Opera Sees "Dramatic" Rise From Microsoft's Ballot

TheReal_sabret00the notes a TechRadar piece reporting that Opera Software has seen a doubling from normal download numbers on average since Microsoft's browser-choice screen lit up in Europe. The UK saw an 85% increase and for other countries it was larger still: Poland 328%, Spain 215%, and Italy 202%. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, said "A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse."

Comments

Same old mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

"A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse"

Oh, no, they won't. I can assure you that the majority of webmasters test their sites in IE and some of them in Firefox (definitely not all of them). The rest of the browser are either assumed to be compatible with IE or Firefox or be rendered irrelevant.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Yvanhoe]

I can assure you that they do not act this way out of sympathy for IE. They do so because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.

Re:Same old mistakes

[WrongSizeGlass]

We code for, and test against, IE 6+, FireFox 2+, Safari 3+, Chrome 4+ and Opera 9+. And it sucks.

With all the supposedly intelligent and future thinking people pushing the Internet forward, I am stunned at their inability to comply with W3C standards. Yeah, yeah, W3C documents are the 'drying paint' of the internet, but they are what all browser developers are supposed to be aiming for. I think they all need new glasses.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Richard_at_work]

I find it amusing that everyone rails against IE (rightfully so in many ways) for not following standards, but every web developer I know (and being one in a lively local web development community, I am exposed to a fair number) still has to check sites in IE plus a multitude of other browsers . When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Blakey Rat]

Well, the standards do suck ass.

I mean, CSS (IMO at least) was completely useless for serious website development until version 3, when it finally gained columns. *Columns!!* One of the most fundamental page layout concepts, and CSS didn't get it until version 3.0! Sure, you could make a box with a dotted top border and a dashed bottom border, but you can't make two fucking columns without workarounds. It still doesn't have math, making simple constructs like "5px + 3em" impossible. (You can't do the math at design-time because you don't know what an "em" is until run-time.)

Frankly, I have no problems with browser makers extending the standards when the standards suck... especially DOM.

For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.

This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.

Also: would it kill the W3C-compliant browsers to add "innerText" to DOM? Just alias it to "textContent." Or to alias attachEvent to addEventListener? You'd get massive compatibility wins for adding it and it would take like 10 minutes of work. If the W3C were smart, they'd just add those into the standards anyway since so many sites already use them. (Whoever came up with textContent when innerHTML already existed should be smacked.)

Re:Same old mistakes

[mikael_j]

You're right in that it sucks that you can be standards compliant and still render things differently from another standards compliant browser, but it's important to note that the differences between Gecko, WebKit and Opera's rendering engine are generally quite small and can often easily be worked around in the last day or two of a large project, but when it comes to Trident it's like entering non-euclidiean space, menus disappear or appear on the wrong side of a page, other elements magically ignore that you just told them their size and none of this ever has a simple "oh, we'll just tweak it a little" solution, it always seems to involve moving stuff around a lot and writing mangled IE-specific non-standards compliant CSS just to trick Trident into rendering things the right way.

So yeah, there is a problem with ambiguity in the standards but Trident rendering standards compliant sites so wrong they're not even usable is a much bigger issue which will hopefully be solved if we can get IE to no longer have a majority share of the browser market.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a webdev and I test all sites against 10 or so browser/version/OS combinations. Apart from identical font size/width issues on all browsers on the Mac, I rarely have to make any changes except for Internet Explorer - IE7 sometimes requires a few small minor things; and IE6 usually requires a few CSS tweaks. All the rest display identically every time (and that includes IE8). Anyone who has to make tweaks specifically for any of the major modern browsers is doing it wrong (or using CSS3 stuff thats just too new to be trusted). But you simply can't avoid testing - its part of the job in every IT related field.

Re:Same old mistakes

[WrongSizeGlass]

When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.

Each browser developer seems to interpret the standard differently ... or only implement it partially (or rather, incompletely). When the five largest browser developers (among others) don't implement the standard properly or completely it's the developers and not the standard.

Re:Same old mistakes

[clone53421]

For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.

I’m betting there’s a better way. But without knowing what your script does, I can’t be positive.

Re:Same old mistakes

[clone53421]

Care to show us some of the pages you’ve designed?

Re:Same old mistakes

[gmuslera]

If there isnt 2-3 main browsers, but a lot having roughly the same market share, things could evolve in some ways:
- There isnt so many engines. A lot of browsers are based on webkit or could be based on it (like with the chrome plugin for IE). Actually the main engines are gecko, webkit, and the ones in opera and IE, but could be a run to standarize in i.e. webkit for some ofthe browsers that don't use it now (would be an interesting move for Opera, and the others could do it gradually... IE already have a "compatibility mode", so it could end being webkit based in some moment).
- Convergence, having as measure things like the Acid3 test, to score compatibility of browsers on one common standard
- Webmasters entering into reason. Maybe could have some sense to code for the browser that have 80% of market share, but if all browsers/engines have 25% market share or they code for all, or they code for none, keeping into common ground zone, or at least a zone where are most of them (that probably will put IE out, that is the one that ever had been far fromt he rest in standards compliance)

Re:Same old mistakes

[mcvos]

When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.

What's wrong with W3C standards is that there's never been a reference implementation, which means there's a lot of room for interpretation, and interpretations can vary a lot. And after they've been implemented, people start discussing which implementations are closest to what the standard intended, after which people need to fix their browser, and in the mean time, we've got a big bloody mess.

Reference implementations are important.

Re:Same old mistakes

[DaVince21]

The standard might not be wrong, just difficult to implement. Though that may be a flaw in itself.

Re:Same old mistakes

[lazybeam]

Isn't that Amaya?

Re:Same old mistakes

[GreyWolf3000]

":first-child" is not some new CSS3 thing and it doesn't work in IE6. There's at least 10 such css selectors or properties I use in IE7 that don't work in IE6 that have been around for years. Also, have you never heard of a child selector?

Re:Same old mistakes

[Blakey Rat]

All that's relevant is, it does stuff that requires the DOM to be fully-loaded. The only "better way" I can think of is adding a flag to the bookmarklet that says, "hey, you're on an already loaded page!" But that doesn't work because the bookmarklet could be run before the page is done loading.

All the experts I've talked to have basically said, "hm, yeah no browsers but IE support that." Maybe true.

If you know of a better way, please let me know.

Re:Same old mistakes

[clone53421]

Why not,

if (document.readyState == "complete") {
    execute();
} else {
    if (window.addEventListener) {
        try {
            window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", execute, false);
        } catch (e) {
            window.addEventListener("load", execute, false);
        }
    } else try {
        window.attachEvent("onload", execute);
    } catch (e) {
        if (window.onload) {
            window.oldonload = window.onload;
            window.onload = function() { oldonload(); execute(); };
        } else {
            window.onload = execute;
        }
    }
}

(W3C says that readyState is unsupported by Firefox, but I’m using it and it seems to work fine...)

Note that I supported all browsers (I think); if you’re using a bookmarklet only in particular browsers you may not need to support all of them.

Re:Same old mistakes

[kyrio]

I test my sites against Opera. I don't care about other browsers. If I'm working with ad placement I'll test the site in IE to see if it's working since Opera blocks every ad with a simple urlfilter.ini.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Blakey Rat]

That might work in IE and Firefox and probably Opera (although I'm pretty sure I tried readyState in Firefox before and it didn't work... maybe I should go back and re-test that-- might depend on which rendering mode the browser's in, too.) But that still leaves Safari and Chrome out in the cold.

If that works, the *only* reason it works in Firefox is because readyState is something they swallowed their pride on and implemented due to its usefulness, not its presence in the W3C standards. There's no standards-compliant way to do what I need. If Firefox (and other W3C-strict browsers) would swallow their pride on a few other IE-isms, it would make my job a lot easier.

The reason this came up is that I was adapting some old IE-only Javascript, and I came across this and thought to myself, "huh, I wonder what the standards-compliant way of finding the page's load status is" only to find out... there is none!

Re:Same old mistakes

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

With all the supposedly intelligent and future thinking people pushing the Internet forward, I am stunned at their inability to comply with W3C standards.

One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.

Most browsers wisely ignored this ridiculous stipulation(It's a string field) and sites could happily use numeric element ids and link to them with impunity. This is still the case in Firefox, Opera, etc, and all the IEs up to 7. However, IE 8, choosing the most ridiculous standard on which to comply, now no longer recognises links with numeric ids, e.g. "page.html#01" no longer works. I have personally had to recode the link across and entire site as a result of this decision.

Sometimes, not every word of gospel that comes out of W3C is worth following.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

@sig
How is a Mac higher standards? Its crap when you look for compatible software that is actually USEFUL, not Apple's "ooh, pretty! that MUST mean its useful!" crap.

Re:Same old mistakes

[ClosedSource]

You're right and the statement you reference is obviously wrong. Multiple implementations will of course diverge no matter what a standard says. IE may suck, but back in the day most web sites could be designed without worrying about other browsers. Sure, it only supported Windows and the Mac, but that was good enough to reach the vast majority of users.

Today, most sites support browsers that run on Linux and that's a good thing, but it's made the web developers job harder.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Dragonslicer]

Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.

Re:Same old mistakes

[jc42]

I can assure you that the majority of webmasters test their sites in IE and some of them in Firefox (definitely not all of them).

...because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.

Picky quibble: "webmasters" are sorta irrelevant; it's the web developers that mostly determine the test methods. I'm actually both, for a handful of sites (so maybe I'm sorta irrelevant, too ;-). But when I'm wearing my "web master" hat, my main concern is that the web server correctly deliver the content, and that's hardly a function of the content's markup. I don't care at all how the developers do their testing, and when I'm testing on someone else's machine, I'd look very askance at any presumption on the webmaster's part to tell me how I should test my own pages. If I were such a webmaster's boss, I'd consider giving him/her a serious talking-to about the responsibilities of the job.

