So when its execs – including founder Jon von Tetzchner and “father of CSS” Hakon Wium Lie – shared their vision of the future of the web at a press event in Oslo, it’s safe to bet at least some of their predictions will prove accurate.

Here are a few of the ideas Opera shared about how the web will evolve in years to come.

HTML5 and CSS3

If you’re going to place your bets on what the web will look like in a decade, the best place to start is standards.

Consider this: in 1998, the web was based on HTML4. We’re only now moving onto HTML5. We’d better get it right, then. “This time in history is going to be important from a web perspective,” said Wium Lie. “In 2010 we see the next generation of these standards. Together these specs will change how web pages are made.”

One major area of change is text. Right now, to do anything different with text – give it a drop shadow, use a font other than the ten defaults, wrap it in a rounded border – is complicated. Consequently, web developers use images of words instead, but they can’t be indexed so easily by search engines. “We don’t really want to send images of text over the web, that’s what fax machines did,” Wium Lie said.

We don’t really want to send images of text over the web, that’s what fax machines did

With CSS3 and HTML5, text will get to stay as text and look pretty with only a few simple lines of code. In other words, say goodbye to Verdana, Comic Sans and Arial, and say hello to crazy fonts and rounded borders and shading – although, hopefully not all at once.

Apps will move back to the web

Native apps are big news at the moment, thanks to Apple’s success, but Opera thinks applications will move back online and be browser-based. “We think native apps are a stop-gap solution, and the web is going to provide the final answer,” added Wium Lie.

CEO Lars Boilesen said apps will move back to the browser. “Apps will become web-based,” he said. “All applications are moving away from native applications to web applications. They will be completely web-based so they can run on any operating system out there.”

Moving apps back to the browser will make it easier on developers, he suggested. “Only one thing connects different mobile operating systems and that is the web,” he said.

That immediately raises one question: what happens when there’s no web connection? Wium Lie noted that HTML5 allows storage inside the browser, so users can keep working away until their connection returns.

Death of proprietary tech

“We believe proprietary technologies will die,” said Boilesen. “They are clearly an integrated part of the web, but we believe there will be new technologies that are much easier to use that will replace these, such as HTML5.”

We believe proprietary technologies will die

Of course, by that, he could only mean Adobe’s Flash. Will HTML5 really take out Flash? “In the long run, we see standardised technologies coming in and maybe taking over some of that functionality,” suggested chief development officer Christen Krogh.

However, Wium Lie had a different thought: “Flash could open up. If they have something proprietary and share it, it will work better that way.”

OS will become meaningless

One good thing about the mobile market is “there will never be an OS monopoly,” predicted Boilesen – and indeed, between iOS, Android, and now Windows Phone 7, it’s clear the big players are hoping that doesn’t happen either (at least, not to one of their opponents).

However, they won’t agree with what Boilesen said next: “For most people, the operating system will become irrelevant. People don’t care about the operating system, they care about how they access their applications on the device.”

And that access, he said, will be through the browser. “In ten years, your device will only need a browser,” he said. “In the future we believe you’ll do everything in the browser, including graphics, games and managing your entire existence.”

Then again, a browser company would say that, wouldn’t it?

The rest of the world will arrive

Opera’s execs noted that three-quarters of the world still isn’t online. ”Only 25% of world has web access, so there’s a fantastic opportunity for growth,” said Krogh. “At Opera, we’re concerned about the next billion as well as the last billion, the remaining 75% growth.”

Most won’t connect over smartphones let alone PCs, von Tetzchner  said. That means mobile browsers need to be speedier and handle data better – two areas Opera’s Mini happens to excel in. He pointed out that most developers are creating products for top-end phones. “Just because we’ve shipped a 1Ghz phone, [it doesn’t] mean all phones have that.”

The same holds true for connection speeds, with the next billion coming to the web in areas lacking good infrastructure, he added.

If you build a really ineffective platform you’ll be number one

With that, von Tetzchner noted it’s time web browsers stop being judged by the amount of data they push around, but by the number of users. Most stats about web browsers judge by traffic, but Opera is a bit more clever about that than most, so it takes a hit in the standings, von Tetzchner suggested.

