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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[RickPartin]

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

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.

Hey

[kevin_conaway]

Aren't you supposed to be swimming somewhere?

strange math

[kingjosh]

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

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: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)

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: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: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: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.

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

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.

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: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: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: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: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.

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

[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.

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.

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: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)"