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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?"
That's hardly the bio of a company losing market share. It seems what THEY ARE failing to do is keep their operating costs under control. Even though that rate of revenue growth cannot be maintained in the long run, seems to me like what's really dead is their management for not being able to turn a profit with such revenue numbers.
A blog like any other.
I remember when I used to actualy use Opera. I think the only reason I used it at the time was because it supported tabs. Gradualy my intrest in it dwindled. It didn't support CSS properly, plugins were a hassle. I tried it again a year or two ago, and immediately deleted it. Nothing turns me off from a piece of software like a damned banner ad in the main window.
stuff
I must say that although I am still an Opera user now (it still wins in the customization department), if Firefox added in the massive ammounts of neat extra features Opera has (someone make an extension! please?), I would switch. Firefox seems to be just as fast, plus I love the security of open source. So Opera better change their buisness model, and fast, because Firefox is bound to have all their features eventually.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Yes. There is. As long as the others are not suitable for embedded applications Opera shall live. Mozilla has a project to do this, but it is still way off...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
There's room but only as a value-add or niche market.
There's room in the "small embedded" market, such as cell-phones and PDAs, and some vendors that bundle software may prefer a commercial vendor with paid support, especially for things like home-entertainment boxes.
I don't see your typical computer maker shipping a paid-for browser unless they get a REALLY GOOD DEAL, but I do see them shipping a mozilla-based browser.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I started using Opera about four years ago and quickly became hooked. Gestures, fast rendering, etc., made me an instant fan. The single (non-flashing) ad in the corner didn't really bother me.
At some point I'd used it enough that I figured it was worth paying some back, so I registered it (ironically, it looked wierd at first without the single ad block). Best $40 I've spent on software.
I haven't had to pay for an upgrade since then, and I've installed it on my computer at work, my laptop, and my new desktop. At some point I may have to kick down again and I'll probably do it, just like I bought Doom I after playing the hell out of it.
I've used Mozilla a little bit, but it was back when it was way more kludgy than I hear firefox is. I know that I could get a gesture patch and all, but I guess I'm happy with the way Opera handles just about everything (though I still have to load ol' IE to get at my bank's web page and my work's exchange server).
I appreciate the benefits of open source, and at some point I'll probably migrate to Firefox (at the very least it's good to know that if Opera goes under I have a great alternative). But for now, that's one for-profit organization that is building a very good piece of software and has brought some serious innovation to the browser world - I, for one, hope they are able to stick around...
I can't speak for 1.0, but I ran some tests on some large, simple-layout web sites comparing FF 0.92-or-so and Mozilla 1.7-or-so to Opera 7.53-or-4 a few weeks back.
Opera was several times faster than Mozilla. Firefox was about the same as Mozilla. A page that took 10 in Mozilla and Firefox.
All tests were done with local files.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I used opera a couple times. My faviorite was the "bork bork" version wich translated msn.com into sweedish chef in response to msn.com perposly making itself look broken to the opera browser. Link here to the slashdot story on it: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/14/1256231.shtm l
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
I've never ever seen the inside of a Chinese home, that doesn't mean that there aren't several hundred million of them, does it?
As for not having any reason to pay for some "unknown" web browser unless it has some amazing features, well, have you considered that the very reason that people do pay for Opera, when there are plenty of free alternatives available, is because it does what it does amazingly well?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I've been an Opera user since verison 3 and it's still my favorite browser.
I recently tried Firefox 1.0 and I still like Opera better. Firefox has tabs, but I couldn't put them at the bottom of the screen. And with Opera I can have two sites open -- one with pictures on and one with pictures off -- at the same time.
And there's a buttom on every window (or "tab") that lets me switch between "author" mode and "user" mode. That means if I come across a website that has say yellow text on a white background I can press this button and it'll change to black text on a white background.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Offtopic, but..
Some of us like our water clean.
So, you'll instead have BOTTLED tapwater?
Check out those little notices with 2 pt font on the bottles...more than a few of them say somewhere "Water source: Municipal water plant of Detroit".
Actually, there are multiple results on various research projects that state that your standard tapwater is usually better than any of those bottled ones. Some study stated that the municipal tap water of New York was cleaner (fewer bacteria, fewer toxins) than something like 95% of the bottled water products...
Also, check out the Penn&Teller's Bullshit episode on bottled water.
Opera still blows other browsers out of the water on Windows (yes, that includes Firefox). It's the fastest graphical browser with the best CSS support I've seen. And even with mail, news, IRC and address book included, it's a smaller download than Firefox.
And let's not forget that Opera pioneered many of the features we've come to love, and apparently continues to do so.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Opera is like the BeOS. It's great, but unknown and unloved. If it goes under, it will take the rest of the world years to achieve the same level of excellence. Unless, of course, they open-source the whole thing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you're going to be stuck with adverts, wouldn't you prefer they were relevant to what you're doing, rather than just constant penis enlargment spam (unless of course your browsing penis enlargment sites ;)
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
Amazing features is _exactly_ what Opera has:
I am a happy Opera customer, though the browser can be downloaded and used at no charge (just an a ad bar to put-up-with). I _highly_ reccomend trying out Opera if you haven't...the mouse gestures alone are enough to make a person switch.
On the rare occassion I have to use IE, I habitually try mouse gestures and spend a moment confused as to why it isn't working!
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
Couldn't the statistic on Opera usage be largely scewed by the fact that it makes it very easy to identify as Internet Explorer? I think more and more people are discovering that just leaving the identification as IE gives them much less of a hassle. Personally I've started identifying as GoogleBot, since it makes a lot of sites behave much more nicely.
A while ago, when mozilla was first released in source I used to use it as a benchmark for burning in new machines (it took a long time to cook one).
Oh boy. twenty different object orientated frameworks and and and. About 1 million lines of code. (I know that's an underestimate).
Never thought anybody would be crazy enough to actually pick up that stuff and run with it.
Too much of a coward myself.
It's a *lot* harder to tear down something and keep it sane than to rewrite. But the firefox crew
(much to my great admiration) managed to do just that. We know it's tough guys. You did a great job. Hope you manage to resurrect composer too...
It's nice to know that great software engineering is alive and well. (Guess what browser I'm using).
Sorry to the Opera people, but the honest truth is that when you insisted on advertising in your browser we all instinctively thought spyware, malware other stuff. You should have reacted to how the world has changed if you wanted to stay in the running...
So you're suggesting the people who buy licences for Opera after having had the chance to test drive the free version indefinitely are doing so because they feel sorry for Opera the underdog, for speed over compatibility (care to share with us your list of Opera's incompatibilities?), because they get a warm fuzzy feeling spending money when they don't have to or because they've been duped into doing it because they don't know anything about computers and are either too scared or too stupid to know any better?
I hope your post was a deliberate attempt at trolling because, quite frankly, you're an idiot if you believe even one of those is true.
People buy Opera licences because they like the software, they consider it to be of benefit and they consider the $39 cost of a licence money well spent. It's that simple.
Take Firefox's top ten most raved about features. I guarantee you at least half, if not almost all of them, were Opera innovations: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, etc all were developed by Opera first and copied by others later. And, if you want these features in a fast, tightly integrated packaged, Opera still wipes the floor with Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, MSIE and any other browser you care to name.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg