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

This is Interesting

[ndansmith]

To see folks from Opera trying to denegrate Firefox. You have to stick together to beat IE, then you can duke it out amongst yourselves!

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:This is Interesting

[Taladar]

Firefox Advocates are not exactly known for sparing other "small" Browsers critizism either...

Re:This is Interesting

[tveidt]

Yup.

And Google only supports Mozilla's prefetching for a couple of weeks. Before that, Firefox's market share wasn't significantly lower, was it? Besides, only the raw source code gets prefetched as far as I know. Scripts, images and the like are only executed/loaded when a user actually visits the page. So, when Firefox prefetches a site, it should be visible in the site's logs, but I don't think it could trigger a third-party counter/tracker. Also, Google only prefetches certain sites, not any site.

And that Opera identifies itself as IE is a valid concern, but that's Opera's fault, and nothing that would inflate Firefox's version numbers, just IE's.

Re:This is Interesting

[badmammajamma]

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.

Re:This is Interesting

[Excelsior]

It's okay. I have my Firefox browser set to report itself as Opera. So, this cancels out and indeed the figure of 3 active users is accurate.

Re:This is Interesting

[snorklewacker]

Hey Sun Tzu, I'd just like a browser that doesn't suck. If Mozilla chases Microsoft into making a browser that doesn't suck, I'll be fine with it. I'd really like, however, to be spared the posturing, politics, and ideology that comes with a war mentality. Especially for something as silly as a damn web browser.

Re:This is Interesting

[rpdillon]

Well, perhaps you are only interested in a "browser that doesn't suck", but other people (i.e. me) may be interested in how well a browser supports web standards, whether it is open source, and how many platforms it runs on. This is on top of "does it suck?" features like security and plug-in support. Mozilla will only scare MS into being "good enough" to take back market share. And it isn't "good enough" that I (or many people, for that matter) are interested in. For example, "good enough" doesn't buy you web standards. Many small browsers allying themselves to pressure the big guys does. And standards are a good thing.

Finally, there is nothing remotely "silly" about a web browser. You may only use it to make snide comments on Slashdot, but web browsers support hundreds of billions of dollars in business, which, I would argue, is far from silly. The security and availability of such a program is quite important, really.

Re:This is Interesting

[GMFTatsujin]

Spoken like an Opera user, you insensitive clod!

F1R3F0X 4EV4R LOLOLOLZY

Re:This is Interesting

[snorklewacker]

Well, perhaps you are only interested in a "browser that doesn't suck", but other people (i.e. me) may be interested in how well a browser supports web standards, whether it is open source, and how many platforms it runs on. This is on top of "does it suck?

No, this is about not sucking. The standards are out there, and do not require comparisons to other browsers. I know browsers are important software, but they still don't justify continuing this idiotic "browser war" nonsense. I'm sick of war, I'm sick of war metaphors, and "silly" was the kindest euphimism I could use to describe the negative reaction I'm having to all the god damned posturing.

I use a web browser that doesn't suck, and it happens to be Firefox, but I will not join your damn crusades.

Re:This is Interesting

[Pulzar]

Additionally, each prefetch would have come from the same IP as the actual hit, so they would not be counted separately.

Your other point is valid, but this one is not. The problem isn't that the prefetch and the hit are counter seperately as 2 hits, but that the prefetch without a hit is counter as a hit.

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:This is Interesting

[Golias]

Preach on!

I conform to standards as best I can when building web pages, surf with Safari on my Mac and Firefox on my work PC... but I would gladly switch to IE without hesitation if Microsoft were to make a browser that does the job better, just as I once dropped Netscape Navigator for IE 5.

I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality.

"I usually vote Democrat, so everytime a car-bomb goes off in Iraq, I'm happy because it makes Bush's decision to go to war look worse."

"I'm a protestant, so every time another story about a cover-up of pedophile priests comes out, I'm giddy with laughter over the human tragedy, because it's a huge embarrassment to Catholics."

"I'm a Linux user, so every time Microsoft users are hit with a virus which shuts down entire companies for the day and costs the US economy millions of dollars, I can barely contain my joy."

