Facebook's interest in Opera may be only speculation, but the company's pursuit of a browser has been discussed for much longer, usually with the expectation of the company building its own from scratch. In 2008, for example, Facebook hired Mike Schroepfer, then Mozilla's vice president of engineering, a driving force behind Firefox, to take the same title at the social network.

Buying Opera could be the quickest, and really only, shortcut.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at , on or subscribe to . His email address is .

See .

in Computerworld's Browsers Topic Center.