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...their computers are comparably priced (just you have to buy more features than you may want or need), their ipods are very competitively (if not more cheaply) priced, the iphone is as well. remember how fast the iPod and iPhone prices came down as they marched towards acceptance? iPhones for 400 dollars would be quite a bit more profitable, they just wouldn't sell anywhere near as much as iPhones for 100 and 200 dollars.

Not quite... one look at those stats (Part 2, snapshots of top20 countries worldwide), or at local per-country browser stats (Statcounter has decent ones) doesn't suggest competitive prices on the part of Apple - having notable presence only in few atypical (but vocal and visible) regions.

As was the case with iPods - even in my decently prosperous late EU memberstate, I can probably count the occasions when I've seen one on the fingers of one hand (well, that excludes my iPod of course). Exorbitant prices, in relation to what was popular (initially things in style of S1 players; and for a few years - phones, mostly so called "feature phones"), were a major part of that. CIS, Middle East, SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are generally notably less prosperous.

100 and 200 dollars is not their price...

PS. Generally, riddle me this: Slashdot seems overall quite disgusted by supposedly dysfunctional stock market, "investors" and their machinations. But why do we forget those when actually discussing company valuations?... (more, we marvel at it!) While for example ignoring who has and who doesn't have manufacturing facilities, or who actually contributes greatly to major shifts in the world (there are 5+ billion mobile subscribers now; iPhones among 1-2% of them...) - which, funnily enough, will provide great opportunities for investment.

Left India? Not according to their site. Troll fail, eh?

That turns out not to be the case - you can get Opera for the iPhone.

How many aren't? (and you know...here there are many mobile phones used for music listening)

Yes - problem is, we operate here mostly on perceptions; solid and precise regional data are hard to find. But just looking at things like wages throughout the world (NVM how Apple products tend to cost much more where wages are low(*)), how iTunes Store is not available in most of it, how there was an explosive growth in number of mobile phone users in so called developing countries, or looking at geographical breakdown of types of handsets in those stats (from people evidently very open about using their mobile phones as "more than a phone")...does strongly hint at something.

(*)a problem with all "high tech" stuff; disproportionally bigger if it's more "premium"...

Yes, that is what pundits marvelled with their newfound smartphones (by no means worse, typically better, sure), in few places where Nokia virtually didn't exist in the first place, would like you to believe. Or where people can afford "hotness"...

Look at what people actually use and buy, what they choose worldwide(quite a lot of recent Nokia phones there, mostly S40 which this was about), also "lesser" people in "lesser" places.

But hey, maybe I'm imagining those stats too, just like what I hear about reasons for preference of Nokia over most top players... (though it's not the case anymore vs. Samsung Touchwiz and LG touch UI, in LG Cookie-like phones - those are hot handsets, responsible for losses in marketshare of Nokia, not iOS or Android ones)

I think you're over reacting about Video on the web, and I can't understand how anything about what you've said is insightful. None of those pages really tell me anything about what the browser really does. Most of it is buzz words, but I guess if thats informative for you.. Also it only took me a split second to find the user guide on flock's page.

Introductory videos being your main introduction are a stupid idea, not because of esoteric technical/philosophical reasons (I have and use Flash! I even use Facebook, and Flash in Facebook). They're a stupid way of going about things because they expected to make noise. A lot of people are often already listening to music, or in a room with someone that is listening to music/watching television/having a conversation, and would rather not be interrupted by some stupid video that is done better with pictures and text.

It's not like this is rocket science. Virtually all the major browsers make a damn feature of their features:

Opera has a link to this right in its splash box:
http://www.opera.com/browser/

and Firefox this:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/

Chrome has this:
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/more/index.html

Even IE has this:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/faster.aspx

All these took literally split seconds to locate on the page. The Flock page is a mess.

P.S. I used to use Flock, so I was idly curious about what it does nowadays. I couldn't be bothered tracking that down on their convoluted so I left. Nice going designers!

The fix:

http://www.opera.com/mobile/next/

Odd, I don't know why you're picking on me,

Since I didn't recognize your name, and wondered why he might be picking on you, I Googled your name, and see why he might be picking on you. There are a lot of people out there who apparently think you are an asshole.

I am reserving my opinion, but I'm just trying to help you understand (and inform others who may not have heard of you).

http://m.facebook.com/ ...not saying the mobile browsers can't have the security, just that "hope" isn't required to render Facebook without js.
And apparently such access is quite popular - there were some news from FB itself about explosive growth; also according to stats of Opera Mini (the #1 mobile web browser worldwide by site hits, despite many of its users being evidently rather frugal with numbers of sites visited / data transferred), Facebook is quite often near the top of popularity.