Fuck all of you! Groups you are "rooting against" doing poorly, or even groups you are "rooting for" doing well, does nothing to make you a better person, nor does it actually make the world a better place. Get some goddamn perspective and stop being so myopic about your little meaningless dogma! You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.

Re:This is Interesting

[BlowChunx]

Hey, we all know The Flash is faster...(sorry, couldn't resist).

Re:This is Interesting

[Seumas]

Even if the Opera dude was right, Firefox is free, open-source, extensible and has a bazillion amazing extensions. I'll take that over paying for Opera or using the free version that is stuffed with adware.

I agree that Opera is a decent browser and they've been decent for a long time. I just don't want to pay for a browser or be forced to view advertisements. And thanks to Firefox, I don't have to.

My only complaint is that Firefox seems to run painfully slow on OSX.

Re:This is Interesting

[rizzo420]

try the IEView extension for firefox... makes it much easier. :)

Re:This is Interesting

[rpdillon]

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.

Re:This is Interesting

[alexhs]

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.

Re:This is Interesting

[Mad_Rain]

You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.

[comic book guy]
Clearly, despite several ties and the interference of other Galactic Super Beings the Flash was faster.

Worst... argument... ever...
[/comic book guy]

(ps, I thought your argument was spot on)

Re:This is Interesting

[Bellum Aeternus]

Tab over blown there - but I see your point and I have to agree.

And Nightscrawler is the fastest... he teleports. X distance / 0 time = infinite speed. ^_^

Re:This is Interesting

[node 3]

I would gladly switch to IE without hesitation if Microsoft were to make a browser that does the job better, just as I once dropped Netscape Navigator for IE 5.

Virtually *everyone* would switch to Windows+IE if it was truly better (in the ways important to them) than the alternatives. But almost *no* MS offering is actually the best available.

Fuck all of you! Groups you are "rooting against" doing poorly, or even groups you are "rooting for" doing well, does nothing to make you a better person, nor does it actually make the world a better place.

Are you sure? For every time MS loses an IE customer to Firefox, just that many fewer people will get hit with malware, that many fewer shady organizations will make money on spyware, and MS might, just maybe, be forced into making IE better.

So yes, it most certainly *can* and *does* make the world a better place, and *can* and *does* make you a better person.

Get some goddamn perspective and stop being so myopic about your little meaningless dogma!

Yeah, most people are dogmatic and stupid, so you're right there. But rooting for a rationally chosen side not "myopic".

You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.

And then you post that neither is faster, but you use Superman to deliver your mail since he's faster right now, yet would gladly call on the Flash if he could speed up a bit.

Re:This is Interesting

[Uber Banker]

I'll take that over paying for Opera or using the free version that is stuffed with adware.

I'd hardly say stuffed. I have an ad-bar of google text ads in neutral colours just below my menu bar.

Opera is free too, free with ads. I don't mind. It does tabbed browsing 'better' than Firefox, it is more stable than Firefox, it has a smaller footprint than Firefox (on WinXP SP2), it has many UI features 'better' than Firefox.

By 'better' I mean:
Enhanced text searching
Voice
Scaling options
Tabs (options in right click like open in new page/window, open in foreground/background)
Better text highlighting options (dictionary, thesaurus, etc)
Ability to right click and search for a phrase
Notes (EXTREMELY USEFUL, would not be surprised if they showed up in the next MS Office colaboration software)
Javascript and Java console

Firefox could most of these with the right extensions. But I am not happy to search high and low for an extension to do this, let alone finding a stable one. Opera offers some fantasic innovation which I don't want to do without. Why not pay someone for their hard work, be that through purchasing their software or implicity through Google text ads?

Re:This is Interesting

[Teckla]

You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.

Superman has more bandwidth, and The Flash has lower latency.

Duh....

Re:This is Interesting

[pcgabe]

31 Replies.

20 of which argue who is faster.

You can see where our priorities are.

---
Flash is faster.

Re:This is Interesting

[im_thatoneguy]

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.

Re:This is Interesting

[bdaehlie]

I know its not a final release, but you should try the latest Firefox Mac OS X nightly build from ftp.mozilla.org

I landed a patch yesterday that significantly speeds things up (we now use use CFRunLoop instead of Carbon Events, in case you can understand that). Huge difference, especially with plugins. It'll be in Firefox 1.1. This one patch makes a huge difference.

