You’ve all been duped. It turns out that Dogpile is buying Opera. Yes. Dogpile. I know, I know, it sounds strange. They could use one of the myriad of browsers that are an equally large variety of “free”. But no, they’re going to buy Opera. I’ve got it on good authority.

Which is why you probably shouldn’t believe everything that you read. Why on earth would a search engine company buy, of all things, Opera? They’ve got a smaller install base than most of the free browsers or Netscape.

Add to that the fact that you can pay, say, Mozilla engineers to build you a custom browser tailored to your every whim without buying the company and it starts looking a bit silly.

So no. it’s not bloody likely anyone is buying Opera at anything but a fire sale. Not Google or Microsoft or Yahoo!. There’s really no point.