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Opera: Firefox User Figures 'Inflated'
Anonymous Coward writes "ZDNet
notes, 'The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching" In addition, "Opera has a better caching mechanism so it doesn't access Web sites as often as other browsers" and "Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer' "
Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer
In other words, they provide skewed data that helps Microsoft present itself as leader of the browser market. That's intelligent, way to go. At least you could have picked up a F/OSS browser to masquerade Opera...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Bug 55279 tried to fix this five years ago. But the feeling was that Mozilla users were smarter than the average user and wouldn't do this (which may have been true back then). Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Nobodys... Opera can render IE pages just fine, but when configured to send an Opera user agent, some sites send malformed pages.
It's the webmasters who feed different pages to different browswer's fault.
Well, it could potentially show how *little* Opera is actually used by comparison. If that's the case, I think the Opera guys would rather keep that number hidden so the can say "We've got many, many users, and if we didn't hide ourselves as IE, you'd see how mighty we are!"
I'm not saying that's the case, but the thought came to mind....and for the record I actually purchased a copy of Opera a few years ago.
I like Opera, don't get me wrong. It had features back in the day that no one had, and it's still a great browser. Heck, I'm posting this from Opera.
BUT! Opera's unfortunately never going to be taken as a serious contender.
The fact that they force themselves to identify the software to websites as IE should be telling enough. I can't log into my freakin' bank account from Opera. I can't check Gmail from Opera. If it's being seen as IE, why isn't this working?
What's it going to take for Opera to stop this practice and get enough credibility behind it to get this stigma/limitation to go away?
I can't even call local tech support people without someone not knowing what Opera is.
Distance yourself from IE, or being like IE. That's a starting recommendation.
FTFA:
"A lot of people don't like our ads, which is sad as we don't have a rich sugar daddy like the Mozilla Foundation. They [the Mozilla Firefox team] don't have to think about money as they're being funded. We're not being funded," said von Tetzchner.
Rich Suger Daddy?!? No. Firefox users feel generous enough to donate to the foundation to help support a great FREE browser. This type of competition bashing is not good for business.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Even though some may take that as joke, it is not necessarily true. Competition is competition. If I were Opera I would want to be better than Mozilla AND better than IE and any of the small fries (Konqueror). Even now, I don't see how "sticking together" with Mozilla would be in Opera's best interest. The standards for the Web are open, whoever implements them best should be acknowledged. Finally, if your main or only goal as a browser is to "beat IE" then as a browser you will ultimately fail.
Many sites have all sorts of BS warning popups, redirects, and restrictions on browsers other than IE (often not placing restrictions on firefox btw) even though they render and work just fine in Opera. The folks at Opera have decided that the user experience is more important than their stats.
Anyone know if Opera is now or ever has been a profitable company? I really hope so, because even with low stats a profitable browser company that competes with both free bundled IE and free firefox makes a powerful statement.
bit trollent
every time I buy a new computer, they record it as a Windows sale, except for the Mac, and then if I replace it as Linux it's usually not recorded as a sale, since it's easy to burn the CDs.
So, yes, all market shares are hyped.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
don't most website statistics count an IP address once and call it a unique visit for x number of hours?
Not if they want to count correctly. Take, for example, the handful of IP addresses that represent AOL's proxies. Thousands of unique visitors could be behind the traffic from half a dozen IP addresses. For many corporate networks (hell, or schools, for that matter), you could easily have a few hundred surfers popping out of the firewall on a single IP address. Nope... to track visitors you've got to look at what they do, or hope they'll take a cookie.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You walk down the street,a nd ask people what the computer program Opera does, you'd get no answer in 100.
You do the same thing with Firefox, and people know what you're talking about as mcu as they don't.
I don't need any hard stats and figures to know that Firefox has made a more profound impact on people and the internet than many other things in a long time.
Pretty Pictures!
So my non-technical father calls me the other day to tell me all about this new Browser called Firefox that the tech support guy at AT&T (his dialup provider) told him would help with the popups he was fighting against.
This is the first time I have ever heard of a tech support person, save at AOL/Netscape, recommending an alternative web browser.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
That is very underhanded and irresponsible of the company to make it's product report that it's IE. But, it's up to them to make sure that their browser is 100% compatible with IE, because when they do stupid things like that, us webmasters have no way of knowing if we have to make tweaks for them because we don't know if they're hitting our web site! If Opera didn't render something quite right, and they had any market share, I'd only be able to work around that if they identified themselves to my web server correctly.
I don't respond to AC's.
News note: Opera has recently announced a security patch to bring Opera to 8.01. This was to fix three holes (A, B, C) announced at the time, as well as one announced later.
The Macintosh version 8.0 has also been recently released, so that they can enjoy modern Opera as well.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Opera defaults itself as IE because some websites won't load unless you tell them you are IE. Opera, just like Firefox, is a victim of all the IE specific sites out there that continue to flourish.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Something else to think about, 'worse case scenario' wise. What if the browser share that Firefox has eroded from IE were Opera users switching to Firefox. So, IE's user base hasn't gone down at all. Doubtful, I am sure, but something to think about....
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
I avoid IE because of security problems, but ironically I need to use it to get Windows security patches.
They do say "If you prefer to use a different Web browser, updates to Windows may be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center", though.
$8.95/mo web hosting
My theory about Firefox and Opera user counts is that Firefox users are mostly zealots that blindly believe when they are told Firefox is already a good Browser (are tell it themselves because they want it to be). This kind of people will of course spend more of their time telling people how nice it is and try to convince them to use it too. And since most people without an opinion in this area are IE-users it is of course better (everything is better than IE).