-Josh Aas, Mozilla Foundation Mac developer

he may be right, but

[oni]

Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer

who's fault is that?

Re:he may be right, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobodys... Opera can render IE pages just fine, but when configured to send an Opera user agent, some sites send malformed pages.

Re:he may be right, but

[limon.verde]

It's the webmasters who feed different pages to different browswer's fault.

Re:he may be right, but

[mahdi13]

If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?

Re:he may be right, but

[shinyplasticbag]

I think that's irrelevant (I'm not trolling, it's just my opinion). Having the option to send a different user agent string is very handy, but it should definitely _not_ be the default action out of the box.

Re:he may be right, but

[bryan8m]

That would mean that IE's market share figures are inflated too (mod me insightful)!

Re:he may be right, but

[pintomp3]

depends, is your name frank?

Re:he may be right, but

[Doctor Memory]

If so....PUSH THE BUTTON!

Re:he may be right, but

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?/p>

If many major department stores and government buildings had someone at the door asking, "is your name Frank," and then refusing entry to anyone who said "no" and then most newspapers reported that Frank is the most popular name in the country after asking department stores and government agencies who would be at fault?

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.

Re:he may be right, but

[slavemowgli]

Damn, I never would've thought that *that* kind of karma whoring worked - I need to try that, too (mod me funny)!

Re:he may be right, but

[mscdex]

would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?

Yes, if you're at Cheers.

Re:he may be right, but

[kunakida]

Opera can render IE pages just fine

Oh no it can't.

If you do almost anything of significance with DHTML and event handling, you quickly run into major differences.
Opera, due to its closer adherence to W3C standards, is much closer to mozilla/firefox than IE.

Because of Opera trying to force its way in to IE only sites, advanced DHTML authors have been forced to use client side browser detection for years now. Browser detection is crucial for advanced sites, and not being able to detect them on the server side is a needless burden. This _is_ Opera's fault. Server side browser detection has become essentially useless because of Opera.

Actually, I'm a bit appalled that the hit counting sites don't also do their detection exclusively on the client side to avoid this issue.

In any case, because the Opera market penetration number is a little vague (around 1~2% with some loss due to miscounting) They get the benefit of the vagueness, and generally I have advocated for supporting them and not NN4, even though NN4 probably has a higher market penetration (NN4 is harder to support than Opera).

As for Opera downloads, I have several. As a web developer, I have to test against Opera (and IE 5.x and 6.x) but, my primary browser is Firefox.

So don't count my Opera downloads in the total :-)

Re:he may be right, but

[endx7]

Unfortunately, everyone just misinforms you about everything unless you say your name is either Frank or Steven. So either you are gonna end up believing a bunch of lies...or you just lie to everyone.

Actually, I'm being serious. It's not quite everyone, but there a good portion of websites will give non-working output or refuse to give full functionality if you give them the opera user agent string. If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output.

Off the top of my head, I know msdn (thinks opera is a bot that wants feeds or something) and gmail (just reverts to basic non-js functionality) do this. Personally, when I use opera, I always just leave it identifying itself as IE or moz since I forget to change it back.

I think a point to Opera is that they aren't so small as everyone thinks, but they ended up in a corner. They can't tell the truth or certain sites won't work (oh noes, opera sucks) or they lie (oh noes, noone uses it!) so they work, which is where they are now.

Re:he may be right, but

[Wieland]

Spot on.

As a matter of fact, by incorrectly identifying itself as IE, Opera is telling lazy webmasters that IE is even more dominant than it really is, which gives them an excuse to rely on IE-only code. This, in turn, makes people use IE, "because alternative browsers render many sites wrong".

If Opera, like Firefox, Safari and Konqueror, would stand up for itself, and send out correct UA identifiation headers, it would help raise awareness among webmasters, thus helping to open up the market for alternatives.

Re:he may be right, but

[lspd]

Nobodys... Opera can render IE pages just fine, but when configured to send an Opera user agent, some sites send malformed pages.

