “It is great to see Bing as a choice within another of the major browser products out there, and we hope all you Opera fans out there will go get the beta and give Bing a try.”

This is evident from the above image that Bing has now been added to the pull-down menu that changes the engine behind the search box in the top right hand corner of the browser. Although Bing is still listed below default search engine Google in the drop-down list — i.e., if you start typing into the search box as is, you search Google. Nonetheless, the change is worth noting — if only because this is Opera.

However, it is worth noticing that Opera did not specify Bing in its press release or any of the many posts announcing Opera 10.60, which was released on Wednesday — though the Norwegians did discuss the addition of Bing to the speed dial page in announcing a new developer build earlier this week. Meanwhile, Tinter and Microsoft were more than happy to trumpet the news to world.

The Bing search option is shown on a beta build of Opera’s newest browser version. Courtesy of Microsoft.

If you had not noticed, Microsoft is changing. The reason behind that is IE is far and away the browser king, though its market share has been steadily dropping for years. Thus, somewhere along the way, it realized it is better to start playing nicely with many of those it has not played nicely with the past. Meanwhile, people have been using Firefox more and more, and Google’s share has jumped from nothing to 7 percent in less than two years, according to Net Applications data.

Opera was also one of the browsers to significantly reap advantage from the greater exposure of the ballot screen, with the Norwegian company announcing in March that Opera downloads had doubled. Some countries boasted even greater improvements — especially Poland, where downloads of Opera 10.5 increased by 328 per cent.

Moreover, the Norway-based Opera makes a browser that is somewhat popular in Europe, but its global use is shrouded with the likes of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Nevertheless, perhaps Bing will get a few more users via Opera.