It was added with Opera 10.5 and is called Opera Link. Other useful features they added recently are Opera Turbo (speeds-up dialup/cellular connections) and Opera Unite (photo and file sharing). I use the Turbo feature a lot, since many hotels only come with slow connections.

http://www.opera.com/link/

Supposedly Firefox 4 will have the same "store bookmarks online" feature, but I've not tried it.

"Want to make you site fast? You don't need Ajax, Flash, or any other "Hype du Jour". Toss it all out, stick with plain old HTML" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)

Agreed, 110%: Most sites really do NOT require FLASH, or JavaScript (or JAVA) to run and allow the user to see the content he came to see/learn from etc. ...

---

"Wham, your site is now an order of magnitude faster." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)

Truckloads faster, especially when you are NOT wasting time &/or your bandwidth YOU PAY FOR OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET on downloading & running adbanners (or other scripted content, that may or MAY NOT harbor malicious script within it).

1 OTHER "USEFUL TRICK" is moving your webbrowser cache content to another disk, just like moving your operating system's Pagefile.sys (Windows) OR swap partition (linux) to another diskdrive (preferably one that's not used by your OS &/or Programs) so you unburden your OS &/or Programs housing disk to load programs instead of handling webbrowser caching!

I do this in Opera for example, via the settings in Opera's operaprefs.ini, explained here http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/sysadmin/#user-file preferences file:

I use these sections to do this from that file:

Linux

[User Prefs]
CACHE DISK=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory1=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory2=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory3=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/
Cache Directory4=/media/SWAPPAGE/TEMP/

[Cache]
exactly the same settings as above...

[Disk Cache]
once more, the exact same settings as above...

Windows

[User Prefs]
CACHE DISK=J
Cache Directory1=J:\Temp
Cache Directory2=J:\Temp
Cache Directory3=J:\Temp
Cache Directory4=J:\Temp

[Cache]
same settings as above...

[Disk Cache]
again, same settings as above...

(This also helps limit fragmentation too, as a final bonus, no less, by moving the browser's cache content to another diskdrive)

APK

P.S.=> Above all else, you've "hit things right on the head" with this comment of yours:

"The Web is rapidly going the way of television: once it was about content, then ads came 'to pay for the content' and now it is all ads with the absolute minimum of content. Spreading a two paragraph article over eight pages just to have more ad impressions. Six pictures that just have to be in a slide show. Ads. Profit. Bottomline." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @09:33AM (#34003488)

Yes, you've got it down perfectly: It's really "ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS" being made for advertisers & webmasters, but the sad part is, just like with adbanners, you have to foot that bill for them by using YOUR BANDWIDTH YOU PAY FOR...

To that, I just say this:

"No, no, senor - no thank you"

I'll keep blocking those adbanners &/or popups via HOSTS files & Opera's native abilities to allow or disallow scripts on website pages of YOUR choosing (leaving scripting on where you may need it on various sites, such as ecommerce related ones for example).

That's so I get all the speed I paid for from my ISP, rather than downloading & running the scripted content (which has been found to have malicious code in it more than just a few times over the past 4-5 yrs. now online no less)... apk

Okay just some random conjecture:

Imagine you've got a program called "Opera Browser" and you are Not distributed through the app store. That means you won't be able to use the LaunchPad

According to what reliable source is that the case?

and 1-Click Updates.

To be precise, you won't be able to use the App Store code's 1-click updates. Imagine you're a company called "Opera Software", large enough to be listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange; you might well be able to provide your own auto-update mechanism and infrastructure on your Web site to support it. Hey, maybe someday somebody will even provide some free software that lets you put auto-update into your OS X application.

They're not loosing share of users - first, you might want to expand the time period displayed; secondly - that's website hits, not users. The way many new mobile users, in some places with current wave of smartphone craze, browse the web differs from how large part of Opera users do so - significant portion of them in very rapidly expanding but still "developing" world, where people are still much more frugal with number of sites visited (numbers are there)

Most of them on so called "feature phones" BTW, a category which is not going away, however the pundits in some highly atypical but highly visible markets would like us to believe. But once those places will be able to get on the PC bandwagon, many people might still appreciate Opera in such setting. Similarly to how it is the #1 or one of top browsers throughout most of CIS (and that's a matter of choice, of people valuing advantages of Opera which are much more visible on slower / cheaper / long-lived machines)

You yourself used a number which includes people browsing from mobile; to make it look worse...