MSIE UserAgent strings are already full of extra garbage.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; MSN 6.1; MSNbMSFT; MSNmen-us; MSNc00; v5m)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) via Avirt Gateway Server v4.2
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; SV1)

You tag the useragent as "Opera" without ruining the MSIE spoofing by simply adding "Opera; " or "OWB; " after the OS string.

It's a stupid issue anyway. Opera Software knows exactly how many users have current licenses and how many users are downloading banners for the adware version. Opera's userbase is simple to track without making any estimations.

Re:he may be right, but

[Ralph Wiggam]

"If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output."

That's true, but it has not been TESTED with Opera. The thinking by the suits is that they don't want to pay people to test every part of a big web site with every browser in the world. If they can test two browsers and cover a huge percentage of all users, it becomes cost effective. Since the suits don't want customer complains from untested browsers and then have to pay people to do support, they completely block some browsers. You would think that the smaller browsers like Opera would always work and not need to be tested, but that assumes that developers follow published standards and don't use crazy IE only features.

If Opera really had so many users, wouldn't the big sites that block Opera be flooded with complaints? A few hundred complaints and I would bet some sites would make a little effort.

-B

Re:he may be right, but

[cmeans]

Thanks for being Frank with us. *ducks*

Re:he may be right, but

[alanh]

GMail now gives the full interface by default to Opera 8.0+ users. They used an unusual interface (XMLHTTPRequest) which most pre-8 versions didn't support. The 8.x betas (and maybe 7.61, IIRC) supported this feature, but GMail didn't recognise them. You could override the check by adding "?nocheckbrowser" to the end of the URI: http://gmail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser

I reverted to using Firefox for a while, but now I'm happily back to using Opera. Been a happy, registered user since 5.0.

Re:he may be right, but

[kajoob]

You'll find that reverse psychology works best, but I'll probably get modded down for saying that.

Re:he may be right, but

[RickPartin]

I'll take a +1 insightful please. Thank you.

Re:he may be right, but

[jp10558]

I agree, that's true and fine. I'm not going to use your site. But, why would you block me? So what if it doesn't work right - that's my fault apparently. Maybe in the next version, it would work right, but now you've blocked all users of browser X.

Re:he may be right, but

[ninjakoala]

I haven't yet met a site that convinced me to download whatever the webmaster thought was appropriate (often IE). It didn't work in '96 (NS) and it doesn't work now. Especially since IE is a horribly crippled browser unless you add at least a couple of plugins - and even then I'd rather use a browser that can actually render CSS correctly.

I suppose it's about time to have a quick detection on one's site: "Oops. It appears you're using an outdated browser. Please consider upgrading to Firefox, Opera or one of the other, safer alternatives. It's really for your own sake you know. It hurts me even more than it hurts you."

That said, who cares if someone wants to play around with the latest technology. As long as the information on the site isn't important and something everyone should be allowed access to, who really cares? And who would want to see the site anyway - except for the sake of geeky curiousity that is.

Re:he may be right, but

[dynamo]

It just might work.. Heh.
I've NEVER seen a comment end up as underrated or overrated. Why is that? Are funny, insightful, troll, and the other ones we ever see just the dominant alleels(sic, probably)?

Mod me underrated!

Re:he may be right, but

[mooingyak]

I have 2 mod points left, but you're not getting one for underrated :)

Under and over rated, to my understanding, are the generic +1 and -1 options. It covers all the reasons you might want to adjust a comment but don't have existing options for, like 'Completely wrong' or 'Proper use of iambic pentameter in a ruby script'. It never gets listed as the reason though -- if I modded you under (or over) rated right now instead of commenting, your score would go up or down, but no word would appear next to the score.

Re:he may be right, but

[Cecil]

Joke's on you. You don't get karma for funny mods.

Re:he may be right, but

[reustp]

No, I just wouldn't shop there anymore.

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

Re:he may be right, but

[kalidasa]

And why the hell would anyone go to the trouble of using someone else's registration key to avoid the ads in Opera, which are not exactly obtrusive?

Re:he may be right, but

[RedWizzard]

You've missed the point: if Firefox can operate successfully without misidentifying itself why does Opera need to do so?

Re:he may be right, but

[martinX]

And just to reply to myself...

