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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.)
All they have to do is get slightly better than IE, and them MS will buy them out.
Table-ized A.I.
I have been a computer technician for years, and I have never ever seen a computer with the opera browser myself. Most people still use internet explorer, the more security aware windows user will tend to use firefox, but opera is nearly unknown.
I don't think anybody has any reason to pay for some unknown web browser, unless it has some amazing features.
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
No.
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/
And it so happens that the fittest is currently also free :)
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If the price is low and the browser is top notch there's hope. IE has security problems galore, and Safari and Firefox still seem to have trouble displaying a certain group of web sites. If Opera can overcome these problems, and incorporate viavoice in a cool way, and people find out about it, they'll throw a few bucks at it. Or ask for it for their birthday.
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.
With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free, is there room for a non-free browser in the market
Rivers, lakes and rain are all free. Bottled water is a $5 billion industry.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
This has been covered quite extensively in the tradepress due to the possible financial benefits to Firefox.
Help fight continental drift.
Check this out http://www.google.com/ie
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
a seven-fold increase in revenue
is there room for a non-free browser in the market?
If not, what are they selling? Office furniture on eBay?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
There's a similar page for MSIE. Are you going to say that that means Google embraces MSIE too?
It's not like Google favours one browser over another. And, even if it did, so what? I don't know about you, but I don't pick what weh browser I use based on the recommendations of one website or another, I pick what web browser I used based upon more tangible and relevant criteria, such as its feature set, speed, user interface, ease of use, etc.
For me that means Opera 7.54 (although I'll soon be installing the second beta of version 7.60). And, yes, I have tried all the alternatives, including Firefox.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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...
Firefox is very good and, best of all, it's free. And...it's arguably the best.
Say what you want, but Internet Explorer - with bugs and all - is still free, and it comes already packaged with the Windows O/S.
On the other hand, Opera charges money.
Hmmm.....let's see how this business model goes...
1. Write Code others are giving away for free...
2. ?????????
3. Profit!
Yes...I see it all now.
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.
As an Opera user, I must say that there is room for a non-free browser. For one, FF doesn't quite have all of the features of Opera (it's getting there, though), and the tabs work slightly differently in Opera that, for me at least, make browsing far faster.
Once FF has extensions for it all, then, yeah, Opera is probably toast. However, until then, as another user pointed out, Opera will be like bottled water to the lakes, rivers, etc of IE, FF, et al.
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.
It 's following the trend set up by Linux. Just as Linux hurt the sales of commercial Unix systems while barely impacting windows strongholds (desktop computing).
Similarly, Firefox targetted the group who wanted multiple featuters (tabbled browsing, low mem usage, mouse gestures etc.) The common man (surfer) stll hasn't heared of firefox - all he wants is the ease of use. He is getting all this with the pre-packaged IE. He doesn't know about the IE securuity risk as security for him is the realm of anti-virus companies and not the browser.
So, firefox impacted Opera's market - no one liked to pay for anything which he can get for free.
PC and Macs are not the only places that browsers live.
Opera browsers are perfect for cellphones, set top boxs and thin clients. One quarter of losses does not mean a whole lot.
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
Currently we have a near monoculture in web browsers. If you're not using IE, you're pretty damn weird and you can expect many web pages to not work.
As firefox gains in popularity, web developers will have to start writing compatable HTML/JS/etc. and as a result life will become easier for the opera users out there.
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!
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.
IMO, Opera is an OK browser. My biggest complaint is the ad boxes on the free version. I could just pay for it, but why would I when firefox is at least equally good?
If opera ever wants to get any real market share, they are going to have to release their browser free and without ads.
I don't think they need to open source it. It'd be nice, but its realy too much to ask. And besides, how many mozilla or firefox users here compiled from source?
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.
Microsoft effectively put the browser market out of play when they released theirs for free, why should anyone pay for a product when an acceptable alternative is free, to download porn 100 times faster?
And this page?
In Opera, the sections are numbered. In Firefox, they are not.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
- New versions are no-cost downloads for supported versions of Windows.
- IE is also a no-cost download for MacOS
- All browsers are affected by various security issues. Need I remind you that the current version of Mozilla is 1.7. 3 ? This is solely due to security issues.
- The money-delta between using Mozilla on Windows and IE on Windows is $0.00. It's free enough for the purposes of this discussion.
Stop karma whoring.I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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.
Yes, have adds, yes, have some compatibility problems, dont have the extensions that Firefox/Mozilla have, yes, is not open source (to differenciate with "free", as you can get it without spending money).
In the other hand, is pretty stable (well, using 7.6 beta 2, i can leave some room for problems), it displays slashdot pretty well (with firefox, sometimes the content move to the black area on the right, a problem that had also Tikiwiki as explained here), it loads FAST and is pretty compact, the ads are text based (bit dependant on content like gmail ones, and i could re-register if want them off), have a good mail client, it have even a good rss reader integrated, and surely have some other nice features that i dont explored yet. Uh, and of course, gmail works with it pretty well.