Either way, Opera is profitable and their profitability has a healthy rise, also during the last 2 years. That's something, considering they are, among major browsers, the longest without any corporate granddaddy.

Thing is - a lot of those people don't even have computers (yet?). Opera is already the #1 mobile web browser by website stats... and that's despite how a lot of that share comes from users which are certainly very frugal about the number of sites visited / data transferred (and typically on so called "feature phones" - which is their main and often only means of web access). There's a high chance those people might start using desktop version, if it comes down to choosing - and in many places they do choose rather than settle on what's installed by default, "big" Opera is at the top or very near throughout the whole CIS (but there people have a motivation for choosing - machines last longer, are cheaper, slower; conditions where advantages of Opera become much more readily appreciated)

And as company they are steadily growing anyway, with nicely rising profitability (easily checked, they are publicly traded), even throughout the last 2 years.

Because if you bother to open the Developer Tools/Error Console --- then you can see all the Warnings and Errors.
And when code does not run in Opera 10.62 and it does in 10.10, 9.62, FireFox, and IE. and the Error is visible in the console. Then gee maybe it's the new JS Engine?
JavaScript: Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'toggler' to object

For example it has NOTHING similar to Adblock Plus and Noscript. Instead you have to run a third party tool like privoxy, and do "all or nothing" JavaScript whitelisting to get a "kinda sorta, but not really" ABP and NS functionality.

Opera has had content blocking for a while now. Granted, it doesn't come with a pre-built blacklist.

You can enable a setting that allows plugin content to be downloaded only after clicking on it. Very useful:
http://my.opera.com/dude09/blog/on-demand-plugin-opera-turbo

Opera is what it is. Either you like it (like me) or you don't. Its lack of popularity is not due to the lack of extensions (after all, chrome and safari had bigger market share before having extensions themselves).

I prefer it, over any of the others. But it seems there are a lot of bad misconceptions around and that's the biggest problem Opera Software needs to find a way to solve.

Like this? http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/08/05/tab-grouping

You wouldn't be thinking of those tasks, wouldn't be doing them, wouldn't miss them. Generally, it would be just life as usual.

In many places people remember such times a bit more vividly. Like in ex-Soviet block, where the net access became reasonably available only during the last decade, and large portions of societies aren't plugged in almost at all; or so called developing nations in general.
Even if it's there, it's often somewhat different from what we are used to - for example access via mobile phones being the rule, and so called "feature phones" at that (as long as it has gprs and j2me, it can run some IM and, most importantly, Opera Mini - check what kinds of phones are most widespread, check growth numbers)

Correction -- Firefox 4 is going to be Firefox's first release that begins to support the HTML5 form enhancements. Opera has already supported those form enhancements since version 9.5.

I quite deliberately said that Firefox 4 will be the first good implementation of HTML5 form enhancements. I wrote HTML5 form support for MediaWiki, but disabled it – partly because of an inexcusably bad WebKit bug, but also because Opera's support is just cruddy. The UI is terrible – red-bordered boxes that only appear when you try to submit the form, not when you actually do the invalid input.

And I quickly found one killer bug: if a password element doesn't meet its constraints, it outputs the currently-entered password to the screen in plaintext, so <input type=password pattern=....> to require passwords of at least four characters is a non-starter. I reported the bug to Opera around the time 10.00 was beta, and it's still not fixed in 10.60. To replicate, cut and paste this into your URL bar:

data:text/html,<form><input name=foo type=password pattern=...><input type=submit></form>

Then type one or two letters in the password field (not more) and try to submit. So, Opera's great and all, but its implementation of this stinks.

The bottleneck is mostly implementation, not standardization. For instance, Firefox 4 is going to be the first good implementation of HTML5 form enhancements, and those were first standardized in Web Forms 2.0 – in 2003. The spec hasn't changed all that much since then (although it has changed), and has been stable for years, but none of the major browsers gave it high enough priority to implement it well. Browser implementers have lots of things to do, like revamping UI and improving performance and security, and they can only implement so many standards per release. Then, of course, they report back all sorts of problems with the proposed standard, so it has to be changed, then changed again.

Correction -- Firefox 4 is going to be Firefox's first release that begins to support the HTML5 form enhancements. Opera has already supported those form enhancements since version 9.5.

