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

[pintomp3]

depends, is your name frank?

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

[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

[RickPartin]

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

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?

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: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.

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: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

[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: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: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

[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)"