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."

Comments

yup

[pizzaman100]

A search for "internet browser" brings opera back at #1.

Lots of money in open source?

[recoiledsnake]

According to some blogs, there are rumors that the Mozilla foundation gets 30 million dollars a year for the search box in Firefox defaulting to google. Also, only the financial details for 2003 have been made public by Mozilla. So it requires someone to file a special request under the law to check Mozilla's dealings.

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.

A thought on how this affects CSS designs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is not a good thing

[nagora]

Opera, while certainly better than IE, hurts the world wide web by dividing the population even further.

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