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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.
All they have to do is get slightly better than IE, and them MS will buy them out.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
No.
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.
Check this out http://www.google.com/ie
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
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
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'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
Like releasing an IE-only version of their toolbar, and having their desktop search tool refuse to search any browser cache that isn't IE.. is that how they're decreasing IE's userbase?
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.
- 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.