A story on El Reg today:
Firefox users turned away from 10% of top UK sites

Were a study to be done using Opera, I'm sure similar figures would be obtained.

Re:he may be right, but

[jc42]

if Firefox can operate successfully without misidentifying itself why does Opera need to do so?

Because, as was discussed here recently, there have been sites (mostly owned by Microsoft) that actively sabotage pages sent to Opera users, by using CSS that cause the content to be garbled. It was shown that only requests with "Opera" in the ID string had this problem. (Changing it to "Oprah" made the pages display properly. ;-)

I haven't (yet) read about this being done to firefox. Anyone know if it's happening anywhere? I wouldn't be surprised; I just haven't heard about it.

There certainly are pages that are only delivered to clients that identify themselves as "IE". I've seen such pages, and verified that an IE ID is needed to get them. I have a little perl web-page tester that has an ID-string command-line arg for exactly this reason.

Now, if this were due to bugs, or were otherwise inadvertent, you'd expect it to effect all browsers equally. But it doesn't. So far, the only cases I've seen are pages that require an IE browser ID. I've never seen a page that requires some other browser's ID. I'm not saying they don't exist; I've just never stumbled across them. This tells you exactly why you might want your browser to masquerade as IE from time to time.

I've read that IE identifies itself as "Mozilla/4.0 " because there were some pages that required the Mozilla ID to function properly. Maybe this is true. I've never seen such pages, but I suppose they could exist.

Re:he may be right, but

[Thundersnatch]

I have yet to have anyone suggest a reason that is useful anyway. But that's just me, I personally think webmail should be abolished, and anyone who thinks of a Web Application should be shot. I am obviously in the minority though.

Yes, you certainly are. If I tried to take away the ability for workers in my company to do useful work from anywhere with just about any PC, I'd be fired and reviled by hundreds of otherwise well-meaning folks.

X windows was not the answer to ubiquitous application mobility, client/server wasn't the answer, nor was Java or ActiveX. Web-based apps seem to be a big step in the right direction.

Re:he may be right, but

[shic]

Or... do you just enjoy being frank with your friends?

Hey

[kevin_conaway]

Aren't you supposed to be swimming somewhere?

Re:Hey

[pianoman113]

They had a mechanical failure. Read all about it here:
http://www.opera.com/swim/

If that's true

[LandownEyes]

I'll swim across the ocean!

WHAT!?

[Leiterfluid]

The open source community inventing information!
Ce n'est possible!

strange math

[kingjosh]

If Opera is identifying itself as IE, isn't IE getting overcounted and Opera undercounted?

Whose fault is it?

[smooth wombat]

"Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer' "

And whose fault is that? Maybe if you would default your browser to itself rather than trying to pass itself off as someone else the statistics would show an even deeper drop in IEs marketshare and an increase in your share.

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.

Re:Whose fault is it?

[arkanes]

Opera actually has the potential for the most accurate user counting around - count number of current licenses, count unique clients being served ads for the adware version. It'd be very slightly over-inflated by people who bought licenses but switched browsers, and slightly under-inflated by pirated versions. But more accurate than web logs, especially when Opera intentionally masks itself.

I wonder if there's a reason why Opera doesn't reveal these numbers....

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...

Re:Thanks Opera!

[cataBob]

The whole reason that Opera is identifying itself as IE is because many pages send different html based upon what browser is requesting it. If Opera identified itself as anything besides IE, Opera users would get alot of degradaded pages, even though it can render the page just fine.

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:Double-click

[mrdaveb]

Mozilla on the other hand fires off two requests. Thus doubling its market

You've got to be joking? Yes, sure it is wasteful to send another request when there could be the option to catch and ignore double clicks... but doubling market share? Nobody in their right mind decides marketshare by counting GET requests - even the simplest stats package will count the number of visits rather than number of hits ('visits' is a very vague term, but generally it groups all the hits from the same IP/browser/hour as a single visit)

Re:Double-click

[slim]

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.

Within the last month, I've been stung by exactly such race conditions -- but we found that it was only possible to double-submit a form in IE. In Firefox the second click was ignored.

Re:Double-click

[Mandomania]

These browsers filter out the double clicks.

