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Opera Reaches 1 Million Downloads Thanks To Google
auckland writes "More than one million people have downloaded the Opera browser in the days since Opera announced it was dropping the ad banner and going completely free. All made possible because Opera signed a search referral deal with Google." From the article: "'The current most important deal now is with Google,' the spokesperson said to Mr. Malik. That deal, and similar ones with Amazon and eBay, give those companies prime placement in the Opera search box. Mozilla has a similar arrangement with Google, with its search box and its default right-click menu search option on highlighted text sending queries straight to Mountain View."
A search for "internet browser" brings opera back at #1.
Damn, I was going to register spreadopera.com and start competing with a certain other browser, but a whois shows that Opera already registered that domain!
With this kind deal between companies? Sure, it may bring Internet Explorer down, but what does this spell for other browsers who do not have 'deals' with Google?
Staying one step ahead!
So, remember, everytime you do a search in Firefox, some money goes from google to Mozilla, estimates ranging from 50 cents to 1 dollar per user per year.
This space for rent.
There is no browser out there with full CSS 2.1 support. Not one. Certaintly not Trident (IE's engine). Not Gecko (Firefox's engine). Not KTML (Konqueror's engine). Not Webcore (Safari's fork of the KHTML engine). And not Presto (Opera's engine).
People talk about designing to the standards, but without a single web browser actually following said standards, web designers on the front lines have to work around different browser's quirks.
For example, a number of browsers support bits and pieces of CSS 3.0. Gecko and Webcore have support for opacity (translucent elements on a web page); Trident can do the same thing with the non-standard "Filter:" tag. However, Presto in Opera 8 has no support for this.
The workaround for Opera users is to use a translucent PNG instead. However, a translucent PNG used in mouseovers triggers a Firefox/Windows 1.0.x bug (probably fixed in Deer Park) where the mouseover image will not be loaded unless visible somewhere else on the page (I can mostly eliminate this bug by making the PNG in question visible on the page as a single 90% transparent pixel in the upper right hand corner. Which mostly, but not completely, works around the bug.)
Basically, with yet another CSS rendering browser out there gaining market share, while only implementing a subset of the CSS standard, web designers now have to work around the quirks of yet another browser. I like this kind of work, but a lot of designers hate this stuff and just throw their hands in the air and make their web page a 100% flash web page or what not.
So Google infiltrates yet ANOTHER aspect of the Internet. This strategy of embedding itself into the fabric of the Internet looked cute before the company went on to become the next stockmarket darling, now I can't help but see each new step in increasing its mind-share as Bill Gates in double.
This stockmarket-listed company's strategy is to 'organise the world's information'. The Internet is resembling one large Google Ad to rule them all!
Do we believe in the inherent goodness of this corporation's dollars as it buys, sponsors, advertises its way into open source?
"free internet browser", gives you www.mozilla.org
"best internet browser" gives you www.opera.com
"bad internet browser" gives you an article on Internet Explorer
"worst internet browser" gives you home.netscape.com
Amazing. Simply amazing.
Opera is older, and better, than Firefox, so by your "logic" it is Firefox that is dividing the population even further. I assume that you wish we were all using Mosaic?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Opera's internal buils are very close to passing Acid2.
Opera 9, AKA Merlin, is adding XSLT, designMode, more CSS3 stuff and "HTML5".