Opera users use a browser with ready-to-use all useful features included (and not many unneeded ones) probably because they are pragmatic about the issue. This kind of person doesn't go out and tells everyone and their dog how good the software they use is, they just use it and do something useful in the time they save by not configuring Firefox Extensions new after each minor update and not advocating their browser all the time.
So as a conclusion the word of mouth effect for Firefox is much higher even though the browser is much less useful.
Linux is not Windows
Y'know, it might've been a good idea to avoid the UA spoofing in the default settings, and offer the ability to set a custom UA string on a site-by-site basis, like another browser I could mention... It seems to me that if a user is savvy enough to be using Opera, they're savvy enough to grasp the concept of UA strings.
Re-read my post and look for one "war metaphor". I wasn't the one talking about attacking from cover of darkness. I did use the word "ally", but that's not a war metaphor, it's exactly what is going on - in business, you must figure out who is competing with you, and who can help you.
You are a poor student of history if you think the standards are out there, and don't require comparisons to other browsers. Do you even understand why Netscape chose to open source their browser? Do you know what was at stake in the competition between MS and Netscape? It's not about war, it's about monopolistic market control, and the "browser war" wasn't about the end user, it was about control of the server market, and about whether the standards were ever going to even matter (they almost don't, even now). Netscape's choice to open source their browser allowed Apache and Linux to become real competitors in the server space. Without ANY other standards compliant browser, IE literally becomes the standard. If Microsoft controls all of the client software, Microsoft can then lock in the server software to only work with the client.
Luckily, this didn't happen in with the web. But it did with email (just look at exchange and outlook) and with SMB protocol (SAMBA, luckily, hasn't been sued yet). Sure, outlook/exchange isn't all of email, but there are tons of corporations that cannot bring themselves to switch away from Windows Server for an otherwise better product because they need to run Exchange. This could have been so with IIS and Internet Explorer. I believe that products should compete on the basis of price and features, not on the basis of vendor lock-in. This may be unrealistic, but at least it is a goal.
You're wrong that I'm part of a crusade, and wrong that I'd want you to join it, if I were. I have no interest in war metaphors, as you may think. But I do want to see better choice for the customer, and we can't get there if we continue to feed monopolies.
Daily figures, rounded to the nearest order of magnitude:
Internet Explorer - 500,000
Firefox - 50,000
Opera - 500
I'm sorry, but there's no "link inflation" that explains a 100-to-1 ratio. Methinks someone has sour grapes.
Pro-IE websites are rare. They are usually just websites written by incomp etant morons who assume there are 2 browsers, IE and netscape. So IE works, firefox/mozilla/netscape work, and opera, konq, safari, omniweb, dillo, etc, etc all get screwed if they don't pretend to be IE or netscape. That's why so many user agents are mozilla/version even if they have nothing at all to do with mozilla or netscape.
And that Opera identifies itself as IE is a valid concern
:
:
That's not totally true
HTTP_USER_AGENT for Opera identifying as
Opera : Opera/8.0 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
Mozilla : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Opera 8.0
IE : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686; en) Opera 8.0
There is "Opera" in each line, so you can make the difference if you want.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
This is just another nail in the coffin of Firefox since it seems the Mozilla group can't focus on one particular project. I prefer to use Mozilla since it lacks the "fruitiness" and the wuss-level preferences system. To fix that, they should offer a [basic] and [advanced] mode. And yes, I'm quite familiar with "about:config" too. However, the problem is, they're trying to burn both ends of the candle at once. Pick one, stick with it!
/ 0152202&tid=154&tid=90 happens. Not having a trademark is shameful.
0 0&tid=154&tid=1 kind of stuff.
It certainly does NOT look good when this http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/17
Then you have to worry about this http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/07/14142
And when the Firefox site says, "Join more than 64 million others and make the switch today -- Firefox imports your Favorites, settings and other information, so you have nothing to lose." You have to wonder, every time a new update comes out, why does it force you to download the ENTIRE Firefox package all over again?
"Oh, you need an update? That's _another_ download and one more point for our team..." What a crock.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
An illustration to your point:
I go to NetLibrary, and a page informs me my browser is not supported, may I download some of the following:
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above
Netscape 6.2 and above
Mozilla 1.1 and above
Firefox 1.0 and above
Safari 1.0 and above
Opera 7.0 and above
Hey, the morons at NetLibrary! I'm using Opera 8! Knock, knock...Somebody there?
The best part, I tell Opera to identify as Explorer, and in I go, with no other change.
I'm still wondering if these guys are beyond stupid or somebody pays them to make alternative browsers look bad.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
And just to reply to myself...
A story on El Reg today:
Were a study to be done using Opera, I'm sure similar figures would be obtained.Firefox users turned away from 10% of top UK sites
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Well to many people, Windows is BETTER than any of the alternatives.
If linux was better for me I would use it.
Microsoft is trying to make a product that is best for a large number of users, it has to make certain sacrifices along the way to acomplish these goals, sacrifices linux doesn't have to make. Truth is Microsoft probably doesn't care about Linux community in general because the cost of accomodating the demographic would be higher than the profit return.
If anything we're probably seeing the natural equilibrium in software right now. No customer is going unsold and every company (well except for linux of course) is making money. In order to "steal" users from one group say Firefox users, Microsoft would have to expend more money than they would get in return. As soon as this is no longer the case, you'll see MS's massive machinery move embrace the profitable demographic.
Opera's default cache settings are more aggressive than other browsers' and they sometimes result in annoying problems (URLs ending in .html are apparently considered static HTML, even though they are often dynamically generated). Opera feels slower than MSIE when the cache settings are "correct", at least on my PC ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)