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' "

Comments

Thanks Opera!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Double-click

[FTL]

There's another factor at work. IE and Opera both understand that many users double-click everything they see. These browsers filter out the double clicks. Mozilla on the other hand fires off two requests. Thus doubling its market share.

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.

Re:Whose fault is it?

[Roofus]

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.

Why?

[natron 2.0]

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.

Re:Why?

[Peyna]

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.

More like, AOL gave them $2,000,000 and Mitch Kapor gave them $300,000. I'd imagine that user contributions pale in comparison to those.

Re:This is Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Identify

[OldSchoolNapster]

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.

Quick survey

[Leroy_Brown242]

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.

Some anicdotal info

[amichalo]

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.

Re:This is Interesting

[Anonymous Custard]

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.

Re:he may be right, but

[ccp]

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

Opera's speed claims are inflated!

[Lazy Jones]

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 ...