Why that last switch? Installed firefox 1.0 RPM from SuSE and started to have problems (well, the right col bug problem was there from some time), firefox sometimes dont load (have to kill the task to retry), sometimes load, but don't display anything on browser's window (seems to work, just not show) and sometimes works. Of course, had to reinstall most themes/extensions, and somewhat between 1.0rc and 1.0 decided to disable the open of new windows from web pages.
I could had try to install another/newer rpm or from other format, clean configurations and try without extensions/themes, and so on... but too i can play a bit more with Opera and leave that test for later.
About opera's "market share", well, that seem to run well in the embedded market. Being small, with low requirements, fast and multiplataform enough are good advantages there and where hardware is not at the top. And for normal desktops still is a good alternative.
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.
note: if you do not have a valid eula for any "os product" (including, without limitation, microsoft windows 98, microsoft windows nt 4.0, microsoft windows 2000, microsoft millennium edition, microsoft windows xp, or any other microsoft operating system that is a successor to any of the foregoing operating systems) you are not authorized to install, copy, or otherwise use the os components and you have no rights under this supplemental eula.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Opera's web standards support is flawed. Period. DOM-compliant Javascript that works PERFECTLY with IE or Mozilla, blows on Opera.
Also, Try to open an XML page with XSLT stylesheet on Opera. Heck! It doesn't work. Wanna know why? Check their STUPID logic for rejecting XSLT. Apparently they confused XML+XSLT (great) with XSL-FO (horrible), and provided neither.
XSLT *was* the future. No more fighting for table rendering etc. You just displayed an xml webpage, and the browser would add ALL the necessary markup. *Instant* templating. Client side.
Just think about HOW MUCH BANDWIDTH could've been saved by using XSLT.
But Nobody will ever DARE to use xslt on their website, guess why. Because Opera doesn't support it and NEVER WILL.
Thanks a lot, Opera. Your stupidity contributed to stalling the web for another 10 years.
i'm really not trying to insult anyone, but i have two good reasons why i use opera for porn surfing.
1) opera has this cool feature called "next". if you go to a gallery with a bunch of photos, you can just hit space bar or click "next" to automagically go to the next hot pic. this avoids the complexity of maneuvering the mouse, hitting the "back" button, and clicking on the next thumbnail. when you spend time looking at a whole lot of porn, this really speeds things up.
2) no-one ever looks at your opera cache/history for porn.
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...
Angry, angry young man.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
However if I'm forced to pay for every critical ancillary peice of software in my OS of choice then computing becomes prohibitively expensive. I have 5 seperate machines in the house so paying for 5 copies of Opera for all those machines would get expensive. I'm also considering replacing both me and the wife's machines with Mac's vs PC's and delegate the largest machine to a glorified Xbox until Linux gaming comes around. I appreciate Apple's family license which would fit perfectly within my budget and comes with everything we need for day to day use of the internet. Firefox or Safari works just fine for what I need it for. Opera while a great browser, is hard to swallow when there's free competition. They would be better served supplying browsers for CE devices like cell phones and PDA's. Of course you also have to worry about those devices turning to Linux in the future also in which case you probably will see FireFox being used there also.
..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
LOL...I've used Opera for several years and I can assure you that virtually nobody out there gives a flying shit whether their website works with Opera. And you can bitch about XSLT support all day long, but from a user's perspective Opera is the best of the lot. Period, end of story.
Oh, and none of these website designers give a flying fuck about bandwidth. The fact that 95% of all websites are built with either Dreamweaver or Frontpage proves that.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
"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.
O.K I'm probably too late for the mods to take ths up, and as such nobody will notice this, but I'll try anyway.
Everyone has been mentioning the superior featureset of Opera, saying its innovative, listing things like good CSS support, the instant back/forward caching, but they forgot one!
Auto-refresh! This is the best feature EVER you can set a page to refresh every N seconds, do you know how useful that is for forum whores and the like?
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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?
Safari is KHTML. Which is free.
Safari just adds some extra features that provide integration into OSX and promote a consistent iLook-and-iFeel... it sort of doesn't mean much unless you _already_ have OSX.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
He paid for it.
Your head a splode
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I've been using Opera for more than 3 years now and still think it's the best browser out there.
There are a lot of small features that keep me hooked up on it, which I couldn't find in Firefox. It has it's problems, too, but I can cope with that.
If some sites don't work with Opera, well, I don't visit the sites! I think it's the webmaster's responsibility to make his site work properly with all browsers, if it doesn't, it means the web site was designed by sloppy web developers or their mind and soul is sold to m$.
Unless your site is gmail (which is more a client-side application than a web site), technically, it IS possible to make it work with opera, so when a web site tells me that I should use IE 6, I tell it to go to hell, where it belongs (that's my new definition of hell, btw - being forced to use IE).
I think the only problem with Opera being widely accepted is that it's not free. If the guys at opera gave it away for free (just the browser, without M2, chat and other advanced features for the Pro version), we could see real competition on this market and Opera would quickly start to climb up.