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Opera Facing Losses While Firefox Usage Grows
An anonymous reader submits "Opera, the sometimes forgotten #3 web browser, reported a third quarter loss that tripled that of last year's third quarter despite a seven-fold increase in revenue. Opera is blaming a weaker dollar for the losses, and say they're spending money on marketing and new ventures like teaming with IBM to use their ViaVoice technology. Opera's future seems uncertain as Firefox's growing popularity may hurt Opera by stealing potential customers. With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free, is there room for a non-free browser in the market?"
According to the article, company officials said operating expenses, like adding new employees and spending more on marketing efforts, are partly to blame for the quarterly loss (of $267,000 compared to a net profit of $9.62 million in the first nine months of this year = maybe $3mil difference).
It seems Opera is growing, and they are doing it by aggressively promoting their products, even goes as far as teaming up with IBM's ViaVoice to allow users execute commands by talking to their computers. These are licensed-features that free browsers will find it hard to justify paying for.
So maybe Opera is just investing 25% of its yearly profit into marketing, and hopes a better year. Even FireFox wants to advertise on NYTimes.
We shall be alarmed if they moved to a penthouse office and every employee drives a Ferrari.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Check this out http://www.google.com/firefox
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
This has been covered quite extensively in the tradepress due to the possible financial benefits to Firefox.
Help fight continental drift.
Perhaps most Opera users aren't taking their computers to computer technicians. I've never had to take either of my Opera-running boxes in for service, but then I built them myself.
I personally quite like the Opera interface, and have grown quite accustomed to it. I use the free version with the ad on top, which I find pretty benign (though not as good as no ads at all).
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
The Slashdot rendering issue is related to some sort of page rendering timing issue, so two computers can and do render it differently. I've got two computers at the same resolution, and the faster computer has the bug, while the slower version does not. Until it makes it into the code (1.1 probably), there's a Firefox extension to fix it.
I like opera (see my other posts on this page), but it does have trouble with that "certain group".
None of the browsers can handle the crappy, IE only coding unless they want to just copy the ridiculous way that microsoft fubared the standards. Sad are the webmasters who put out such shite.
Our hope is that people get frustrated enough with IE to migrate to different browsers as the rest of us did long ago, which will force webmasters to pay more attention. I have to say, I'm surprised at Microsoft for making the switch to an alternative so gratifying (everyone I've gotten to ditch IE has been happy about it), but I'm sure that they'll do a real upgrade of IE in longhorn just so they can advertise their new stolen features.
Well, in that case, use it for 30 days without the banner.
Then, at the end of the 30 days, pay for it if you actually like it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My browser experience isn't overcome with ads. I use AdBlock with FireFox, and I never see ads.
You should give a free browser and a free extension a try, instead of having a constant banner ad while looking for information or entertainment.
I see enough advertising on tv.
It looks as if this is for IE's sidebar.
Unfortunately, that's still SOMEWHAT the case. You now get a choice between generic animated ads, and less-intrusive text ads. If you choose the text ads, it tracks your browsing activity to give relevant ones, so I won't touch that "feature" with a ten-foot pole.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I have been using Opera for about 4 years now.
Opera is the slickest browser out there. The interface is great and the features have lots of little subtle twists that make them much better than plugins in Firefox.
Opera also has killer caching that provides instant forward/back ( I mean INSTANT ) through recently visted pages.
But I recently switched to Firefox. So my bet is Opera is toast.
Why did I switch? Compatability. More pages take Mox/FF into account. Like my Bank and Gmail for 2 that are important to me.
Talk to an Opera Zealot or Opera developer and the answer has always been the same. The site is serving bad pages to Opera. And this is generally true. Using a proxy tool to spoof firefox in Opera many of the pages did indeed work, but this is a clumsy solution. Unfortunately the Opera line remains the same. Users should fight to change the bad pages.
Where in my view a true firefox emulation/spoofing mode would go a long way to making Opera more workable.
But I have finally conluded that this is not going to happen. And that Firefox is finally there with the features and compatability intersection that makes it my current browser choice. It is compatible enough, and has features enough.
Opera is now Toast for me.
RIP Opera. I really wish they could have made more effort to handle errant pages than simply telling users to change the world. I will miss the Opera way.
Firefox doesn't run on mobile phones yet, so I figure Opera has a niche there.
Alternatively, I will buy the first phone to ship with the Gecko rendering engine in its web browser.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
The IE page is designed to be used in a sidebar.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I don't think anybody has any reason to pay for some unknown web browser, unless it has some amazing features.
Tabbed browsing, popup blocking, mouse gestures, JavaScript disable, etc. etc. all started in Opera first. The Mozilla project then assimilated them in the pre 1.0 days.
Opera is the fastest browser out there. Firefox can't even come close to its memory footprint and speed. Oh, and Opera has always rendered Slashdot correctly too!
