Forum Moderators: open
Opera usage share has been growing at a faster rate in certain European countries since January 2001. ...usage share in Russia as of November 29, 2001 was 5.88 percent ... And in Germany and Sweden, Opera was at 3.37 percent and 1.8 percent respectively, having grown from a 1.3 percent and .5 percent usage share in January 2001
A german version is now available:
[opera.com...]
The only reason I busted my butt to rewrite my app for Netscape was out of sense of loyalty to the "good old days"
I guess that's what I meant. How provincial and bigoted of me.
Sorry, all.
How do you know 40% of your users don't already use it? It wasn't but a few months ago when StatMarket...etal started to properly count Opera (I still don't think they do). The only way you'll know is to look at raw agent stats and look for Opera in the UA.
Opera has passed 10million dl's and installs - someone is using the thing somewhere. And now with the ibm, amd, and nokia/symbian deals, Opera is going to continue to grow.
Sorry Tx, don't blame O for it's inability to run non-standard crudy js code that has been copied over and over.
>Opera's global usage share as of November 29, 2001, was 0.67 percent,
lol. You mean there are Opera users out there that haven't added Hitbox/statmarket to their global hosts ban list? Man, we have some work to do.
I'm using Analog which does show me Opera in the reports. It's barely a blip at this point.
I use opera, and like it too, but I don't want to rewrite my app for every available browser.
What about Copernic? I haven't noticed any differences in usage between Copernic and IE.
Congrats to Opera tho' a lot of those (not most, just a lot - and 10 million globally for free software isn't as amazing as you may at first think, though it is good) will be web professionals who use it for testing and not as their main browser (including me and nearly everybody in this office).
Aside, I love IE5s JS handling - it may have some of it's own proprietary methods, properties and behaviours, but believe me, if you're ever in a position to be able to develop advanced client side behaviour for IE5+ ONLY you'll appreciate some of the extras;).
Of course those got me into trouble with Netscape and I've had to backpedal quite a few neat tricks, but I did find work arounds - mostly.....
I'm still stuck with that "Object Moved" page with Netscape though.
I've already seen lots of things in Opera 6 which have left me indifferent to its release - mostly it's apparent lack of scripting support.
For instance try changing the className of a table data tag onmouseover or onmouseout... nothing. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but even Netscape 6 copes gracefully with such scripting.
Put a line break in the middle of your <a> tags and your pseudo hover only works for the line your over.
Interestingly, the following line of script causes Opera 6 to crash and totally bin out on every machine I've tried it on.
window.top.hsplit.cols = "*,0";
Where hsplit is the name of a FRAMESET (with two columns), if you change the name attribute to an id attribute it doesn't crash out.
OK, only a few examples but the point is that I hardly ever test anything on Opera, and because of my disappointment when I do I don't intend to start just yet.
I'm sure Brett's gonna come down on this one like a ton of bricks, but I felt I had to say it: "I'll stick with IE thanks, for now anyway".
Now being a Linux user I have gone back and made some changes to my pages that have made them more compatable (mostly fonts). Low and behold my Linux page views are up.
If there are 10 million Opera users thats 10 million possible customers to think about.
If I write a page that runs through the w3c validator, I know it will atleast display in Opera. I can write pages all day long that will validate but not work in Netscape.
Actually, Opera's implementation of ECMAScript is as good (or better) than anyone's. It is DOM2 (object model) support that's lacking. It's pretty much confirmed now that Opera is working on a brand new rendering engine - supposedly very fast and DOM2 compliant.
Opera's dedication to standards is what attracted me to it in the first place. True, there are some things I don't like about it - but if all browser vendors were as serious about standards-compliance, our jobs as developers would be much easier!
Concerning Opera's market share. I tend to look for niche markets anyway - I can make a decent living off of a small percentage of 10 million!
I should say that I do indeed support Opera and I want them to do well. I think some competition in the market is essential to keep things moving otherwise MS is likely to sit on IE like it has with many other products where it totally dominates the market.
>>the reverse is also true. If you used Opera all the time
I can see this would likely be the case, however, the glitches do dissapoint me though (no changes of class names etc). Additionally I'm in a lucky position where my development tends to be entirely targetted at a single browser (intranets, applications etc) ~ 90% of the time this is IE. If I ever develop for the internet - I always aim to support Opera.
Netscape... don't get me started on Netscape.
Note: Having just upgraded to Opera 6.01 I'm pleased to confirm that the line of code in my post above no longer trashes the entire process. Just doesn't do anything.
What I love most as a developer is Opera's hard line interpretation of web standards and clean coding. As Brett mentioned - if I build a page and it displays properly in Opera - the code will validate as well.
I am quickly leaving propriety coding behind.
NS4.x ??? left that dog months ago! To ignore Web Standards just to appease the dying remnants of the NS crowd is NOT my choice...
OPERA IS the Web Developer's best friend right now.
Besides standards support, I'm also big on Opera because of the usability and the many well considered features, the speed, and the efficient, non-bloated code. I wish that every application was developed so intelligently on so many fronts.
It's very easy to use "Quick Preferences" to switch identity from Opera to IE when I "must", so I'm trying to run as Opera as much as possible. I want those websites to see the up and coming browser in their stats.
I also run "as Opera" because I want to see how many "troubled sites" I can find. What I have noticed it that there are few fewer occurances where Opera will have problems displaying a site. Very few in fact; much less than v.5.
And as a good learning tool, when I do find a site that Opera balks on, I look to the source code to find the reasons. All together now... one, two, three!! PROPRIETY CODING! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, Can I get a witness!!?
By the way, there is a VERY INTERESTING trend being reported by TheCounter.com's browser stats: compare the change in ratios between Opera and Netscape 6 for the last several months:
[thecounter.com...]
[thecounter.com...]
[thecounter.com...]
Very encouraging....
You can get a witness for "validated code" - yes.
Trends can sometimes still be hinted at. Either TheCounter.com has improved there recording methods, or there is a noticeable growth rate for the Opera stats the do record.
In any event, it appears that Opera is suddenly gaining ground on Netscape 6.x where previously, the growth trends were somewhat matching.
It is interesting to note that Opera 6 (with java) is ranked #37 on Download.com's popular download list. This is for ALL categories. In the Internet Category, Opera is ranked #5 and in all cases, it is well ahead (in popularity) of any other browser downloads.
Validate your code brothers and sisters! Embrace the Standards!
