Opera Dominates CNET Survey of "Underdog" Web Browsers

An anonymous reader writes "Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against 'underdog Web browsers' Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests."

Comments

Arora's reason for existence

[David Gerard]

Woulda been nice to add the reasons these browsers exist - e.g. Arora was created specifically as a test wrapper for the Qt WebKit component. In fact, right now I'm compiling the current git of Qt so I can compile the current git of Arora because Ubuntu 9.04 only includes Arora 0.5, which is rather old and rickety ...

Camino exists because AOL made an abortive move to make a lightweight Mac Gecko browser and it's still around from that. K-Meleon exists because there was no lightweight Gecko browser at the time, i.e. it's before the mozilla/browser internal fork that became Firefox.

So what's the story behind Shiira?

Underdog?

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

I'm not sure if a browser like Opera, which is available on many many [many many] platforms - from set-top boxes to game consoles to mobile phones to actual PCs - can responsibly be called an underdog browser by anyone - regardless of the opinion of the submitter. And it runs pretty well on all those platforms too. The only thing I've seen Firefox, Chrome or IE run decently on is a PC (Fennic? Mobile IE? Surely you jest!). (Disclaimer: I never use Opera on my PC's, but I do use it on all my mobiles)

Opera is 3rd biggets browser outside USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera's desktop has almost 4% market share and is bigger than both Chrome and Safari. Check the latest numbers at www.statcounter.com. Even Net Applications, which is more skewed towards US and western Europe, show Opera's global market share at 2%. CNET's visitors does obviously not represent the Internet population so it's a bit weird to compare Opera, the world's 3rd biggest browser, to small unknown providers.

Besided this, Opera's mobile browser is the biggest in the world, still bigger than iphone. Worth mentioning is Opera as the only browser available on Nintendo Wii or DSi.

Re:Who cares how fast the browser is?

[sznupi]

You would really like the responsiveness of Opera in many-tabs scenario.

If you do check it out, remember to turn on "Window" menu in options (lists all tabs in current window, and is actually usable - you don't have to scroll through it like in FF, no matter how many tabs), "hold down right mouse button and move scroll" (hard to explain...but its great), and list of all tabs (in all windows) in sidebar (with search)

And yes, Opera has Adblock built-in, you just have to provide it with a list... http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/

Re:Opera

[BenoitRen]

Allow me to correct myself. While I was right in that an IE shell came up with the innovation, it wasn't MyIE2. It was actually NetCaptor. From Wikipedia:

Browser tabs were introduced by NetCaptor in 1998, later by IBrowse in 1999, following by myIE2 and MultiZilla (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[1]) and Opera in 2000, Mozilla Application Suite in 2001, Konqueror and Safari in 2003, Internet Explorer 7[2] in 2006 and Google Chrome in 2008.

Re:Opera not an underdog

[rs79]

"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"

How would you know?

For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.

Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".

http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php

http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html

"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."

And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.