Your article under estimate the importance of open source, not because of quality but the free marketing you get.

That is why google made chrome open source.

The real reason Firefox took off where Opera didn’t is that until fairly recently you had to PAY for Opera. This idea lingered for a long time, even years, after Opera released free versions. If Opera had gone free a few years earlier the current market position with respect to Firefox would likely be reversed. Another thing that killed Opera was the rise of Firefox plugins, especially ad-blockers. Opera just took too damn long to implement their own ad blocking features, and even now they’re not easy to use.

Yes, I’ve tried about every browser on the web. Some of the bramnches off from Mozilla were the best, but poorly supported and died or got hijacked by geeks.

My main love of Opera is its (quantifiably) vast superiority in security. At the touch of a button or two I can disable Java, Flash, and Javascript, then head to unknown sites with little fear. Secunia will vouch for that. Almost zero unpatched holes IE is a security joke; it probably accounts for 50% of the worlds virus and trojan problems. Firefox comes second of the three, but is let down by its advantages – plugins, which are the source of uncoutable exploits.

But Opera themselves are to blame for their poor showing. I have often commented about their “weird and wonderful” feature “marketing” of consulting a tiny vocal portion of their user base over changes and new features. But they seem to ignore basic stuff as if there was just one self opinionated dork there who commands.

The latets gimmick was “speed dialling” – basically setting up the home page as a link page to your favourites sites. Big deal. I got a slim menu bar permenantly there that does that already for the last 5 years. But they can’t find Java in an Ubuntu or Mint set up still. You have to show the browser where it is installed. Flash and Windows Media player integration have to be done manually. I mean, get a grip guys!

Opera’s main weaknesses are:

1. The slow site never finishes problem. Occupies a limited number of connections until there are none left. The solution is to go back and manually stop the loading of dead connections. That will never be fixed. Been there for 5 years.
2. Stupid resistance to accomodating IE quirks which casues incompatibility with so many important sites like Google and Yahoo (and my bank).
3.Failure to develope a plug-in system – as if the dork from 2. couldn’t stand the thought that outside plug-ins might show up their in-house team’s new features.
4. Javascript handling that allows it to eat memory over a period of time -you have to restart the browser to speed the OS back up. Part of that got fixed recently when they realised that scripts could carry on working after their pages were closed. They say they have stopped that, but my experience is otherwise. They were told about that problem many times over many years and never listened. Its easy to monitor Javascripts and cancel them when they run riot. Just do it.
5.Updating usually knocks out your customization. Its better to do an uninstall/reinstall which, with reverting their latest and greatest default UI to a simple fast one with no gimmicks, takes a couple of hours (sheesh). The dork obviously doesn’t give a damn.

4. Updates, new feature, gimmicks and bloat instead of solid work on the above. We got a poor e-mail client, poor feed handling, poor newsreader, “widgets” of java games and idiocies like that, not to mention a free webmail, and hundreds of silly skins from users with more time than sense…. instead of some good solid work on the basic interface and web handling and some real market research. Yes, and the standard skin is pathetic. I remove it and run Windows native skin, which on my systems is no skin.

Market research? I think they must ask a dozen die-hard skin designers “How a bout a whatsemit doodoo wnji guys?” “oh, cool! Wow! Great! Yeah! Super! God your eyes are beautiful!”
Instead of:

“Do you want more gimmicks, or would you prefer us to fix the IE quirk sites?”
“How about changing the user string to anything you want so you can wander around pretending to be any browser you want?”
“How about having the mail/feed/reader as an add-on deselectable at install time?”
“How about your customisation being respected at update time”
“How important is trouble-free Java, Javascript and Flash handling to you?”
“You want a bust-proof all-site browser, small footprint, clean easy interface, no hassle updates?”

Marketing? I just wish it could advertise “The smallest, fastest, go-anywhere browser on the planet Bill Gates uses Opera!”

That said, I still love it. I just wish the producers weren’t so stuck in the mud. It IS interoperable between Linux and Windows (I dual boot), so it suites me fine. But one day I might just crack up and nuke Norway in frustration!

I gave it a go (under my Linux Mint partition), and find it indeed faster than FF…

Correction, it has the Mplayer plugin (thanks to the Mint dev, I guess…), I was able to watch the news online…

The spellcheck is ok, but I still prefer the FF one…

Te Opera “Block content” option (with the right-click) isn’t that bad, but it requires an extra effort versus Adblock Plus.

Anyway, I must say that Opera seems faster right now…

Too bad it’s not Free as in speech, as it is important…

However, I’ll always cite Firefox & Opera as my 2 favorite browsers, no matter which one is the first, or the second… I always use both…

The most important opera-only feature for me is zoom, but there’s so many of them good ideas come true that I only remember they exist when I have to use other browsers. I can also live with firefox, but it’s just a bit too clumsy. Also, I’m used to doing things the opera way. The only thing I can complain about is the fact they changed shortcuts to remind those of firefox so that ctrl+n no longer gives me a new tab but a new window instead. That is kind of annoying since this combination was, still is and will probably be forever carved to my soul So nowdays I always have to change it whenever I install Opera clean.

I believe Opera is not so popular due to ads but also due to the fact that “normal users” dont appreciate performance and they don’t like to customize, whereas customization is one of the dearest things to a geek. But I’m happy with my opera, who cares if my friends feel lost when using it

ps. this article was very interesting and nice to read

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@Adam Williamson, Opera is a company that has to pay its own bills unlike Mozilla which gets donations and stuff. If making the browser free was going to make Opera lose a lot of money, they never had that choice in the first place. When the mobile browser got a nice foothold they could afford to lose money for a period of time to see if the free model worked.

And it’s completely wrong that Opera’s developers saw it as a widget app. Widgets were added after Opera became free of charge. Oh, you didn’t know that Opera for desktop is free of charge now?!

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@Simon, Opera is the default on UIQ.

“And if they’ve spent anything on marketing it, they’ve obviously not done a good job of it, because I’ve never seen it advertised anywhere.”

I’ve never seen Firefox advertised anywhere either…

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@”g”, Opera actually has more screen estate than Firefox by default…

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@warpdesign, Opera displays “deviant” sites as well as Firefox. Problem with your argument is, Firefox got free compatibility because of its Netscape roots. If someone told you that Opera doesn’t display non-compliant code, they lied to you. Not sure what adding features has to do with fixing important bugs BTW. Important bugs ARE being fixed, and different developers typically have different tasks anyway, so stuff like widgets shouldn’t affect the rate of rendering fixes anyway.

-Why do I use Firefox as my main ?

-mPlayer plugin works easily in Firefox, so I can watch any videos online.

-Adblock Plus (!!!!!!!)… It has been about 3 years that I surf the web without being bothered by any ads… As much as Opera can be tweaked in some extent to eliminate some ads, it is nowhere near as nice as Adblock Plus…

-Poor Gmail/Google Calendar support in Opera…

-Closed-sources… Yes I know, many people don’t care, but it is an issue for me… I believe in Freedom. If there are 2 equivalent apps, one Free, and one Non-Free, I’ll go for the Free one…