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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.
interesting.w w.google.com/linuxt p://www.google.com/bsd
have you tried:
http://www.google.com/microsoft
http://w
http://www.google.com/mac
ht
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!
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.
..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
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