Once again, Opera is ahead of the game. Opera Unite came out last year.

Though the carrier issue is also quite often (probably more often) dealt with by carrying more than one simcard & one phone... Then there are dualsim handsets.

Those mobile phones (and mostly so called "feature phones") are also increasingly a way of accessing the web (conveniently, last three reports are about Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America) - IIRC already close to 30% of Facebook usage is from mobiles. After looking at State of the Mobile Web reports from Opera (which include most popular sites per country), it's quite possible that some notable part of those ~30% is from places where it's often the only frequent method of access. And despite a lot of those users being rather frugal with the amount of browsing / data transferred, Opera Mini is still the #1 mobile web browser by worldwide website stats.

The CSS we complain about - Microsoft invented it.

Er, the CTO of Opera software (and inventor of CSS) would beg to differ....

Denigrate web standards of yore if you must, but please don't make shit up. Thanks.

Even after 15 years, illegally tying MSIE to Windows is still happening. This anti-competitive activity has hurt standards, hurt competition, hurt the economy and held back the net.

There is even a form to report ongoing anti-trust violations, there are so many.

If M$ executives and employees would have ditched MSIE if security or performance were an issue. Opera and even Safari are far and above superior, if closed source is an obligation. Keeping MSIE in place AND keeping pieces of it throughout the OS show that there is no intention of MSIE being there to benefit the end-user in anyway. If we add up the cost over 15 years of all the MSIE malware in one column we will have an astronomical sum. If we then total the combined costs of all Opera, Netscape, Cameleon, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror malware in another column and subtract that total of non-MSIE costs from the MSIE costs, we will still have an astronomical sum. Based on quarterly malware damage, the sum is probably in the range of 100's to 10's of thousands of billions of dollars. The Apollo program to the moon itself only cost 25 billion and we got integrated circuits out of that. Even for the unrealistically low sum of 1 billion dollars, what kind of rocking Free Software distro, applications or infrastructure could have been created? Even building a full distro from scratch we could have a full kernel, drivers, utilities, desktop, services, and applications for less.

You can put a stop to this and advance technology, economy and security by not feeding the Windows monopoly any more market share. Tagging this one as "antitrust".

Opera introduced facial gestures long ago!

I don't think it's really making history, considering Opera has always had up to 50% market share in CIS countries.

ITYM "over 50% market share"[0]. According to your source, Opera has only over 50% in Belarus. If this was always so isn't mentioned in your article.

[0] otherwise: Opera had up to 50% market share since it's release. Just like FF. Worldwide.

Firefox To Make History, About To Surpass IE in Europe

Firefox to make history by surpassing IE? I don't think it's really making history, considering Opera has always had up to 50% market share in CIS countries.

Also as it happens, IE is no more losing market share, but increasing it at the cost of Firefox.

Microsoft Internet Explorer continues to make a comeback, gaining market share for the third month in a row, mostly to the detriment of Mozilla Firefox.

Internet Explorer increased its share of the browser market in July by 0.42%, for a total share of 60.74%. Firefox, on the other hand, took the biggest hit: a loss of 0.9%.

In addition to IE regaining some momentum, Chrome usage has also been soaring. At the short end of the stick though is Firefox, whose market share peaked in April at 24.59% and has steadily dropped since.

These stats fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that Internet Explorer is doomed to decline against the superior speed, extension capabilities and HTML5 support of FirefoxFirefox and ChromeChrome. And there’s an even bigger wrench that will soon be thrown into the mix: Internet Explorer 9, which boasts superior hardware-accelerated speed and strong support for open standards.

Not used NoScript or Adblock or what, but I use Proxomitron combined with Opera and the web seems relatively Ad-free.

So, how do you move backward in the browser window history? *lots of mouse stuff*

I use z to navigate backwards and x to move forwards. Opera has had these keymappings available for years and I can't begin to imagine how much strain on my wrists they have saved. Hands are usually on the keyboard anyways, why not use them?

I think a lot of companies in the same position would have made it so their browser ADDED ads.

You think?

But plenty of other browsers are supported on those systems.

Which ones and how old are they?

Of their Windows versions:
Firefox 3.6.6 requires Windows 2000 or newer.
Chrome (all versions) requires Windows XP or newer.
Opera 10.60 requires Windows XP or newer.
Safari 5 requires Windows XP SP2 or newer.

