Opera Software is a company which, behind the scenes, has had a significant influence on the modern mobile experience. The Norwegian firm had the most functional handset browser for years before Safari, Android and Chrome colonized the smartphone. Some of its innovations – such as compressing data searches on the cloud side to save on device and connection resources; as well as tabbed browsing, user-defined search engines and speed dial – have become standard practice. One of Nokia’s many strategic errors, when trying to put together a platform to challenge Apple’s, was to acquire fellow slimline browser maker, Novarra, rather than Opera (it finally made Opera Mini the default for its ‘smart featurephones’ in 2014). Buying Opera would not have…