“What I’ve seen them using is data usage [to rank browsers], which is a bit stupid,” he said. “If you build a really ineffective platform you’ll be number one.”

But by jingo it has, at least if today’s news story (Microsoft to offer browser choice with Windows 7) is to be believed. During installation, you’ll get the choice of five (Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari), rendering the EU’s objection of Microsoft exploiting its monopolistic position irrelevant.

“Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Microsoft Corp.

So, you’ll still need to go through the hassle of downloading your browser before you can actually use it, but it should also mean that we can avoid this stupidness of having no way to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (as exclusively revealed by PC Pro many weeks ago).

At the moment the proposal is lighter on detail than Sarah Palin’s plan to get elected President of the USA, and perhaps it’s unfair to expect anything more than broad statements at this stage, but you have to ask how we’ve got to within eight weeks of Windows 7 going on the shelves without this being sorted out.

Until Microsoft updates its code to incorporate this new “choice of browser” proposal – and bear in mind this could take months – anyone in the EU who upgrades their Vista machine to Windows 7 will have to go through the pain and hassle of a full reinstallation, possibly losing all their applications in the process.

So yes, I applaud this latest move by Microsoft. But it’s many months too late.

PC manufacturers will of course bundle a browser with any new Windows 7 PC, and I wouldn’t mind betting that the only browser the vast majority will choose to bundle is Internet Explorer.

And what about people who buy Windows 7 off the shelf? A spokesperson for Microsoft Europe said the company will provide a free IE8 CD-ROM with every retail copy of Windows 7. So the company’s still effectively bundling IE8 – it’s just making consumers jump through a few more hoops to install the browser. Utterly, utterly pointless.

However, the real pain is reserved for people who are buying Windows 7 as an upgrade. Previously you’ve been able to upgrade in place, meaning that all your Vista applications (including the browser) and data would be carried over to the new operating system. Microsoft says this won’t now be possible. “The E [European] version will require a clean install,” the Microsoft spokesman told us. “You’ll need to rebuild the default settings after installation.”

Unbelievably, the EU has still taken umbrage at Microsoft’s decision to hobble its own operating system. “Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all,” the Eurocrats claim in a statement. “Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.”

Yes, Microsoft could have chosen to bundle every browser under the sun with Windows, but even Firefox executives admit there’s no “good way” of doing that. So what was Microsoft meant to do? Bundle IE8 again and wait for the inevitable multi-million fine? Or take the scalpel out?

The EU and Opera have got exactly what they asked for. Let’s see what good it does them.

“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”

There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.

Mateu argued, fairly convincingly, that the way around this was not to get hung up on desktops but to stick your browser on the things that are appearing in the living room. The Wii, the DS, the set-top box. In this scenario, the consequences for the browser are intruiging, because the key to making browsers work on these sorts of devices is to make them as abstract as possible. And therein, lays a problem. How do you build brand recognition for something that, if it’s working properly, will be basically invisible to the end user? 

Chrome is one of the first browsers we’ve seen that really pares back the browser. Google can get away with this, because it’s brand is already so strong. Also, because the browser isn’t the goal, it’ just a better method of serving its other products such as Google Docs. It wants to make you oblivious to the browser, but smaller names, such as Opera, can’t pull the same trick.

According to Opera’s web evangelist Bruce Lawson, the introduction of Chrome wasn’t something that caught it by surprise, nor something that it’s worried by: “The writing was on the wall when it started creating all those javascript heavy applications. People spend eight hours a day on the internet, but not browsing. They spend it on applications, and Google had to ensure they got the best experience on those applications…”

It’s strange to think that Opera isn’t actually fighting in the browser wars at all, it’s fighting its own very specific battles, against nobody at all. Just look at the big innovation in Opera 9.6, the “low bandwith” mode, which allows users to pick and choose which parts of an email or page to display. That’s clearly not aimed at Europe, or the West, it’s aimed at China, Indonesia, South Africa – lands of mass adoption but terrible connections. 

The majority of these users aren’t spending eight hours on Google Docs, they surfing on mobiles, or through the Wii. When Lawson says Chrome isn’t competing with Opera, I believe him, because I think where Opera is being succesful is in catering to those markets that seem niche to the western world. Lawson also reckons the IE development team are the worse drinkers on the circuit. I believe that, too.