Interesting announcement from the norwegian browser company Opera today: “Macromedia to Embed the Opera Browser in Web Authoring Products”
Today, Opera Software announced an agreement with Macromedia, whereby the two companies will work together to integrate their products for the Mac platform. Opera will deliver a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser to be integrated into a wide range of Macromedia Web development products.
The anouncement has sparked some questions in the blog community about what this means for the Macromedia products.
At ActionScript.com the question was:
Macromedia uses Opera’s browser in their Mac products (how or why this will work is a bit mysterious)
Todd @ What Do I Know also wants to know what is going on:
…why in the world is Macromedia joining efforts with Opera to create an embeddable browser for the Mac?
I think Mike Davidson from ESPN.com has an interesting explenation/theory:
First let’s deal with why they need an embeddable browser. Not many of these have been released yet, but many companies are starting to use Flash to develop desktop applications. At ESPN, we created ‘The BottomLine‘ which we believe to be the most widely used installable Flash desktop application in the world. We released it a couple of months ago and it has already been downloaded by over 300,000 users. Here’s the problem though: the application is only embeddable as a true installable app on Windows PCs. The reason is that there is an IE control built into Windows which allows you to easily construct a ‘shell’ around any Flash app. All other machine/browser combinations must use the popup window version of the BottomLine.
[Via ActionScript.com]