But when I put on my "web developer" hat, my personal choices for primary test browsers are Safari, Opera, and Firefox, usually in that order. IE is much later, after I've verified that the markup works in the major standards-compliant browsers.

My choice of Safari and Opera first over Firefox is due to what I consider a design failure in Firefox: I routinely "click" on things using Ctl/Cmd-click, to get them to open in a new tab. That way I can quickly switch between the two tabs. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with FF, which always handles clicks on buttons (i.e., <input type=submit ...>) by opening the page in the same tab regardless of whether the Ctl or Cmd button was used. So testing with FF is materially slower, and it gets used later, after the major problems are worked out in Safari and Opera.

Actually, Opera presents another misbehavior that sometimes makes me test with FF first: When you tell it to show the page's source, it insists on opening the source in a new tab, next to the rendered page. This means that I can't see them in separate windows side by side and quickly compare the rendered version with the actual source. Safari and Firefox both do this right, showing the source in a new window, though I do have to remember to use Opt-Cmd-U with Safari and just Cmd-U or Ctl-U with FF, depending on whether it's on my Macbook or linux machine.

These two things make Safari my usual first choice, because it's standards-compliant and it lets me open anything in a new window with a single 2-or 3-key combo.

My main wish here would probably be that all the folks building browsers would just make all those key combos and behaviors configurable. If I could spend an hour or so making my common operations use the same keys on all my test browsers, it would save me a lot of "Oops!" time wasters during a lot of testing. Trying to remember the correct "show the source" key combo in a dozen browsers can materially slow down testing.

Of course, it's possible that all this stuff is configurable, and I'm just too dumb to find it. I have found some key-config windows for all of them, but they are always very sketchy, and never include things like the above that a developer would want to configure. And it's not that I object to the builtin key combos; it would just make my life a lot easier if I could make them the same on all my installed browsers.

(Another bit of weirdness is that I keep finding that the most important test version of IE is IE6. Later releases are both more standard and less common in my server logs, so it's useful to test against the least standard IE, which is IE6. But my server logs also show that none of my sites attracts a "typical" set of visitors. If I exclude the known search bots, IE is less common in my logs than Firefox, Safari or Opera. This may be because I don't have any "business" oriented sites. Whatever; I just find many reasons to ignore IE until I have everything working for standards-compliant browsers. Then

Re:Same old mistakes

[choongiri]

Have you heard of ie7-js? You really don't need to spend days working around IE's defficiencies in css any more. Anyone who is savvy enough to disable javascript in IE is also savvy enough to use a better browser.

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.1(beta3)/IE9.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Done.

Re:Same old mistakes

[clone53421]

Why wouldn’t it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it’s supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).

Anyway, I think the standards-compliant way of doing what you need is probably one of the following:

a) Call the function to process the objects that have been laid out, and call it again in the window onload event to pick up the objects that were missed the first time (if the page was loaded the first time, onload won’t fire and call it again).

b) If you’re looking for particular DOM elements, process immediately if they exist, otherwise register the onload event.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Blakey Rat]

Why wouldn't it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it's supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).

At the time I was puzzling over this, nothing supported it but IE. It's great that other browsers are finally starting to say, "hey, wait, I guess some of the stuff Microsoft did isn't so bad after-all!"

But the fact that this fucking useful readyState still has a "No" in the W3C column pisses me off to no end... what is the W3C even *for*, other than getting in the way of useful features propagating to all browsers?

A) is actually a good idea, and could work... it would require some modifications, but it'd work.

Thanks for the tip.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Midnight Thunder]

You're right and the statement you reference is obviously wrong. Multiple implementations will of course diverge no matter what a standard says. IE may suck, but back in the day most web sites could be designed without worrying about other browsers. Sure, it only supported Windows and the Mac, but that was good enough to reach the vast majority of users.

Today, most sites support browsers that run on Linux and that's a good thing, but it's made the web developers job harder.

This is why it is important that browsers do their best to adhere to standards and be functionally equivalent when it comes to rendering standards compliant content. If your favourite is not adhering to an accepted test case, then it is important, IMHO, that you open up a ticket for the developers to fix it.

Re:Same old mistakes

[jim_v2000]

I'm always curious as to what the hell people do on their websites that is so hard for them to get to work on all browsers. I've never run into such problems.

Re:Same old mistakes

[jc42]

Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.

And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.

This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all. ;-)

There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.

Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.

(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems. ;-)

Re:Same old mistakes

[Simetrical]

I can assure you that they do not act this way out of sympathy for IE. They do so because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.

Chrome now has larger market share than Safari according to four out of the five reports here. And the one exception is drastically different from the other four on all counts, while the other four largely agree with each other, so I'd neglect it. Of course, individual sites will differ, but still.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Dragonslicer]

Sure, there's always the possibility of language that ends up being ambiguous. I was referring specifically to items in the W3C standard that are intentionally left as a decision for the implementation.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Simetrical]

What's wrong with W3C standards is that there's never been a reference implementation, which means there's a lot of room for interpretation, and interpretations can vary a lot. And after they've been implemented, people start discussing which implementations are closest to what the standard intended, after which people need to fix their browser, and in the mean time, we've got a big bloody mess.

Reference implementations are important.

The W3C publishes standards too rapidly for a reference implementation to be feasible, unless you just arbitrarily pick a major browser and declare it such. The work to maintain a reasonable reference implementation is probably beyond the W3C's budget.

In practice, if uncertainty arises, a browser developer can just ask on the relevant mailing list and an official conclusion can usually be reached in a week or less. So I don't think a reference implementation is really necessary here. Detailed behavior descriptions, extensive test cases, and a quick way to resolve uncertainty suffice.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Simetrical]

I find it amusing that everyone rails against IE (rightfully so in many ways) for not following standards, but every web developer I know (and being one in a lively local web development community, I am exposed to a fair number) still has to check sites in IE plus a multitude of other browsers . When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.

It's not necessarily a problem with the standard, it's a problem of specifications generally. Writing a specification that covers everything is very hard, and writing code to match a specification exactly is also very hard. You can realistically only get approximations. The same thing occurs with other standards. Look at how many differences you have between C compilers, Unixes, or (God help us) SQL databases – sometimes even when the standard is very clear.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Simetrical]

One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.

This is true in HTML 4.01 and all non-HTML5 versions of XHTML. It is no longer true in HTML5:

The id attribute specifies its element's unique identifier (ID). The value must be unique amongst all the IDs in the element's home subtree and must contain at least one character. The value must not contain any space characters.

It now just has to be non-empty, and can't contain ASCII whitespace. I'm waiting for this to be widely implemented so I can switch MediaWiki to not use awful id's with ad hoc UTF-8 hex digits in them . . . the old (HTML 4.01) rules didn't allow non-ASCII characters either.

Re:Same old mistakes

[clone53421]

Note that, if you control the HTML of the document, you could simply use something like <body onload="window.loaded = 'complete'> to tell you whether the page was done loading, and register your load event using addEventListener if window.loaded wasn’t defined.

Re:Same old mistakes

[raphael75]

You obviously haven't seen ie's 20% market share loss over the last 3 years...

Re:Same old mistakes

[raphael75]

I work as a Front End web programmer for one of the largest ministry sites in the world. For virtually everything we do, ie is the problem and all other browsers behave as expected, especially with CSS2/HTML4 stuff. The only time we have problems between the W3C-compliant browsers is doing something really advanced, but it's so rare I can't think of an example. IE is always the problem, and the lack of documentation and testing plugins (like Firebug) makes it an absolute nightmare to work with.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Blakey Rat]

If I could control the HTML of the site, why would I bother with a bookmarklet in the first place? :)

Of course, I don't even control the HTML of the site normally-- our product is just a Javascript that customers put on their site without our having any access to it. The bookmarklet lets me give demos using their actual site instead of having to demo it on a mock-up, it's much more convincing that way.

Again, this is all one of the many scenarios the W3C never imagined when creating the standards.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Rantastic]

This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.

I don't think that work means what you think it means.

Re:Same old mistakes

[Cl1mh4224rd]

The W3C publishes standards too rapidly [...]

Do you... experience the passage of time differently than the rest of us?

Re:Woah

[SimonTheSoundMan]

What happens when they hit 11?

Frist ps0t

[heneon]

Could someone explain when this ballot actually comes up? is it only for new installs of Windows or at some later moment, too? I already use Opera so it wouldnt make any difference to me but at least during the odd times I had to use IE for something it didn't ask me anything.

Re:Frist ps0t

[iJusten]

I understand it's an update for Windows 7, served with other software updates for computers in EU.

Re:Frist ps0t

[lordandmaker]

During the latest (or a recent) Windows Update it presents itself, but only if you have no browsers other than IE installed. It also appears to do it pre-update on new (XP) builds since then, too.

Amusingly, it's presented by IE, so you still have to click though the three or four pages of setting your IE8 preferences, and it doesn't replace. I'd understood IE was to be removed, but I wasn't really listening.

Re:Frist ps0t

[takowl]

It will appear on new installs of windows, but an automatic update also pushes it to existing installations of XP, Vista and 7. You get a "browser choice" icon on the desktop, and I believe it pops up when you try to use IE.

Reasons you might not have seen it: You're not in the EU, it's not been rolled out to you yet (they're not doing it all at once), or it may even detect that you already have another browser installed, so decide not to bother you.