Really? IE doesn't. In fact, there's an MSDN page that describes the ondblclick event that fires when someone double-clicks a DHTML element:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/re ference/events/ondblclick.asp

The only reason I know this is because we actively use this event at work (Don't shoot: it wasn't my idea).

--
Mando

Link prefetching?

[TERdON]

I wasn't aware Firefox was prefetching links. Is this part of the standard distribution of Firefox or is it as usual an addon?

BTW, the same could be said about IE but because of another reason... It does visit a whole buttload of pages, which the user never asked it to go to...

Re:Link prefetching?

[DeadSea]

It is standard behaviour in Firefox but its not as bad as the article suggests.

Firefox only prefetches links when the links are marked on the previous site as "hey you might want to prefetch this".

Specifically on Google, only the top result is marked as prefetch. And even then, only when Google has determined that most visitors would choose it. Google has said that they mark it for things such as prefetching cnn.com when somebody searches for "CNN".

The article states: "...which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache." which is innacurate. It should say "...which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search result into its cache when Google thinks there is a very high probability you will visit the first result."

Currency exchange rate calculator and foreign exchange converter

Re:Link prefetching?

[the_maddman]

Firefox only prefetches links the site has tagged. So, it's not like you visit a page with Firefox and it starts downloading the whole site, unless the web designer is smoking something and tagged all the links with rel="prefetch".
So, whining about a feature that the website has to turn on is kinda pointless. You'd think the site would figure out how to count visitors BEFORE turning on prefetch right?
Read the FAQ and see what's really going on.

Forgot a reason for Opras Low stats.

[jellomizer]

No one really uses it.
Well yea there are some die hards and I am sure it is a great Browser and all. But with firefox as a viable free alternitive without the adds why bother.

Who cares about the technical details?

[lazuli42]

What the heck is this guy von Tetzchner smoking? Doesn't he realize yet that nobody cares about the technical details? People (web developers, plugin writers, users) only care about the big numbers. They don't want to think about the results, they only want to know: who is first, and by how much? Is the second place browser big enough to notice?

Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.

Re:Who cares about the technical details?

[aBlooMoon]

Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.

The world would be a better place if this were a universal truth.

'Windows is nice, but the Windows execs should realize already that they can't sell their OS when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.' :D

Re:Who cares about the technical details?

[Troed]

they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.

... and yet I have bought it, and bought my parents a license as well when I removed the IE-shortcut from their computers.

Could it be because Opera is better than the other alternatives maybe?

consequently..

[PopeAlien]

..the next version of Opera will identify itself as Opera, prefetch all links, reload pages every 5 seconds, and randomly email links to the Opera download page to present a more balanced picture of market share.

Yeah well...

[ajservo]

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.

Re:Yeah well...

[jp10558]

I don't know about your bank, but as far as I know, GMail works fine in Opera 8+.

Basically, Opera always used to put Opera in it's UA string. They would constantly get blocked from sites for no reason (if you used proxomitron and blatently lied to the site to get past the checker, it worked perfectly).

Opera's customers asked for a way to hide that they were using Opera (check the forums, this went on for years). In Opera 8, you now are able to hide what browser you are using completely. Heck, Opera takes care of some of that automatically for you with auto updates.

Re:Now why?

[RangerRick98]

I can't recall any website that I've been to in Firefox that didn't let me in because I wasn't using IE. Perhaps I just don't go to the same sites that you do, but I'd think that if "many sites" exhibited that behavior, I'd see at least one of them.

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:Why?

[Christianfreak]

$2.3 million is nothing when your thinking in terms of large companies or foundations. Heck Opera claims to have had > 4 million downloads (from a quick google search). What do they charge $30 for their browser? If only 10% of those people paid for it that's $12 million right there.

AOL gave them that money 2 years ago. With just salaries alone its likely all gone.

Re:Why?

[RexRhino]

First of all, the development that people have contributed to Firefox, developing Firefox and also developing the free plugins, are worth millions of dollars in man-hours, much more than what AOL gave them.

Second of all, tt doesn't matter who funds the Foundation... if people don't like something about a product, people won't use it. People hate the advertising bar in Opera, and won't use it. People don't find the features in Opera valueable enough to pay for it.