I use Opera, and I find it's UI much better than Firefox. The only problem I find with Opera is *the* compatibility with some websites. Not that it doesn't work per say, but that they check the browser's name and say "It's not supported" (Yes, I know you can make it claim to be IE or whatever, but that doesn't always work)
A lot of people claim Opera's problem is they can't complete with Free. Well, I use Opera's free version. Whats the problem? Opera's customizable interface blows Firefox away. In UI, Firefox is no competition to Opera. Speed? Nope, Opera is still far better.
Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox too, but Opera in my opinion has a far superior usability. Firefox just renders more websites. Every product has it's pluses and minuses. I use both, but if it renders in Opera, then I use Opera.
I ran some informal tests just now on my MS-Windows XP box that has oodles of unused RAM. I compared an older version of Opera (7.23) with the current stock Firefox (1.0). All times are approximate and are +/- a couple seconds.
Text-only file:
4.7MB: 4 seconds for Opera vs. 7 for Firefox
11MB: 24s for Opera vs. over 2 minutes for Firefox
Simple test HTML file with bold, italic, color, and "small":
101KB version: Too short to measure in both
1MB version: 3 and 7 seconds
10MB version: about 24 and about 80 seconds
Fortunately, both browsers rendered the "top" of the page immediately, so the user would not notice the delay unless he needed to search the page or scroll to the bottom.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Opera's main income is from the embedded market, and Firefox is nowhere to be seen there. Besides, Opera's losses are due to hiring more people to keep up with demand. They recently started porting Opera to Windows Mobile.
In conclusion, Opera's losses are expected since they have to hire to keep up with demand, and Firefox is largely irrelevant since it is not available for mobile phones.
Clever signature text goes here.
Minimo is Mozilla's answer to the PDA & embedded device market. Now that Firefox 1.0 is out, I hope the developers allot more time and effort to it.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
If anyone is interested, Adblock can be downloaded from the Adblock homepage or from update.mozilla.org
The -IMHO- best filter to use:
Get it here. Scroll down the page to get the latest version. You can save the textfile and import it from the Adblock dialog (Menu: Tools / Adblock / Preferences ).
Way better than IE or Opera or a HOSTS file! Believe me!
"Who needs a proxy tool? Hit F12 and pick one of the alternative user-agent strings."
Almost all browser sniffing ignores Operas spoof light and queries to find out it is in fact Opera.
"With all due respect, you really haven't got a clue how hard this is until you try and do it yourself. It's not a case of handling HTML"
If clues were shoes... Well shoeless Joe. I never said this was a solution to every page. But for my browsing I never use IE. Firefox now handles every page I visit. Opera doesn't.
Here is an example where real spoofing would work, but Opera doesn't do real spoofing. The server code can easily check that it is Opera.
www.dpreview.com
Works great in Firefox. The cascading menus on the side work, as well as other features work.
Menus don't cascade and features dont work in Opera, no matter which user agaent you spoof with F12.
Now use a proxy spoofer with Opera and all the features work again.
Please verify what people say before you start your rants...
The problem with Opera's CSS support is that it tends to break in ways that both IE and Firefox do not, creating yet a third series of hacks you must do to compensate. While Opera's CSS support is good, it's just different enough for it to be a headache.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
That is hardly a fair comparison considering New York has the best water in of any city in the entire world. Engineers from around the world travel to New York each year to learn how New York created their system and it is the benchmark that all other city's water is measured from.
Things firefox still doesn't have, even with all the extensions:
-Support for session management, including...
--The ability to resume sessions after shutdown or (rare) crashes
--Save/Close/Resume any number of sessions
-Format override at the push of a button
-Image override, again, with a single button
-Nearly perfect page zooming
-Dozens of little UI features like...
--Paste and Go in the URL bar
--Go To URL for any piece of selected text
--The ability to close a tab by middle clicking it
--Incredibly comprehensive keyboard support
--The ability to copy the URL of any conceivable page, frame, image, or link with two clicks
There's tons more, but it comes down to the issue of refinement. Opera has been through so many revisions that the interface has essentially been perfected. It was the first browser to do tabbed browsing, popup blocking, user-agent spoofing, search toolbars, mouse gestures - all the things that firefox users praise their browser for.
It's kind of a shame to see this sort of innovation go unrewarded as free alternatives rip off all the best features of Opera.
Once in a while, an animated one slips through. When they become aware of it, they will get it stopped (AFIK, the ads are served by advertising.com). I've seen animated ads on maybe 3 occasions in the last 12 months (I average 4 hours on line each day). They never last more than a day and even then the ads get changed out several times an hour. If an ad is distracting, I just create a little window with notepad, and place it over the ad - problem solved.
Given the wealth of features and remarkable flexibility that Opera provides, getting it for "free" in exchange for an occasional animated ad is a negligible nuisance to me.
Sigs are bad for your health.
I install Firefox at work. Tabs (MDI) is logical. But there is no built-in contsruct to save the tabs as groups
Actually, there is.