Re:Frist ps0t

[commodore64_love]

>>>the ballot is presented by IE

Correction - The ballot WAS presented by IE, but Opera and others objected, so the EU ordered Microsoft to use a generic window.

Re:Frist ps0t

[Saint Gerbil]

The browser choice is shown in your current default browser.

Its worth noting that it doesnt work with most of the lesser known browsers.

Re:Frist ps0t

[lordandmaker]

Yeah, I thought that.

This was on Monday that I went through the IE preferences windows to get at the browser choice screen, though, and that was one from an update.

Re:Frist ps0t

[hkmwbz]

Correction - the ballot screen still uses IE.

Re:Frist ps0t

[Kalriath]

I was going to say "correction - the ballot screen still uses Trident" but it appears that it still uses an IE window, albeit a dialog so your only clue is the title bar and app icon.

I like Opera the way it was

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the rest of the choices, but largely unknown. Tiny install and just as small a target for malware. And the stuff they are adding with unite and native widgets only makes it better. But lets try to keep it secret like Usenet so the malware authors keep attacking you idiots that use IE and firefox.

an anti-swpat company doing well

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Opera Software did great work lobbying against software patents in the campaigns on the EU software patents directive. Thanks Opera!.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

I can understand why people would be against software patents for obvious ideas, such as the one-click patent. But are these folks against all software patents, no matter how innovative and complex? If so, why? What makes software patents so special that they should not be allowed?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[commodore64_love]

PLUS Opera's Turbo mode is great for people with slow connections like Dialup or Cellular/wireless. It makes the connection look about 5 times faster than it really is.

Opera's innovations remind me of how Mosaic (and later Netscape) innovated in the early 90s.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[augustw]

Because they are expressions of ideas, more like mathematical proofs than real, mechanical, inventions - and neither ideas nor mathematical theories are patentable. The "expressions of ideas" bit is why programmes are copyrightable -- as literary works. And if they're literary works, protected by copyright, how can the be patentable too?

And remember, in Europe you can't patent business methods or processes, either.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[gilgongo]

I can understand why people would be against software patents for obvious ideas, such as the one-click patent. But are these folks against all software patents, no matter how innovative and complex? If so, why? What makes software patents so special that they should not be allowed?

There are various arguments for disallowing all software (and similar "business methods" patents), as they are currently outlawed in Europe. However, the main one is that software is basically too slippery for any patents office adequately to adjudicate on. Physical inventions are far easier to award patents for because things like prior art have a least some chance of being discovered and you can't easily derive a machine from another machine.

This is of course an unfortunate state of affairs for the writers of software. We all know that writing genuinely innovative algorithms is just as hard as inventing a method for stripping the wings off flies. Perhaps in the far future, super-human intelligence will be able to judge the originality of software and business methods to award bone fide innovators with patents. But until that happy day, we'll be stuck with the likes of Darl McBride trying to rip us all off and work the system.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as innovation in software, just different ways to do things.

Software Patents will just end up resulting in the mess we already have with the patent system in general, companies hogging up all kinds of simple crap just because they can.
"Want to do some nice addition using that good ol' Addition sign? Too bad, you'll have to do some complex bit-shifting, rotating and creating wormholes to do that. And we will still sue you because we have loads of money and can hire better lawyers than you can. So if you give us 10k, we'll leave you alone."

Algorithm patents would be the first to be abused.
Sorts, calculations for file management, creating keys, 3D geometry and so on.
Software patents can fuck right off.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Runaway1956]

Software should be copyrighted, NOT patented. Period. No matter how innovative, no matter how complex, no matter how many billion people think it's really cool. No patents. Patents are for physical, concrete, touchable and feelable items. Tangible, as opposed to intangible. All software is just a specific way of rearranging ones and zeros, after all. You can't actually make anything new with them.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

Every patent involves an expression of an idea. A drug is a chemical compound (i.e. an idea about how to arrange atoms), and those can be patented. A machine is an expression of an idea (i.e. an idea of how to arrange gears and pulleys and levers), and those can be patented. I would say that an algorithm is in every sense an invention just as much as a drug or a machine.

Those things are different from mathematical proofs or scientific hypotheses, which are not inventions, in the sense that you cannot do anything with them alone. You must apply them to a situation. They are no good on their own. You cannot put a mathematical proof or scientific hypothesis into a product. You can put a drug or a machine or an algorithm into a product.

I don't buy this "ideas can't be patented" argument. Can you give some sources where is seemingly silly idea is discussed at greater length?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[nmb3000]

Because they are expressions of ideas, more like mathematical proofs than real, mechanical, inventions - and neither ideas nor mathematical theories are patentable.

While I'm generally against software patents, this does bother me somewhat. If you come up with an amazing algorithm - which is really just math - to do something, for example, like RSA, why shouldn't you be able to patent the process? An algorithm can be very real in the sense that it takes input (like a machine) runs some process (like a machine) and yields meaningful output (like a machine). Why shouldn't the work that went into the creation of this system be patented (like a machine)?

Yes, the system is abused by people like Amazon and their "one click" crap, but the normal patent system is abused as well. It seems like the real answer is more stringent patent review and oversight, not outright banning of software patents.

An interesting idea would be to require a company applying for a software patents to release the source code. Normal machines can be investigated to determine if they violate an existing patent, why not hold software to the same requirement? If I create algorithm B that takes the same input and yields the same output as your algorithm A, but does it in a completely different way, I'm not in violation of your patent, but the only way to know this is to see the source code for both.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[tepples]

What makes software patents so special is that computer science moves so fast that a 20-year term is excessive to balance the benefit of disclosure (the original meaning of "patent" was "disclosed") with the deterrence of independent reinvention.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

Software is different from algorithms. Software can be copyrighted. Algorithms can be patented.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the quadratic formula was patented?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Rogerborg]

Your assumption that they've in favour of other patents says more about your opinions than theirs.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

I know there are some radicals that say that we shouldn't have any patents whatsoever, but that would put the brakes on innovation. There would be no drugs developed by for-profit companies, for example. Without any patents on their products, competitors could sell generic versions immediately and they wouldn't be able to recoup R and D costs. Surely there is a happy medium between our currently broken patent system where patents are awarded for obvious ideas, and eradicating all patents. Abolishing patents would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[clone53421]

You don’t have to come up with analogies. Just look at the issues we’ve had with the GIF format, the LAME MP3 encoder, H.263 video codec, etc.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Runaway1956]

They CAN be, but they SHOULDN'T be. That's my position, and I'm not budging. Unless you have something physical, or at least make physical changes to something physical, then you're in copyright land.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

What justificates the application of the patent system in the field of software? What economic evidence is provided? What political consent was sought?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[NickFortune]

I don't buy this "ideas can't be patented" argument. Can you give some sources where is seemingly silly idea is discussed at greater length?

I'm sorry, but I think you'll find I've patented the notion of not buying the "ideas can't be patented" argument. You need to either pay me $20,000 dollars to licence your use of the idea for this discussion only, or else retract the comment, admit that you are in error, ad henceforth withdraw from the debate.

And that is one reason why it's dangerous to allow ideas to be patented.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[commodore64_love]

"It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, whatever belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.

"It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1813

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[commodore64_love]

If patented or copyrighted it should only be for a limited lifespan, say 14 years, with a possibility for ONE renewal of the copyright by the *original inventor*. If the inventor is dead, then it falls into public domain.

This is how the original Copyright Act of 1790 was written.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[mister_playboy]

Software should be copyrighted, NOT patented. Period.

I sympathize with your viewpoint, but the fact that patents expire and copyright is (effectively) eternal means I would prefer software patents to software copyrights in the current legal situation.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be true, but personally, I lost all respect for Opera when they blamed their lack of user base on Microsoft.

Instead, of finding a scapegoat, they should have acknowledged that they are doing something wrong. I'm getting sick of companies who blame their lackluster performance on "anti-competitive practices" by other companies. Yes I'll acknowledge the browser ballot is nice (even though its odd that Opera didn't demand the same for OSX), but its pathetic that Opera software resorted to name calling. I sincerely hope that Opera doesn't become a stronger player in the browser market, because I'd say they are no better than McBride or Steve Jobs (who seems to rubbish anything which isn't Apple)

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

Books are physical and they are copyrighted, not patented. Your idea that physical things are patented and non-physical things are copyrighted doesn't make any sense.

Inventions (ideas) that can be implemented in many different products are patented. A specific authored work can be copyrighted. Copyrights cover specific manifestations of ideas that have taken a concrete form, such as specific words, musical notes, or lines of computer code. Patents cover general ideas that could implemented in various specific ways.

Because an algorithm is an idea that can be implemented in many different ways, it can be patented. Each specific implementation, for example, programs that implement the algorithm, can be copyrighted.

Copyright restricts your right to copy the information that is copyrighted. A patent does not restrict your right to copy information (i.e. the idea embodied in the patent itself), but restricts your right to produce products that use the patent.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[jank1887]

programs are mathematical constructs. you can't patent math. some people claim it's a unique document more appropriate for copyright, not patenting. Of course, we have 'process patents'. Programs are a mathematical description of a process or set of instructions followed by a machine to perform a task. The process can get quite complex, but it is still a finite state process. So people claim that they're patentable. And the debate goes round and round.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You can't patent that idea. You can only patent an idea that can be used in making a product. FAIL on two counts -- not understanding what kinds of ideas can be patented, and not providing a source as I requested. Could you provide a source that discusses this silly idea in more detail?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

No. Math is not patentable. Software is math. Algorithms are math.

Also, Alan Turing says, "Fuck you."