I am not going to choose what product I use based on sympathy and excuses. If a for-profit company wants me to give them my money, they are going to have to give something of equal value to me in return.

Re:Why?

[ffub]

"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.

Hate to be a capitalist, but that's a great revenue stream that allows you to increase your userbase with ease ("what, it's free?!"). Seriously mate, if you're jealous, and think mozilla's model allows them to have it better, then move open source and get some funding. It's competition, that's how it works.

As for public browser stats: If you're faking IE then you're really pushing it. Even IE fake Mozilla. It's meanlingless, seeing as you have sales figures (those ads served, licenses, downloads). The reason why standards are not well enforced on the web is because - shock horror - browser makers and web designers keep breaking them.

This is not good marketing. Maybe spending more on that would help your market share.

Re:Someone's jealous, methinks

[AtariAmarok]

"Online penis envy, perhaps?"

I got something in my email inbox this morning which might help with this situation. Perhaps I should forward it to you.

This is wholly inaccurate

[suitepotato]

With suitable proxies, you can make Lynx look like Internet Explorer. Of course the wrong service pack will make Internet Explorer behave like Lynx.

Aren't all market share numbers hyped?

[amichalo]

Aren't all market share numbers hyped?

I bet I have reinstalled Windows 10 times in the past few years, and each time I update IE and download several other software packages over and over again.

And as far as actual web usage, those stats must be all over the place because some sites do a better job of cross browser compatibility than others and other sites, like Slashdot, appeal to a non-IE crowd while still others, like MSN, do not.

So this whole article should really just be a reminder to not believe everything someone else wants you to.

Re:Aren't all market share numbers hyped?

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Aren't all market share numbers hyped?

[The Bungi]

those stats must be all over the place

True, but surely you can compute an average. The typical Slashdork user is not average. The average is Yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon, etc. It's amusing how for the past year or so I've seen people post stats from W3C Schools as "proof" that FF's share was increasing. As if that was more accurate (or a better representation of the average) than, say, the Google zeitgeist. Of course it was a fanboy that cause Google to pull zeitgeist because he argued that Linux should be 0.4% as opposed to 0.3% or some ridiculous bullshit like that.

As a side note, Slashnot used to publish browser stats. Ever wonder why they don't anymore?

Can't We All Just Get Along

[jeff_schiller]

I think the "who actually uses it" argument is a good one. As a web developer I have installed IE6, Fx1.1 and O8 and I test on all. I think Opera 8 is a great browser, especially since it's the first to support native SVG rendering, but my regular browser is still Firefox, as I find the ads in O8 at the top distracting.

Of course, this little snippet from Opera isn't a response to the enormous success of Firefox at all, is it? Opera is envious of how Firefox became the darling of the internet community and threads like this prove that they still don't understand why (hint: clean, crisp interface and a lot of word of mouth)

It's odd that the CEO of a for-profit company whines that they don't have a not-for-profit "sugar-daddy" like MoFo. Who funds MoFo? Isn't it a not-for-profit company (I'm not sure if AOL still does any funding there)?

It's also odd that they are whining about setting the user string agent to IE's when they are doing it to themselves.

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.

Re:Switcher

[ScentCone]

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.

Re:Opera versus Firefox

[Eric Giguere]

Relying on the headers the browser sends to figure out stats on browser usage is a dicey proposition at best. A statistically significant survey of Internet users would yield better results, but who's going to pay for that?

Eric
Descriptions of my books

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.

Is it Just Google Prefetching?

[ehaggis]

A ZDNet article indicates the prefetching is for Google searches only. I am not sure this would account for a 9 point spread between browsers.

Irresponsible as hell

[DogDude]

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.

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[MayonakaHa]

Webmasters that have a clue and know how to make a site compatible with all browsers aren't the problem. Webmasters and companies that have no clue and make pages that will only render to a browser that identifies itself as IE are the problem even if the code would render perfectly in Opera, Firefox, Konquerer, et al.

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[arose]

That is very underhanded and irresponsible of the company to make it's product report that it's IE.

Yes it is. Did you know that IE reports as Mozilla?

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[swimin]

That is slightly different. IE reports as Mozilla Compatible. As it has been explained to me, browsers that did not mark themselves as such got much less rich content from webservers.

