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...web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards...

Sooner, I'd say; and perhaps too often via "we have to support it because of visitor stats" (so yeah, maybe driven by users), ending in a bit of duopoly of "best viewed in IE & FF" (not much of a win for standards at that point)

Quite a bit more interesting in Russia or Ukraine, BTW (generally, most of CIS; those two having majority of its population already, anyway). They seem to be trending towards roughly equal usage share of every major engine, probably a perfect situation for standards. Shows the advantages of communism, I guess... ;)

Enabling Opera Turbo (as long as corp policy, etc. allows such proxy) also makes a big difference, especially on lowest-end machines - because on them it's apparently not only about connection speed, also how much RAM is taken, say, by all the images (recompressed & much smaller with Turbo, it adds up I guess; then you can quickly toggle images on/off in Opera) ...or whatever it is that causes noticeably lower memory usage with Turbo on. Which also places "press here" place-holder where plugin contents are, so there's no need to disable them manually.

This adblock list might also be handy. Yes, Opera has nicely packaged "extensions" now... but using the built-in adblocker (which was there for a long time, only needed to be provided with a list) might end up lighter. It works fine, and if something slips in - there's also content blocker under RMB menu.

Its suitability for older machines is probably one of the reasons for Opera usage share among CIS web population - where people are at the same time quite connected and on slow machines & connections (in the family home of my buddy, the computer is still some early Netburst Celeron with 256 MiB, on dial-up; by no means unique). By far #1 browser in Belarus with half the market, large share in Ukraine and Russia (those two seem to tend towards roughly equal usage shares of all major browsers, an ideal situation IMHO; assures standard websites, not "best viewed in IE and FF" we had for some time, which is only barely better from "best in IE")

"Classic" 9.27 release is even fine on a dual PII 266 that I keep around and boot up sometimes. It actually appears to work better recently (apart from js overload nowadays, better to turn it off) - I guess thanks to websites dropping IE6 & caring more about web standards, which is another focus of Opera for a long time.

"Smartphone" platform (or at least what is at this day considered one by pundits); S40 is the most-shipped mobile platform by a very wide margin.

The other news - Symbian is the first smarthpone platform which broke annual shipments of 100 million units. Because you know, it also has big growth / more than overall growth of mobile sales / the whole market is expanding (including one quite unusual - also in basically not having any Nokia presence - place finally allowed by carriers its share of growth in smartphones and their shipments there)

Plus, generally, I wouldn't mind a landscape analogous to browser marketshare in Ukraine or Russia; but if you prefer a repeat of desktop OS situation... (that said, Nokia will probably adopt also Android relatively soon, and they should quickly catch up via their supply/etc. chains - similar to how Samsung is at the top despite late start - and so the new PC/MS-DOS/Wintel, in mobile world, will fully arrive ... hopefully without the pitfalls of MS / already Google could fix some aspects: for example some functions relying a bit too much, unnecesserily, on data access - good for Google, great for carriers, not so great for too many potential users, we don't need such things repeating)

Another big news - ZTE (yeah, ever heard of them?) is now in the top5 of mobile phone vendors - ahead of RIM, only behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.

"a more useful device, such as Box (from the Sci-Fi TV series on PBS)"? (looking at Wiki article and template table on PBS didn't help, list of their programming isn't really any more clear either)

Regarding Android - it looks like it will be really big (unfortunately, in some regards... I wouldn't mind a market with roughly equal shares of few players, towards what it trends now with browsers in few places, most spectacularly in Ukraine or Russia; alas, people generally seem to crave for clear winners - perhaps in anticipation of network effects, perhaps it's our primitive nature / desire to "be on the side of the winner"...).

MediaTek (one of the largest IC providers, 2nd for mobile phone solutions, enabler of inexpensive Shanzhai phones, basically blocked by Qualcomm from joining OHA for some time) is releasing an OEM solution for Android. Something which might finally make so called "feature phones" not so dominating. Might form, one way or another, a successor of current LG Cookie or Samsung Star handsets. Heck, and there is Open Embedded Software Foundation, a coalition of mostly Asian companies focused on utilizing Android in publicly accessible appliances, white goods, all kinds of consumer and business user electronics, car systems, healthcare products ... roughly speaking, in everything.

10.52 would be weird considering the latest version is 10.53

Anyway, Opera does seem to be the best fit for "ancient" machines. That's probably one of the main reasons why it's comfortably #1 browser in Ukraine and #1 "alternative" browser in Russia; in both of those places machines tend to live much longer...

BTW, what FF add-ons would that be? It's too often the case that people don't know how much functionality can be had from Opera...

That model isn't bad on desktops / laptops, either. The browser is becoming / has become(?) the main app many people use on their PCs. And possibly one of only two (the second being video editing) which can still greatly benefit from improvements in processing power or...attention to its performance during development.

I would hope we can prefer the second, less wasteful, solution.

Some places already seem to do so; places where a PC has typically much longer lifetime. Ukraine, where Opera is handily the #1 browser; Russia, where it's the #1 "alternative" one.

In that case perhaps you should consider Opera; especially on older machines and/or with a lot of tabs it ends up noticeably snappier than the rest of the bunch.

That's probably one of the reasons why it's the number one browser in Ukraine (yes, significantly ahead of IE), with similar situation in Belarus from I've heard, and the number one "alternative" browser in Russia. Places where machines are, on average, what many would consider a bit "old" (I have a buddy from Dnepropetrovsk, a major city on the east of Ukraine - a PC at his home there was something in the style of Celeron Willamette or early Northwood, with 256MB...and from what he said it's relatively typical). Plus machines there often come...essentially without OS (yes, also laptops from major manufacturers - with things like "DOS2000" or useless Linux liveCD/installation without drivers or even without X functioning); usually set up with pirate copy of Windows by somebody who "knows computers" - those people often install "better" (given the circumstances) browser.

I figure that not abondoning perfectly fine older machine, using instead more appropriate software on it, is just, well, the responsible thing to do. And it's not much of a problem to quickly launch another browser if some sites really don't want to cooperate... (especially if Chrome can "turn them into apps")

The only stats I'm familiar with actually seem to suggest that Opera growth is still very healthy, especially in Russian homes (huge spike during recent holidays)

http://www.rankingru.com/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html

Overall it seems to rise at around the same pace as FF.

Ahh, yes, because it's so hard to imagine the world is not homogeneous...

Ukraine, Opera is the number one browser with 35%, ahead of IE:
http://www.ranking.com.ua/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html

Russia, number one among alternatives to IE, with 27%
http://www.rankingru.com/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html

And in most of the countries in ma backyard, flags of which you can see at the top of above webpages, it is between 5 and 10%, quite respectable.

And in all except one Safari almost doesn't exist, with sub 1% share.