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[mister_playboy]

I haven't had a very positive experience with Turbo. All your traffic is funneled through Opera's servers and they are often so unresponsive page loads end up taking more, rather than less, time.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Rogerborg]

I think the baby has drowned. Flush it.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Runaway1956]

A book that you buy in a store is nothing more than a container for an IDEA - the idea of the story. The story can be retold, rewritten, turned into a play, a movie, or whatever. You are confusing what copyright applies to. It isn't the physical paper and glue that is copyrighted - THAT is probably patentable, if you should come up with a new method of printing and binding books.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have expired long ago.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

No, physical things cannot be patented. Drug companies don't patent physical pills. They patent a chemical formula that could be made into a pill, a table, a shot, a spray. Your whole idea of a physical/non-physical dichotomy makes no sense.

Let's say I make two widgets, Widget A and Widget B. Widget A has the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the Philospopher's Stone etched into it. Widget B contains a gear mechanism that is covered by a patent. Both are physical manifestations of an idea. I cannot sell either, but for two entirely different reasons.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[The End Of Days]

If you have nothing to replace it, then your opinion is useless.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Rogerborg]

Whereas your opinion is sought after and respected at the highest levels of government?

Sorry, I meant: so's your face.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You left out the next sentence from Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

That describes... guess what?

Patents!

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Dragonslicer]

There is no such thing as innovation in software, just different ways to do things.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're trying to be funny.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[jbengt]

No, you can copyright a specific expression of an idea, if it (the expression, that is, not the idea) is original and creative.
You can patent a specific implementation of an idea, if it is novel, non-obvious, and useful.
The idea itself is neither copyrightable nor patentable
IANAL, YMMV

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

If there are no patents, what's the incentive for innovation?

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them [inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You copyright programs. You patent algorithms.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

A patent attorney says that Computer Software is Not Math. Fuck you, too.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[gbjbaanb]

but... that means, if you do not make profit from them its ok. So, if you sold the fruits of the ideas that you obtained from someone else, that's bad. But if you gave them away to benefit everyone (a'la OSS), then that's as fine as the idea being freely available to all men and benefiting society.

I rather like that - if you do not profit from it, you cannot be held accountable by the patent. Cool or what!

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

Wow, Alan Turing says that software is math, and some random asshole lawyer with no real mathematical or computer science background says it is not. I wonder who I'm going to go with...

Dumbass.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

You are pulling shit out of your ass and saying "this is the way I want the world to be". Unfortunetly for you, this isn't the way the world is. If you are having a hard time finding sources discussing why patenting ideas is wrong, then maybe it is because everybody but you understands why it is retarded.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[guyminuslife]

What's a product? Is a product something physical, like a telephone? Is a product something intangible, like a set of instructions for a machine, or an educational curriculum?

Is a product a Slashdot post?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

You are making distinctions where, in reality, none exist.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[hkmwbz]

Wow, another AC parroting Microsoft talking points. What a surprise!

All Opera did was to report Microsoft's crimes to the authorities. They didn't "blame" Microsoft for anything, except for breaking the law.

Also, the ballot screen was Microsoft's proposal. Opera is in no position to demand anything.

How much is Microsoft paying you to spread misinformation?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[hkmwbz]

Turbo is supposed to be used when you are on a slow connection. Sure it goes through Opera's servers, but Opera is well known for not violating people's privacy.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[guyminuslife]

That's not really a productive comment, and if I had mod points and hadn't already commented, I'd mod it flamebait.

To GP---if you do want discussions outside of Slashdot, the place to look is the current SCOTUS case on In Re Bilski, which concerns patentability.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

If everybody but me understands why patents are wrong, why do we have patents?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You got me. Sue the USPTO and present Alan Turing as your star witness in the trial. Double dumbass on you!

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

I suspect you are being purposely dense but what the hell, I'll clarify: Everybody knows that patents on ideas are wrong. Most people agree that patents on mechanisms are a good thing.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

Product: (n) merchandise, ware, product (commodities offered for sale) "good business depends on having good merchandise"; "that store offers a variety of products"

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

Then how can a video codec be patented? If you could only patent one particular implementation, then I could implement the codec myself and no one else would have any patent rights to my implementation. Has Groklaw been so wrong all these years?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

No need, just waiting for Bilski to go through.

Alan Turing may be dead, but that in no way invalidates his work. Fuckwit.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You don't patent a physical mechanism. You patent the idea for a mechanism. No one else can build a separate physical mechanism that matches your idea and then claim it isn't covered by your idea because it's a different physical mechanism. All patents are patents on ideas.

Someone else has tried to argue that patents apply to implementations, but that also doesn't make sense. If a drug company could patent only a specific formulation of a drug, then another company could make its own formulation and claim it isn't covered by the patent.

All inventions are ideas, and inventions are what is patented. All patents are patents on ideas. You can read about how to patent an idea at howtopatentanidea.net.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Sir_Lewk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test

Read.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

I think what you're trying to say is that one opinion is that the only ideas that should be patented are those that are embodied in a physical mechanism. For example, Canada uses this criterion. It would have been far better to link to a source in the first place -- I find Wikipedia's explanations of patent issues to be far less silly than the discussions here. Thanks for finally finding one!

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[NickFortune]

You can't patent that idea. You can only patent an idea that can be used in making a product. FAIL on two counts

You made an overly broad and sweeping statement, and now you're getting all upset because someone called you on it. The failure is entire on your part.

not understanding what kinds of ideas can be patented, and not providing a source as I requested

Yes, yes. We'd all like to tell our opponents what arguments they could and could not use in the course of a debate, I'm sure.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

I looked up Bilski. It seems to do with patenting business processes. That same article describes at least one specific algorithm was decided to be patentable. You have no idea what you're ranting on about, do you?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

You made an overly broad and sweeping statement, and now you're getting all upset because someone called you on it. The failure is entire on your part.

No, someone misread my statement and then said something boneheaded that he though showed that I was being stupid. I never said any ideas can be patented. I said the only things that are patented are ideas. They are a specific kind of idea called an invention. You can't patent any old idea.

Can anyone provide any source whatsoever that argues cogently that patents on algorithms should not be allowed? The posts here on Slashdot look like a laundry list of lame excuses compiled by crackpots for why they shouldn't be allowed.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Anonymous Coward]

There would be no drugs developed by for-profit companies, for example.

That is very, very unlikely. You might have a point in claiming there'd be less but I doubt even that. There's so much money in this, they'd innovate just to get the head start, the increased publicity and the mind share, and anyway after that even a small share of all sales will pay for R&D.

The theory that they'd stop innovating is a little like saying a chess grandmaster shouldn't bother making good moves because his competition will be able to use them too from then on.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bunratty]

I'm explaining the distinctions that exist between copyrights and patents. You copyright a specific work. You patent a certain kind of idea called an invention. It's pretty clear to me what the distinction is between what can be patented and what can be copyrighted.

I found many arguments against software patents in Wikipedia, and interestingly, there is almost no overlap between the discussion in these Slashdot posts and the discussion in that article. The reasons for not allowing software patents given here are idiotic. The reasons given in the Wikipedia article are much more reasonable.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[guyminuslife]

Not to be nitpicky, but the dictionary isn't necessarily our best reference here. If I invent something---say, a hovercar---but I don't offer it commercially, it's not a product and therefore not patentable under the definition you just gave. Likewise, patent law is usually considered to also cover, say, a physical transformation---e.g., if I develop a process to turn lead into gold, it's patentable. In that sense, saying that the only things that are patentable are the things you refer to as "products" is too narrow.

But then again, if you say that a product is anything that is provided commercially, then it also includes services. You might say Google's algorithms are patentable, when they're used as a service. (I would not, but let's let that lie for the sake of discussion.) For instance, if I started a commercial service for improving Slashdot submitters' karma scores, and could reduce my process for doing so to a well-defined series of steps (Step 1: Bash Microsoft, Step 2: Promote Linux, etc.), then the process would be patentable.

Saying that a patent is something that somehow is involved in a "product" only muddles the issue.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[bingoUV]

Those things are different from mathematical proofs or scientific hypotheses, which are not inventions, in the sense that you cannot do anything with them alone. You must apply them to a situation. They are no good on their own. You cannot put a mathematical proof or scientific hypothesis into a product. You can put a drug or a machine or an algorithm into a product.

An algorithm cannot do anything alone either. It must be applied to a situation.

E.g. merge sort. What can you do with the algorithm alone? You need to have items that need to be sorted, figure out merge sort is best for your case, and then apply it to the situation. Without the last step, what use is merge sort?

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[JAlexoi]

A: It uses the word "may".
B: Intellectual output should be patentable or copyrightable, never both.
C: Patent's idea is to make sure the knowledge is not kept secret. As it was with guilds in those days. Therefore patents are publicly available.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[NickFortune]

No, someone misread my statement

The statement I apparently misread, and to which I responded was:

I don't buy this "ideas can't be patented" argument.

I don't see any mention of invention there.

Re:an anti-swpat company doing well

[Draek]

I would say that an algorithm is in every sense an invention just as much as a drug or a machine.

And I would say an algorithm is very much the same as a mathematical expression instead.

Correlation/causation

[TSchut]

These numbers don't mean too much, because at the time the ballot screen was introduced Opera introduced a new version of their browser as well. Probably at least part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen.

However, still nice to see people trying something different.

Re:Correlation/causation

[sopssa]

They track the browser downloads depending on source, so they do actually have a quite good idea how many people are installing via ballot screen.

Re:Correlation/causation

[Anonymous Coward]

These numbers don't mean too much, because at the time the ballot screen was introduced Opera introduced a new version of their browser as well. Probably at least part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen.

However, still nice to see people trying something different.

Considering that Opera had previously released, what, nine new versions and never seen a bump, I'd say it's pretty likely that the ballot was the causal factor.