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[Taladar]

Actually Webmasters thinking like you lead to the problem in the first place. Neither webmasters nor the browsers should work around and tweak for specific instances of the other, they should just both use the standard.

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[arose]

Compatible or not, historical reasons or not IE7 would be the time ti finaly do the right thing, guess they are going to do. At least they aren't sticking Mozilla/5.0 there...

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[Fweeky]

Opera reports itself as "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.01"; this isn't a case of Opera being completely unidentifiable by default. A swift F12-i and Opera reports "Opera/8.01 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)"

Re:Irresponsible as hell

[shutdown -p now]

As it has been explained to me, browsers that did not mark themselves as such got much less rich content from webservers.

Which is exactly the problem Opera is facing now. Don't blame them, blame the morons who still think it's 90s and rely on browser detection and non-standard trickery.

Re:Caching

[m50d]

No, I think opera's is a better mechanism, just show the page you saw, not the page as it is now. If I go back to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl, I don't want an empty comments.pl, I definitely don't want it to POST my comment again, I just want to see the "submitted comment" page I originally got. Even when it's something like bbc news front page, I'd prefer to go back to the same page than back to whatever's now at that location.

Opera new release

[whitehatlurker]

Given Opera's security record, it is odd that they would want to spoof a less secure browser.

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.

Re:damn the mouth-breathing majority!!!

[AKAImBatman]

1. "Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer' "
Isn't that fraud?

No. Fraud is about using lies for direct financial gain, and requires specific intent. Opera identifies itself as IE for interoperability purposes, something that "modern" tech laws (such as the DMCA) protect.

Plus, the whole point of the www is that it is browser independent. So this is unstandard behavior, and should be shunned(2).

I'm sure Grandma will think it's great that her bank and realtor websites don't work because Opera is taking a stand.

The real blame for this lies first in Netscape (which extended the web in many incompatible ways, but at least worked on every OS) and later in Microsoft (who used Netscape's tactics to sew up the web). If Tim Berners-Lee was dead, I'm sure he'd be rolling in his grave. Instead he's had to settle for being alive and helping correct this nonsense.

It Might Be Worse Than That....

[BRock97]

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....

Perfect solution

[Durandal64]

The thought just occurred to me that we could use one problem to fix another here. We want to get webmasters coding for standards-compliant web browsers, right? Problem Number 1 is that they generally don't. Problem Number 2 is that Windows is highly susceptible to malware and viruses. So how about someone just write a virus that changes IE's user agent string to a random pick from Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla or any other browser out there? Webmasters would no longer be able to trust the user agent strings they receive, so they'll have to just code to standards instead.

Then we'll see just how fast Microsoft can get a security update out when their web monopoly is being threatened.

Theory about User-Numbers

[Taladar]

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.

If Opera cares about market share

[koreaman]

Why does the browser call itself "IE"?

Re:damn the mouth-breathing majority!!!

[MinutiaeMan]

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.

The results:

[game kid]

Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox! Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox! Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera--AAH, its I-E!
IIIEEE, III...oooh, its IEE!!!
its an Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox! Firefox!

(repeat about 4 or so times in every web server log...)

Opera isn't firefox (duh?)

[Some Random Username]

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.

Yeah, ok...

[Junior J. Junior III]

That may be, but I still don't know anyone personally who uses Opera, and maybe only a handful who've even heard of it. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, sure. But not Safari (unless they're Mac people), Konqueror, Opera. I bet more people use Lynx than Opera. It might be a really nice browser, but it's irrelevant since there are presently many great FREE browsers.

Sorry Opera, you lose.

Firewhat?

[http101]

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!

It certainly does NOT look good when this http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/17/ 0152202&tid=154&tid=90 happens. Not having a trademark is shameful.

Then you have to worry about this http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/07/141420 0&tid=154&tid=1 kind of stuff.

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.

despite deflated numbers . . .

[V_Pundit]

"Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer" Even if Opera's numbers are deflated because of this practice they still have fewer users at my site than Firefox. If every hit reported as IE were a hit for Opera it would be less than Firefox. Perhaps they should stop complaining and get to making a better browser. I will admit that Opera has its good points, but they were not enough to keep me as a user.

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 ...