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Opera: Firefox User Figures 'Inflated'

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the soem-valid-points dept.

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' "

3 of 810 comments (clear)

  1. Double-click by FTL · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

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  2. Re:This is Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Identify by OldSchoolNapster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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