Re:Correlation/causation

[TSchut]

Could be, but it doesn't say so in TFA. It may be *implied*, but that's not good enough in my book.

Re:Correlation/causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if you stopped reading TFA's you'd be able to infer anything you'd like - just like the rest of us.

Re:Correlation/causation

[Animaether]

The numbers don't mean too much not for the reason you mention (as others have pointed out, they probably correlate the IP address used for the download to the IP address's entry point and check the referrer for that hit) but because these are only downloads.

How many of those Polish potentially swayed by the "Opera Turbo technology - speed up your Internet connection" are actually going to -stick to- using Opera, rather than going back to IE or using another browser they might have downloaded through that same choice screen?

The only thing we can even remotely suggest is that if nothing else, the browser choice screen may have brought choice -awareness- to the masses more than any other effort has done so far. That alone is a Good Thing(TM)

Re:Correlation/causation

[lyinhart]

This article explicitly states that the additional downloads are coming from the screen: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8574883.stm

Re:Correlation/causation

[lw7av]

However, still nice to see people trying something different.

Or maybe these "new" Opera users had only been exposed to a non-MS browser (Opera) on their phones and they are only discovering its availability on windows.

Re:Correlation/causation

[TSchut]

No, that article states for *some* countries how many percent of the total downloads come from the ballot screen (Poland 77%, Spain, Italy, Denmark over 60%)

In other words, this looks a lot like marketing with some selective data. Not that that's surprising or weird, but still.

Re:Correlation/causation

[mdwh2]

was also appalled that it wasn't free; they wanted me to pay for it!

Note that Opera has been completely free for years (since 2005). (And even before that, long before Firefox existed, you had the option of paying or a small ad.) I'm not sure why the idea of commercial sortware is "appalling" - I mean, you're running this on Windows!

I'd certainly recommend trying it again - Opera has been continually improved, and it's not really fair to judge it today based on a five year old version. (Also it's unclear whether the webpage problems were due to bugs/limitations in Opera, or because of poorly written webpages that are only written for IE and Firefox.)

Re:Correlation/causation

[cerberusss]

part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen

I see this differently. The ballot screen somehow caused Opera to create a new version.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster may have something to do with it as well.

Re:Correlation/causation

[John Napkintosh]

Not only that, but people are probably just trying them out just to try them out. Now that a lot of people suddenly see more options, they're going to give some or all of them a shot, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're converts, or that they'll do anything more than browse around for an hour or so to see what it's all about.

It would be more interesting to somehow correlate continued use.

Re:Correlation/causation

[Dynedain]

Also it's unclear whether the webpage problems were due to bugs/limitations in Opera, or because of poorly written webpages that are only written for IE and Firefox.

As a web developer, when my pages are 100% valid XHTML and CSS, work properly on IE 7+8, Safari 2-4, Chrome, and Firefox 2-3.6, and they still break on Opera (which has a visitor rate of less than 1%) I'm not going to do much to support Opera. At that point, the ball is in their court to fix.

I don't care if you get 100 on the Acid3 test if your browsers still chokes on things when surfing real sites.

Re:Correlation/causation

[h4rr4r]

Opera is no cost software, not free software.

Re:Correlation/causation

[just_another_sean]

Regular pages that looked fine in IE and Firefox were completely mangled in Opera, so I gave up and said never again.

See here.

Re:Correlation/causation

[mister_playboy]

This article caused me to break out Opera 10.10 and browse Slashdot. It's very noticeable how differently it renders pages on this site than FF 3.6 does. All the boxes that normally have rounded corners now have squared ones. The checkbox for posting AC takes on a different, 3-D look. I have no idea which rendering is the desired one, but they are clearly quite different.

The main reason I don't use Opera much is that I find it painfully slow on /. Opening a story page like this one and rendering the page literally takes a full minute, compared to about 12 seconds for FF 3.6. I have no idea if this is just a problem with the Linux version or what.

Re:Correlation/causation

[The End Of Days]

Free still means "no cost" in the English language, despite the best efforts of RMS to have everything his way.

Re:Correlation/causation

[jim_v2000]

Why is this flamebait? He said that he had a bad experience with Opera, but his going to try it again. Seems like a decent post.

Re:Correlation/causation

[gbjbaanb]

my pages are 100% valid XHTML and CSS, work properly on IE 7+8

you had me up to that point :)

Re:Correlation/causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but Poland is not America and we have here a quite decent broadband with broad coverage. Don't even get me started on mobile broadband.

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

The numbers mean that, being made aware that they have choice, more people will exercise it. They mean that the ballot screen seems to be a success.

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

Actually, the numbers are specifically for ballot screen downloads. They are not just normal downloads. It's trivially easy to keep track of where downloads are coming from.

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

Why Opera 10.10? It's old! Opera 10.50 supports rounded corners and all that. Why are you using the latest Firefox, but an old and outdated Opera version?

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

Sounds like FUD to me. My standards compliant pages work fine in Opera. I'm guessing that you are designing specifically for bugs in other browsers, and then blaming Opera for your own incompetence when it doesn't have the exact same bugs.

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

I was also appalled that it wasn't free; they wanted me to pay for it!

Oh no! A company needs to make money to survive! Evil capitalist pigs!

Re:Correlation/causation

[jaavaaguru]

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re:Correlation/causation

[lowrydr310]

I know it's free now, I was just commenting on my past experience when it wasn't free and didn't render half of my regularly visited sites properly.

I definitely plan on trying the new version. My original post reflected those intentions. Had the Euro-MS 'browser choice' issue not made mainstream headlines, I wouldn't have really paid much attention to the fact that a new version of Opera was recently released.

I still don't get why I was modded flamebait (by more than just a few mods). Had a bad past experience when Opera wasn't free, but I'm willing to give it another chance. Oh well, so much for my good karma bonus.

Re:Correlation/causation

[hkmwbz]

Selective data? They are listing the rate of ballot screen downloads compared to normal downloads.

Re:Correlation/causation

[lowrydr310]

I'm not sure why the idea of commercial sortware is "appalling" - I mean, you're running this on Windows!

I'm not appalled by commercial software by any means. I just didn't like the idea that this particular piece of commercial software, which for whatever reason at the time didn't render my frequently visited sites properly, especially when a free browser (firefox) was available.

I will try the new version though - competition is usually a good thing.

Re:Correlation/causation

[Animaether]

Gosh, don't get all offended now ;)

It's simply the only distinguishing part -in- the description for Opera..
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

The powerful and easy-to-use Web browser. Try the only browser with Opera Turbo technology, and speed up your Internet connection.

Poland does have lovely broadband.. now all it needs is static IPs so I don't have to ban half the country (83.3.*.*-83.5.*.* and others) from my game server every time a handful of players decide to cheat and hit up the DHCP to get a new IP every time ;)

Re:Correlation/causation

[A Friendly Troll]

How many of those Polish potentially swayed by the "Opera Turbo technology - speed up your Internet connection" are actually going to -stick to- using Opera, rather than going back to IE or using another browser they might have downloaded through that same choice screen?

Opera has 12% market share in Poland, which is almost double that of Safari and Chrome combined. No notable increases, despite the number of extra downloads, or they haven't been recorded yet in the stats.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-PL-monthly-200903-201003-bar

Re:Correlation/causation

[rdnetto]

What I'd really like to know is what % of people using the ballot screen selected Opera. I wouldn't be surprised if it's ~20%

Re:Correlation/causation

[mdwh2]

Opera works fine for me when I visit real sites. I guess I won't visit yours then, if you take that attitude to your customers.

Re:Correlation/causation

[mdwh2]

Yeah, I agree the flamebait mods were unfair.

Re:Correlation/causation

[jgrahn]

Also it's unclear whether the webpage problems were due to bugs/limitations in Opera, or because of poorly written webpages that are only written for IE and Firefox.

As a web developer, when my pages are 100% valid XHTML and CSS, work properly on IE 7+8, Safari 2-4, Chrome, and Firefox 2-3.6, and they still break on Opera (which has a visitor rate of less than 1%) I'm not going to do much to support Opera. At that point, the ball is in their court to fix. I don't care if you get 100 on the Acid3 test if your browsers still chokes on things when surfing real sites.

I'm an Opera user, and I very rarely have problems with real sites. So I'd tend to think your problems say more about your code than about Opera ... Did you report these bugs to Opera, by the way?

Re:Correlation/causation

[Kalriath]

I wouldn't be surprised if the % of downloads is directly proportional to the frequency of Opera being in place #1.

Re:Correlation/causation

[tehcyder]

Opera has been continually improved, and it's not really fair to judge it today based on a five year old version.

Don't forget that most people here judge Windows today based on a fifteen year old version.

Testing burden

[williamhb]

Presumably it will also raise web development testing costs in the short term, as organisations feel less happy to test "just on the big three" but might not be any happier to assume that browsers all produce the same output than they are today? The long-term outlook might be more standards compliant pages, but the short term outlook might well be "Panic!"

Re:Testing burden

[ad0n]

..and, by that logic, maybe cut long term costs overall given that they will realize up front that a subset of their customers cannot even use their site because it is not supported by common mac browsers, etc. I know I had this problem with http://fido.ca/ -- it appears as though they fixed the site now, but how many calls to tech support and how much re-inventing or patching up a poorly engineered site after the fact?

Re:Testing burden

[Blakey Rat]

It's going to be a long time until the average web developer gets to "let's test on Opera!" Unless they have a rich customer using it that they happen to know about. Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.

Of course if you want to do the IE and Safari tests properly, you need a VM for each browser, since IE and Safari versions don't play nice alongside newer IE versions. And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery, and even when you've done that it doesn't work quite 100% right... so really, for "simplicity", we just use a VM for every browser except the most current.

