I have to confess, I haven’t paid much attention to Opera Software until recently. The Norwegian company has been an also-ran in the browser market for 13 years. On Friday, I had a chance to sit down with its co-founder and chief executive, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. I can’t say that I’m convinced that Opera is now poised to take the Web by storm, but his take on the browser world makes good sense and paints a picture of a future with browsers everywhere.

As a company, Opera focuses on areas where Internet Explorer and Firefox are hardly to be found. Some 80 percent of its business is browsers for mobile phones and other devices that aren’t computers. It has relatively few users in the United States. Its PC browser is particularly popular in central and eastern Europe. One reason is that the browser is optimized to run on old computers with slow connections.

Mr. von Tetzchner said the main reason that Opera has not done better in the United States is that it had to compete first with Microsoft and then Firefox, both of which gave browsers away free. Opera struggled for a business model, trying shareware, paid downloads, and display advertising, none of which proved to be popular. Since 2005, it has been giving an ad-free browser away free. Now it earns money from search engines, which pay for traffic from its search box. Mr. von Tetzchner wouldn’t go into detail, but he said these add up to more than $1 per user per year.

The future of browsers on computers is going down two paths, he said. There are more features to help users organize their information, such as a new service that helps synchronize bookmarks among several computers and phones. On the other hand, Mr. von Tetzchner echoes the view of Google and many others, that the browser is becoming the platform for applications. Some Web standards that are emerging will permit more functions for standalone applications, including storing information on local computers, displaying more sophisticated graphics and receiving notifications from remote servers.

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