--Asa
Company is European. (Nordic if I remember correctly). Typically European businesses, in particular German companies (I studied International Business and German in collge) tend to have an out look of 15 years. If there are a couple off quaters or even off years finicailly because of marketing or R&D expenses, then typically that is expected and over the long term one should come out ahead. Classic example: European Steel industry putting in efficent plants and equipement. Hell of an up front cost, but here 30 years later when energy prices have increased, put a hurt on the inneffecient US steel industry.
Boeing usually goes to Japan to finace projects like the 777 because Japan has almost a life time "Where do we want to be in 50 years" approach.
Not to say all good/bad/indeffierent, but too often US companies slash marketing and R&D to improve quarterly or yearly numbers and find themselves out of business 5 or 10 years down the road because someone else with forsight developed the better mouse trap or marketing trap.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I also checked /safari, /konqueror, /dillo, and (for shits and giggles) /links and /lynx. Nothing...
It passes the URL on to Google so it can send back relevant ads, that's it. It is not used to track surfing or create a user profile or anything like that. Read the privacy policy.
Some will obviously argue that "Google could be doing this anyway!". Well, so could your ISP in that case. But you aren't being as paranoid about your ISP as you are with Google, are you?
Clever signature text goes here.
A third of that is PC revenue. The rest, and the fastest growing market is the mobile market.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but Firefox is very, very irrelevant to Opera's losses in the last quarter. The losses are not due to competition, but the insane demand for Opera mobile browsers! They've gotten so many deals lately, and have expanded to the Windows Mobile platform, started delivering to Casio, a major deal with the second biggest mobile operator in Japan, and so on.
The losses are because they had to hire enough people to keep up with long term demand. So they took a short term loss. And all this was in the mobile market. Little has changed on the PC - Opera is still making lots of money there too.
So Firefox is irrelevant to Opera's losses last Q.
Clever signature text goes here.
Composer is actually being worked on by Daniel Glazman as a standalone product called Nvu.
..as far as I'm concerned is neither one will use the freaking RAM cache properly. I have a 2000 mhtz computer, ultrafast memory, a gillion gig hard drive, but with all browsers but Opera it takes a full second to go back to the page I was just looking at. With Opera it's the blink of an eye. I have no doubt that they are doing it "properly" somehow. Perhaps the page has code to tell the browser to check for updates. But guess what--I don't give a damn! I'll hit reload if I want to check for updates. I like a browser that has my interests first, not those of some webmaster or anyone else. In short, Opera still feels MUCH MUCH FASTER than Firefox or IE, and I'll stick with it until that changes. Lee
expandfairuse.org
"If I have a Windows computer without IE on it, I have to pay money to get the latest version of IE. That is, IE is not free."
The latest version of IE supports all versions of Windows from 98 on. It is a free download in all cases. Therefore, what you are saying is inaccurate.
IE6 SP1 system requirements
Note: I use Mozilla on OpenBSD and Linux, I use Camino on MacOS. I don't use Windows or IE at all.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest advantage of Opera - the memory footprint; not the download size, though that's small too but the run time memory usage. On Linux try running FireFox and Opera for a while and you'll notice that Firefox uses up a lot more memory.
Actually, XSLT is a hidden, disguised Prolog. It is a declarative type language.
You have to have a lot of expertise and/or great brains to code XSLT really good.
Perhaps you should try http://update.mozilla.org/. That's a start if you want customization. Extensions allow for unlimited functionality when you want it or for a very fast and slim browser when you don't. Via editing and commenting a few lines of text, I built a kiosk enviroment for Firefox for the lan center I work at. Can this be done with Opera?
They are also the only truly innovative people in the browser market. Without detracting from Mozilla, most of it's killer features have been in Opera for quite some time now.
As well as the notable tabbed browsing and gesture-based browsing, Opera introduced many smaller things that have proven invaluable in my work as a (non-designer) web developer:
Also, the following innovations have definately added to my browsing 'experience'
- The Zoom function - overlooked by many, this lets you zoom in/out on a page (Ctrl+Scrollwheel!) which, when you have a 1600x1200 display, is often of great help.
- Address bar shortcuts - "g" for google etc. unfortunately not customisable, as it is on Firefox.
- Meta links toolbar - if a page has meta link tags, Opera displays them on a toolbar at the top of the page, no larger than the slashdot OSDN menu.
It does all this while still rendering faster than any other engine and yet retaining a small footprint - I currently have 15 Opera windows open, with 29 tabs, on a P3 550 w/ 128M RAM.Finally, anybody who responds to MS bullshit by releasing a Swedish Chef "Bork Bork" edition is a good guy to me.
There are problems - they only recently added the capability to view an SSL cert, and the Java support on FreeBSD is difficult to get working (although that is more a problem with java on FreeBSD than with Opera).
The OSS community needs companies like Opera - how else will we ever get decent gaming
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"