To add to the confusion, you can't even test on older versions of Chrome even if you want to, because Google claims since Chrome auto-updates itself, it's literally impossible for someone to be running a year-old version-- yeah, right, Google! I'm sure angels will begin farting out software updates to modem users any day now!

Re:Testing burden

[Aphoxema]

I figure just write your page in perfect compliance and say fuck any browser that fails to currently render it properly. Should one day browsers become compliant to standards they'll be able to work with the pages then and re-writing won't be necessary and you won't have wasted time supporting multiple browsers.

Of course, this only works on not-important, mission critical web pages.

Re:Testing burden

[FlyingBishop]

I always test on Opera because I can't install Chrome at work. (Well, I can, but it insists on ignoring my organization's Windows policies, and installs itself to Documents & Settings, which is wiped every time I log out. )

So I test on Firefox 3.6, Opera, and IE7. (Because my organization hasn't moved to IE8.)

I've never run into an instance where Opera didn't match either IE7 or Firefox 3.6. (this is mostly testing other people's shit.)

No, it's probably not ever going to be the first thing I test. But I always hit all four major rendering engines before shipping things out the door (Gecko, Webkit, Presto, and Trident.) If it works on all of those, it's highly unlikely that your design will ever break. And that's worth a final test.

Re:Testing burden

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course if you want to do the IE and Safari tests properly, you need a VM for each browser, since IE and Safari versions don't play nice alongside newer IE versions."

I've had pretty good luck with this http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE for IE.

YMMV tho.

Cheers

Re:Testing burden

[netsharc]

There was an anecdote on one of the Opera employee's blogs on how they looking to buy new servers, which nowadays are of course managed via a web-interface. They got offers and test equipment from some server companies, and one of the higher ups in the company was doing the evaluation, so he had to use the web-interface. He opened it up in his browser (you can guess which it is he's using), and immediately came the pop-up message "This browser is not supported".

Interestingly Microsoft offers Virtual PC VM's with Windows XP and different IE versions in them, it's on their site somewhere, if you google for it.

Re:Testing burden

[netsharc]

Ah, here's the story, told better.

Re:Testing burden

[Gr8Apes]

Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that

The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev) , the latest version of Safari in the last 3, and IE, fortunately, only versions 7 and 8. We actually had a page up for IE 6 users that recommended an updated browser since IE 6 has so many limitations it's actually disfunctional.

Re:Testing burden

[SmilingBoy]

"(Well, I can, but it insists on ignoring my organization's Windows policies, and installs itself to Documents & Settings, which is wiped every time I log out. )"

I think Chrome installs into Program Files if you install it using Google Pack: http://pack.google.com/

Re:Testing burden

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't at all hard to setup multiple profiles. Just sit down in profile manager, and crank 'em out. Then, unpack each firefox zip you grabbed off of ftp.mozilla.org to a separately named folder. In each one, if you are using windows on your test machine (which simplifies testing of chrome/safari/opera etc including their nightly builds) right click on the executable and choose "Create Shortcut" - then just add -no-remote -P newprofilename to the end of the shortcut executable line.
Finally, after launching you might want to go to about:config and turn off app.update.auto if you're trying to control versions.

Above process is trivially scriptable under Linux, but my Windows expertise in that area is somewhat lacking.

Took me about 15 minutes to setup 10 firefox profiles. FF2, FF3, FF3.5, FF3.6, FF3.7 continually updated and a handful of trunk builds for bisecting to an approximate range.

I also test chromium and webkit nightlies the same way. I do use VMs for IE7, IE8 and IE9 - the test machine runs IE6 natively for lowest common denominator testing.

Re:Testing burden

[Blakey Rat]

The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev)

This is another gripe of mine. I have the same problem with web designers around here, I've tried explaining to them that they'd have a MUCH easier time of it if they gave up their prejudices for awhile and just did the dev on IE. (Or both.) Instead, I get sites delivered to me with extremely obvious and blatant flaws in IE... they don't even bother to glance at the site in another browser.

Just irritating. Look, I know Firebug is pretty cool, but then again so is DOM Toolbar in IE. And if you have Visual Studio installed, Javascript debugging in IE is pretty good too. Just swallow your pride and use it.

The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev) , the latest version of Safari in the last 3, and IE, fortunately, only versions 7 and 8.

Yah, I'm dropping IE6 in the next version of our Javascript, but that's probably 6 months out. Since the current version already supports IE 5.5 and 6, there's no point in breaking it on purpose.

Re:Testing burden

[Anonymous Coward]

I cut out the middleman and use opera when I'm doing development. I mean, our QA guys need to hit IE and FF anyway, so I might as well get in an 80/20 test with Opera while I'm iterating my changes.

Re:Testing burden

[Carewolf]

No the "testing burden" is exactly the same. The same as it always have been. It just increases the pressure on some web-developers to get of their lazy ass and lift their burden.

Re:Testing burden

[The End Of Days]

It's not a matter of swallowing pride. The IE related tools are inferior, the browser itself is inferior, and treating it like a first class platform is wrong, because it should be relegated to the trash heap of history. If more developers ignored IE, fewer users would consider it the one and only browser. The answer isn't to coddle, it's to punish.

Re:Testing burden

[Blakey Rat]

Wow, you're exactly the kind of full-of-yourself holier-than-thou douchebag web developer I'm talking about. Thanks for the vivid example to back me up.

Dude, you're an asshole, you're producing buggy code that, like it or not, you'll have to eventually fix, and you're pissing off all your users and many of your co-workers. Get the fuck over yourself, using IE isn't like having bowel cancer, it's just another piece of software.

The IE related tools are inferior,

Visual Studio is a hundred times better than Firebug for debugging Javascript. (And even the free Express versions can be used in this way, so no need to buy anything.)

I will say that Firebug is better for diving down into the DOM and tweaking stuff, though. (Although I haven't much experience on the built-in DOM inspector on IE8... can anybody speak to how well it works?)

the browser itself is inferior

Really? Because it's got process separation, which is more than Firefox has going for it. And when IE9 comes out, its JS performance will be on-par with Firefox too... so there's two major areas where IE is demonstrably *not* inferior.

If more developers ignored IE, fewer users would consider it the one and only browser.

No they wouldn't, they'd just leave your website and go elsewhere. And given your attitude, I'd say you deserve to lose the business.

Re:Testing burden

[Gr8Apes]

Wow, you're exactly the kind of full-of-yourself holier-than-thou douchebag web developer I'm talking about.

Talk about pot-kettle.

Dude, you're an asshole, you're producing buggy code that, like it or not, you'll have to eventually fix, and you're pissing off all your users and many of your co-workers.

Actually - I produce very high quality code that generally only needs a few tweaks for IE because....

wait for it...

it's written using standards!!!!

The only tweaks required are for broken IE implementations.

Face it - IE has been the pariah of web browsers ever since version 4 deviated from standards in MS's plot to take over the web.

The best thing that could happen is that no one develops for IE specifically. Then again, we could just wait for You Tube to force HTML 5 on IE....

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be lonely, or only know idiots. Opera has been at the forefront of web technologies and open standards for years. PS. Check market share in Russia.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[TSchut]

Nice to meet you, dsavi. You can remove that comment now :P

Homegrown popularity.

[kiehlster]

I'm pretty sure this is only because Opera is based in Norway. Now that they see the choice, of course they'll pick Opera. Hey, Opera is made in Europe, so why not use that?

Re:Homegrown popularity.

[obarthelemy]

how many non-slashdot-readers do you think know that ?

Re:Homegrown popularity.

[Anonymous Coward]

The ones who remember Opera's old domain of opera.no :)

Re:Homegrown popularity.

[hkmwbz]

Uh, do you have any idea how huge and diverse Europe is? Your comment just reeks og ignorance and bigotry.

Devil's advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse

The same could be said for only a single browser existing.

What a multitude of browsers do, is promote progress and innovation. Now _that_ we surely do want.

Re:Woah

[kauttapiste]

Hence the "Dramatic" in the headline!

Re:Woah

[WrongSizeGlass]

Spinal Tap will start streaming through all 11 copies of Opera simultaneously.

Re:Woah

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_rule

Statistics can be misleading.

IE is the burden.

[MikeFM]

I doubt it. Testing in IE takes longer than in all other major browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome) combined. Besides IE, all major browsers are reasonably standards compliant. IE is the only browser with enough market share to make it the developers problem if they aren't standards compliant. Only really crappy developers will have any major issues and lets face it - they deserve it.

Re:IE is the burden.

[gzipped_tar]

To make things worse, each version of IE sucks in its distinctive way.

That's a real pain. I used to do some Web developing part-time and I know that. When I was doing the job I had Firefox as the main testing browser and voila, my site automagicaly looked and worked the same in Firefox, Opera and Chrome/Safari without tweaking the standard-compliant code (extensively validated using W3C's tools). For each version of IE I had to maintain different hacks, test them, and make it couldn't break in the standard-compliant browsers, AND still pass the validation, AND keep the hacks as maintainable as possible.

I learned a lot trying to do it and I was glad I made it. I'm doubly glad that I probably don't have to do it again.

Re:IE is the burden.

[HopefulIntern]

A lot of my job (at least last summer) was testing software in different browsers. It is a massive pain thanks to IE. I have one test plan for FF/Chrome/Opera as they tend to be the same, then one for IE6, one for IE7 and one for IE8.... All being different, handling content differently.

some annoying bugs on 10.50

[Anonymous Coward]

it's nice for opera but as a long time opera user i think they should improve pretty quickly their 10.50 desktop browser. it has more bugs compared to the far more stable 10.10

Re:some annoying bugs on 10.50

[blai]

I know right, a version with 10 revisions is more stable than a remake that just came out. hmm!