Chromnium is available under one of the repositories (http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/09/googles-chromium-project-ported-to-n900/), works asides for some of the menu's running off screen. The Opera crowd does have Opera Mini available as well (see http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/). The default browser, MicroB, is based on Firefox. Of course, there is a terminal; vnc & ssh are both readily available in the Maemo.org repositories.

Considering Opera Mini is a J2ME app and the N900 has no J2ME runtime, and the only way to run it is with MicroEmulator, I'm not surprised that it looked bad. I'm surprised you managed to get it running at all after 1 day of owning the N900. There is, however, Opera Mobile for N900: http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/

Probably for the same reason that they dropped OS/2, BeOS and QNX versions...

Probably for the same reason that they dropped OS/2, BeOS and QNX versions...

Probably for the same reason that they dropped OS/2, BeOS and QNX versions...

"Why should I care about a non-extensible browser" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 04, @04:54PM (#32793748)

Opera IS "extensible", via its 'opera widgets' -> http://widgets.opera.com/

APK

P.S.=> Between that, & Opera's 0% unpatched known security vulnerabilities -> http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/ , I'd say most of what you're complaining about is moot... apk

That will be Symbian^4 - and I fear that Symbian^4 will be to late to successfully catch up with iOS or Android.

And some catch you have to do. I developed for Smybian/UIQ and later Symbian/S60E5 and now I develop for Andoid. And it is so much easier. Simpler to set-up, works not only on Windows, has a gratis IDE (eclipse), better Emulator, better on device debugging. logging framework, allows self signed application.

And last not least an application shop which pays a decent cut: http://my.opera.com/HP-45/blog/whats-in-a-price .

It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux."

No, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Actually, Solaris support has been dropped (http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/29/the-setting-sun). No new versions after 10.11 will be available for Solaris.

1. No, Opera like most other browsers have "quirks mode" to deal with non-standard code, in particular when identifying as other browsers.

2. No, it's not better in Firefox. Only a Opera-bashing Firefox zealot would think so. It is implemented differently but that is not the same as "bad". "Decent firebug equivalent" is spoken by someone who have never ever even bothered firing up Dragonfly. FF is "customizable" if you install a bunch of extensions that slow down startup because it looks for updates, but the extensions break on the next update anyway...

3. Since Mozilla and Google had the same status as Opera in that case I guess they are "tattling" as well?

4. Are you reading what you are writing? In your second point you complained about an imagined lack of features and now it has too many? And I loved having Opera Turbo last weekend when my broadband went dead and I had to resort to 3G tethering. See, not everyone use their computer near high-speed wireless all the time.

5. Goes against the observation of a number of people.

Opera added tabbed browsing in 4.00 (June 2000), prior to that it used MDI (and was ridiculed for it by Mozilla fanboys who preferred the X11-oriented multi-window paradigm.) I and many others use mouse gestures all the time.

I guess you need a history lesson

http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=freebsd

http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=solaris

http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=freebsd

http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=solaris

I found a User Javascript somewhere the other day that allows you to operate Wave -- which currently runs like molasses uphill in a cold michigan winter in Chrome -- reasonably properly in Opera .. and it's STUPIDLY FAST.

http://my.opera.com/sitepatching/blog/2010/02/05/ready-to-wave

I was also annoyed by the lack of flashblock, but somebody above just posted a link to this: On-Demand Plugin
Does the same thing, but for all plugins, plus it looks/works nicer than the old opera-flashblock userjs, and no weird install (copying text files, really?)
Sam

Even better, this one is orders of magnitude faster than a potato

There's a newer, nicer looking Flashbock-like feature in Opera as of 10.50, On-Demand Plug-in

I'll bite.
NoScript: disable scripting and enable it selectively using the F12 "site preferences" shortcut.
AdBlockPlus: You can get various urlfilter.ini if you really want to. I really dont need this, just block the most annoying ones with right-click:block_content. Some sites need the "normal" advertising, and once you block the top-10, you don't have much to complain about. Anyway, I will give you that point.
Flashblock: Here. Myself I just "enable plugins" (F12 again) on sites I want. *And* you can block the flash content with the normal "block content" too.
Firebug: Meh. Have you worked with dragon fly?
RefControl: Hmpf. F12, disable "send referrer information". Maybe it is just me, but I never needed to spoof referrers.

And yes, I use every one of these extensions on firefox, because it is not there as default. And some more. In a *memory-limited VM* just so it does not goes haywire and swaps the hell out of my current apps to oblivion. Lucky me.