Many of you use Opera extensions, those nifty little add-ons that help you personalize the Opera browser. Don’t know what an extension is? Don’t despair, go here to start exploring how you can add new functionality to your browser and make it the perfect tool for your everyday online tasks.

But, who are the people behind the more than 1,000 extensions that you can add to Opera?

First of all, Opera relies on hundreds of external extension developers around the world. They do the tremendous job of creating these handy extensions many people can’t live without. Some do it just for fun; others do it for a living. For those who are interested, we published a series of interviews with extension developers a while back, which sheds light on what drives them, how they work, which tools they use and much more.

There are 15 employees at Opera who help get extensions to work in the Opera browser. Most of them work in Opera’s office in Wroclaw, Poland.

The Opera extensions browser team is led by Łukasz Bendig and works on implementing all the necessary extension APIs and UI changes in the browser. Our fearless and strict moderators, Daniel Michnowicz, Wojciech Zieliński and Łukasz Mormol make sure no malicious or broken code is published in our catalog. We also maintain a small set of extensions we’ve developed in-house from the Wroclaw office.

The Opera extensions catalog team is spread across Oslo and Wroclaw and is led by Hans Tømmerholt. This team consists of Grzegorz, Jasmina and Krzysztof, who develop and maintain our extensions catalog, making sure it performs well and looks nice (we’re starting work on a redesign!). Serving more than 700k extension downloads and handling 5M+ pageviews per week requires quite a bit of work.

If you are an extension developer, you’ve probably come across Andreas Bovens and Shwetank Dixit, who keep our extensions developer documentation up-to-date and answer developer questions on Stack Overflow and Twitter. Andreas is also Product Manager for the extensions project working from our HQ office in Oslo. Shwetank is based in Chandigarh, India.

Download the latest version of Opera for Windows, Mac and Linux at opera.com, and visit our catalog to try our extensions. If you are an extension developer, go to dev.opera.com/extensions/ to find all the documentation, tools and tutorials you’ll need to get started.

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