Re:some annoying bugs on 10.50

[hkmwbz]

Can't say I have noticed any bad bugs. It's stable and works well. Funny how all the negative comments are from ACs...

Nintendo?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will Opera go after Nintendo for only allowing one "3rd-party" browser on the Wii?

Re:Nintendo?

[JoelMartinez]

Isn't the Wii web browser already from Opera?

Re:Nintendo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking it'll be a while since the Wii uses Opera as it's browser.

Re:Nintendo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. They also have an exclusive contract with Nintendo which is the worse than the behavior the bitched to the EU about.

Re:Nintendo?

[david_thornley]

Except that Nintendo isn't a monopoly. They share the console market with Microsoft and Sony, and the handheld market with Sony.

There are a lot of things you can do if you're not a monopoly that you can't if you are.

Nor do I want anybody telling me Microsoft Windows isn't a monopoly. There's legal and practical definitions for these things, and they don't require there to be absolutely no competition.

Re:Nintendo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is the web browser for the Wii, so I'm sure they're delighted to be the only browser allowed. On the other hand, the Wii browser hasn't had a meaningful update since 2007, only supports Flash 8, no support for audio/video other than flash (e.g. no mp3), can't view PDF... well that's what the official FAQ says anyway. I stopped using it when I figured out that even Nintendo's own web sites don't work 100% correctly in it.

Re:Nintendo?

[hkmwbz]

Opera is the web browser for the Wii, so I'm sure they're delighted to be the only browser allowed.

Actually, Opera's CEO has stated that he doesn't want any browser to be completely dominant, and that includes his own browser.

Re:Nintendo?

[hkmwbz]

Clearly you are deeply ignorant. The Wii is not made by Opera. The Wii does not have a monopoly. Opera has not been found guilty of anti-competitive practices. On the other hand, Microsoft broke the law with their own IE by abusing their monopoly.

Re:Nintendo?

[hkmwbz]

Why would they do that? The Wii doesn't have a monopoly. Weird with all these ACs parrting pro-Microsoft talking points...

Re:Nintendo?

[petermgreen]

The wii does not have a near monopoly of the game console market.

Re:Woah

[WrongSizeGlass]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_rule

Statistics can be misleading.

Links can be misleading, too. That link had absolutely nothing to do with the Simpsons.

Death of the proprietary browser monopoly?

[Mantis8]

Hopefully, this will signal the end of the monopoly of the proprietary, non-standards compliant browsers like ie enjoyed for many years and force everybody to comply with reasonable standards. At the beginning of the internet, being non-standards compliant seemed ok at first, but now we are wiser and non-compliant browsers are looked down upon, instead of being a skewed standard.

Opera support comes from people like me...

[Orga]

Why do some websites look okay? Because I, the actual engineer on the project use Opera.. and therefore I make sure the page looks alright. We're tasked with supporting FireFox, IE 7, we force compatibility mode in 8 because of third party controls that we use and can't influence.

Give me a break....

[ThisIsAnonymous]

I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product. Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using. Let's start the insanity...

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.

Microsoft isn't required to do anything by anyone. The Browser Ballot Screen is entirely thought up and implemented by Microsoft themselves.

Re:Give me a break....

[Anonymous Coward]

to please the EU governments

Re:Give me a break....

[Seth024]

Because you can't use a monopoly in one area (OS) to gain a monopoly in another area (browers).

Giving IE with every version of Windows breaks that law, because most people won't install another browser. The browser ballot screen is a solution that the European Parliament (?) and Microsoft both agreed to.

Re:Give me a break....

[b4dc0d3r]

I find it a little strange that USA prosecuted Microsoft as an illegal leverager of a monopoly - this should have happened sooner. Maybe the IE team wouldn't have been disbanded.

Microsoft put out a crappy browser and then stopped developing it, thinking people would just give up on standards and write for IE. I find that strange as well.

I'm sure there are other aspects which qualify as strange.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

Yes, of course. But they did this out of free will, not because they were required to do anything. The investigation into Internet Explorer was still underway when MS introducted the ballot screen.

Re:Give me a break....

[ThisIsAnonymous]

So how is this different from the iPhone not allowing any other browsers? If Microsoft had locked down Windows so that only Microsoft approved applications from the Microsoft app store could run on Windows, then they wouldn't be facing any of this right now (because they would have presumably denied Opera for "similar features" or "feature already available in Windows" etc.)?

Re:Give me a break....

[daveime]

So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?

What a fucked up world we live in.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

So how is this different from the iPhone not allowing any other browsers?

Because the iPhone doesn't have a monopoly in the phonemarket.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

Your comparison makes no sense. First of all, Starbucks doesn't have a monopoly in the coffeemarket. But even more obvious, they aren't using their influence in the coffeemarket to gain a monopoly in the sandwichmarket.

Re:Give me a break....

[bunratty]

Microsoft is being treated specially because they have a near monopoly on the desktop operating system market, and they have been abusing this monopoly to promote their own products, such as their web browser, their search engine, and their Office suite. Other companies do not have a monopoly in these areas, and therefore they face an uphill battle in attempting to compete against Microsoft. By promoting other browsers, they're trying to level the playing field to allow more competition, which should result in better products.

Re:Give me a break....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.

I'm not a fan of strangling women or anything but I still find it a little strange that Gary Leon Ridgway is being required to "promote the safety of women" in his own housing choices, by living in a small cell away from society.

Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using.

Perhaps Anthony Hopkins and every man should be required to live in a cell.

Let's start the insanity...

I think your insanity is in assuming people convicted of a crime should not be punished and forced to make reparations to society because non-criminals are not punished. That's pretty fucking nuts dude.

Re:Give me a break....

[clone53421]

Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.

Re:Give me a break....

[jonnat]

Your perception is based on the flawed assumption that Microsoft is a common competitor in the browser market. MS has been found by the European Commission to be a monopoly abusing its position to stifle competition. They were fined over 1.6 billion Euro and the "promotion of the competition" is nothing but MS's own strategy to reduce that penalty.

Re:Give me a break....

[mikechant]

I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.

Have you by any chance been living in a cave for the last few years?

Basic EU competition law: *If* Opera was distributed along with 'Opera OS', *and* 'Opera OS' had a 90% market share, then Opera might well be required to include such a ballot screen or other equivalent requirement.

As 'Opera OS' does not even exist, they can do what they like. Same for Firefox etc.

Simple eh?

And (preemptively) don't bring Apple into it just because they *do* have an OS. It has less than 10% of the relevant market, so again they are free to do what they like.

NB US competition laws are very similar but don't seem to be enforced as much.

Re:Give me a break....

[Runaway1956]

The iPhone has no monopoly in telephones. THAT's how it's different.

As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.

Re:Give me a break....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.

Actually it's the desktop OS market. MS doesn't even sell a computer of their own. Steve Jobs, being a bright guy, already knows this fact and knows that his company bears some responsibility since they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market. Of course the fact that MS's monopoly power would make that a crazy business move probably figures in.

Re:Give me a break....

[ceoyoyo]

Doing something while under investigation by one of the most powerful political organizations in the world, to avoid having that organization levy hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of fines, is a strange definition of free will.

Re:Give me a break....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?

Nope. If, however, Starbucks doubled their market share and qualified as a monopoly and then gave away a free sandwich with each coffee (while rolling their costs into the price of coffee, usually called bundling) then they would be guilty of violating competition laws.

Re:Give me a break....

[clone53421]

they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market

You lost me there.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

Say it as you like, the fact of the matter is that not the EU but MS themselves came up with the browser ballot screen and they implemented it before the EU's investigation reached any conclusions, nor did the EU do any suggestions towards Microsoft on how to handle this situation.

Re:Give me a break....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market

You lost me there.

Okay I'll simplify. A "market" is a group of sellers and buyers where the buyers choose among those sellers when looking to make a purchase. The sellers in this case are people supplying the desktop OS component for pre-installation on home computers. The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them. If Apple were to license OS X to Dell to preinstall, there would be more choices in the market and MS's monopoly power would be lessened. Given Apple and MS's relative sales now, however, that would not seem to lessen MS's power over OEMs enough to make bundling laws not apply in this case.

Re:Give me a break....

[ceoyoyo]

While technically true, it's a little less misleading if you put it like this:

The EU told MS that IE bundled with Windows was a problem. If MS didn't do anything the EU would probably require that IE be removed, which would be a major undertaking. MS suggested a ballot screen as an option and the EU decided that was an acceptable compromise.

Yes, MS suggested the solution. No, they wouldn't have done it except to avoid a far worse solution being imposed by the EU. I'm not sure exactly what the point of your post is, but if it was to suggest that MS invented the ballot screen out of the kindness of their hearts or as some kind of strategic move unconnected with the EU, you're wrong. Your statement that "Microsoft isn't required to do anything by anyone" is also wrong. The EU required Microsoft to do something, they just didn't specify precisely what "something" was.

Re:Give me a break....

[3vi1]

"I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of." -- Steve Jobs

Re:Give me a break....

[EvanED]

As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.

Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

The point of my posts is that people keep saying Microsoft was forced to create the Browser Ballot Screen, which is simply not true.

Yes, Microsoft was informed they were under investigion by the EU because of their bundling of IE with Windows. But that is it. How MS decided to handle this situation was entirely their own choice. So there's no "poor Microsoft, being forced to offer products by their competitors", because apparently MS thinks the browser ballot screen is the best solution for the problem.

Re:Give me a break....

[Anonymous Coward]

So you get a free sandwich with a coffee in Starbucks ?

What a strange place you live in.

Re:Give me a break....

[Runaway1956]

Well - you'll note the time frame I am referring to. If MS had taken responsibility for making applications available to their customers way back then, in the name of security, then a whole lot of OTHER things would necessarily have happened differently. In my opinion, anyway. Of course, it's awfully hard to prove the existence of an alternate reality - we all know the road that MS actually chose. ;^)

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.

How would offering a secure repository get them into antitrust problems?

Re:Give me a break....

[clone53421]

Apple is an OEM. The market isn’t just “Dell”, and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.

Re:Give me a break....

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone has no monopoly in telephones. THAT's how it's different.

Somehow...I don't give a crap about whether the iPhone has a monopoly or not. Why? Because I'm more concerned about my using things than I am about well this phantom of a monopoly and a market. That's your bogeyman not mine.

See, I think it's more fair to treat things equally than single one out. Sure, you can break thing down with an analogy that just seems appropriate, but really misses the point, but eh, I don't care. I see things how I see it.

If it's bad that one can't use any browser one wants on one platform, then it's bad that another platform won't allow it either.

As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.

Except they'd have been accused of even worse things if they had done it.

Though really, I wouldn't put Windows 95 in the range of it being when it was feasible. ME, maybe, but 95? Too much dial-up around then.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

Somehow...I don't give a crap about whether the iPhone has a monopoly or not. Why? Because I'm more concerned about my using things than I am about well this phantom of a monopoly and a market. That's your bogeyman not mine.

It does matter if a company holds a monopoly with it's product, because that's what antitrust laws are all about. There is nothing wrong with bundling two products together, it's only wrong when you abuse your monopoly in one market to get one in another market. You can't put the whole monopoly thing aside, because it is at the heart of the issue.

See, I think it's more fair to treat things equally than single one out. Sure, you can break thing down with an analogy that just seems appropriate, but really misses the point, but eh, I don't care. I see things how I see it.

You can't treat monopolists equally, because they are not equal. That's the whole point: it's about creating fairness on the market by making sure there are no big boy bullies around who can prevent smaller boys from having success.

Re:Give me a break....

[EvanED]

Even without platform exclusivity, how long would it have been from when MS rejected some application for sort of grey-area reasons (is spyware the user "agrees" to malware or not?) until the offended party cried antitrust?

(Without doing some filtering, an app store doesn't really buy you anything.)

Re:Give me a break....

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop lying. They were both forced to do it and the EU did have input into the ballot process.

I think MS was going to just omit IE, but the whiners in the EU wouldn't have that either.

Re:Give me a break....

[dingen]

As they say on Wikipedia, citation needed, sir.

Re:Give me a break....

[hkmwbz]

The fact still remains: Microsoft broke the law, and proposed the ballot screen themselves.

Re:Give me a break....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Apple is an OEM.

Yes they are. They sell hardware in competition with Dell and HP, which is important if you're considering if the desktop computer market is monopolized. They do not, however, compete, in the desktop OS market because they won't sell their product, only integrating it in their own machines, bypassing that market through vertical integration.

The market isn’t just “Dell”

I didn't say it was.

...and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.

I used Dell as an example. We're not talking about the personal computer market because no one has ever been alleged to have monopoly influence in that market for the antitrust action we're discussing. The relevant markets are "web browsers" which is what was being influenced and "desktop operating systems" (as opposed to server which was ruled a separate market). If Apple is not willing to license their OS to a given OEM, then their OS is not relevant for purposes of defining the market and how much influence MS has over buyers (OEMs). When economists and lawmakers consider how much market share MS has, OS X's numbers are not even considered nor should they be.

Re:Give me a break....

[hkmwbz]

If MS didn't do anything the EU would probably require that IE be removed

Actually, that was Microsoft's first proposal. It was rejected. So they came up with the ballot idea, which was accepted.

Re:Woah

[poetmatt]

What's this got to do with Link?

Still haven't seen...

[Anonymous Coward]

...this ballot screen and don't want to. Thank god we block this "important" update via WSUS!

Firefox on a stick

[tepples]

And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery

Or you use the "portable" versions, designed to be installed to removable media, that do this dickery for you.

Opera Mini

[rwa2]

As long as we're spreading the Opera love...
I've tried but never really have gotten into Opera on the desktop. However on mobile devices -- dumbphones and smartphones and PDAs -- it's pretty much the only game in town.
http://m.opera.com/

The interface is quite fast, even on my crappy old Samsung. Difficult to believe it's a Java midp, given the responsiveness with which you can scroll around the page, zoom in/out, and slide back. It's much better than the built-in browsers that I've used on Samsung, Blackberry, older Palm devices, etc. and I even use it sometimes on my wife's Android phone. And it has some sort of bookmark sync thing tied to your account.

Anyway, if it wasn't for opera mini, I wouldn't have been able to get by with my dumb phone on a cheap wap plan for so long. Also with my Blackberry and Palm it allowed me to hit some javascript-heavy pages when I didn't have access to a computer (airline check-ins, etc.) and the built-in browsers just wouldn't hack it. So it's an essential piece to have on your mobile device.

Downsides:
* sometimes I lose my bookmarks, I think when I exit out of it too fast and my device kills java before it's finished cleaning up.
* My phone puts java apps in a really annoying place without a quick shortcut to it (Tools | My Files | Games).
* It disables my phone's standby for some reason.
* Opera Mini 5 beta doesn't work, but Opera Mini 4 works great. YMMV
* java nags to grant the app network access every time I launch a new session.

But it's awesome enough that I put up with those inconveniences to use it :P

Re:Opera Mini

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera Mobile, (for smartphones) native symbian one on nokia anyway, will sync with desktop opera, (which i've been using since firefox 3.1.*some bloody buggy number*)

syncs bookmarks, sync speed dial, does email (but doesn't sync mobile contacts with desktop email contacts)

and, it does all of this out of the box, no add ons, just does it. ad block was manually add a *.ini to a folder, but everything else just works.
easy.
simple.

Re:Opera Mini

[Corporate Troll]

I'm also a fan of Opera Mini! That said, on my Sony Ericsson c702 (provided by work), Opera Mini 5 beta works fine. I still think I need to file a bug report or two regarding odd behaviour.

I think partially the problem is your phone with the issues you are having... Never lost my shortcuts, standby works fine if I minimize the application (Multitasking on a phone... a novel idea for the iPhone fanbois) and the nagging for network access is simply a matter of setting "Always allow, never ask" or whatever the option was when it asked the first time.

Re:Opera Mini

[icebraining]

Not to flamebait or something, but those downsides are your phone's fault, it fine in my E65 (Well, maybe except 4, I haven't tried the beta).

Re:Opera Mini

[Zebedeu]

* java nags to grant the app network access every time I launch a new session.

Don't know if you tried this (sometimes it doesn't work), but before you launch Opera Mini if you can get to the application properties, sometimes it lets you disable the nag.

At least my old Sony Ericsson had that option, though it only allowed me to set it for signed applications (worked for Opera Mini).

Re:Opera Mini

[rwa2]

Thanks, but I'm pretty sure it's something dorked up with my crappy Samsung t629 phone. I've been able to permanently give it permissions once, but it involves dialing a wonky access code into the keypad to reach a secret java config menu. At some point after that, my settings got borked and I had to delete and reinstall opera mini to get it working again, and never bothered looking up that code again :P

It is/was a decent dumb phone for the price (EDGE bluetooth tethering, 128kbps mp3, some IM connectivity, etc.) but I certainly wouldn't buy one again :P

Not too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

So they went from 100 downloads in Italy to 202?

Re:Not too hard

[hkmwbz]

Opera already has about 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million Opera Mini users. Compare that to Firefox's reported 300 million users, and you'll get the idea. The blatant lie that Opera has a tiny user base is still being spread by ignoramuses like yourself.

Re:Not too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is all in markets that are profitless like the ghettos of eastern europe. Considering the webkit browsers are vastly superior... Why do people care about Opera? Oh right because kids like to rebel against popular choices because mainstream ISNT KOOL!

Re:Not too hard

[hkmwbz]

Who do you think are the ones with an internet connection in Eastern Europe? Oh, right, the people who have money! Which means that they are far from profitless. And why do you think companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. all want to get into non-Western markets? Because they are in fact growing quickly, and profits are soaring.

Regardless, my point was that the claim that Opera has a tiny user base is a blatant lie. You can of course spew nonsense and red herrings like you just did, but that does not change the fact that you are nothing but a sad, pathetic little liar :)

As for why people care about Opera... Why do they care about other browsers? Why do you care what other people care about? Personal issues, it seems.

WebKit superior? LOL.

Microsoft Great Software?

[Herkum01]

Goes to show that Microsoft IE has a large market share not because it is a great product, but because it locking competitors out.

Re:Microsoft Great Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a moron. Microsoft has never locked out any other browser from being installed.

Re:Microsoft Great Software?

[tehcyder]

Goes to show that Microsoft IE has a large market share not because it is a great product, but because it locking competitors out.

IE works well enough for most people, so it doesn't really matter yo them whether it's great or not.

And it has always been simple enough to download an alternative to IE, if you can be bothered. Again, though, it is a matter of absolutely no interest to the majority of computer users.

Re:Woah

[Stormwatch]

He didn't say Link, he said Links.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[residieu]

It's a Big Red O! There's no stopping the Big Red O once it gets rolling. It'll roll right over your lowercase blue e. It'll roll right over your rat clinging to the blue egg. It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is. Beware the Big Red O! It's the Future!

Avoiding the appearance of tying

[tepples]

I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.

Windows is Microsoft's own product, which holds market power over home PC operating systems. The browser ballot is Microsoft's way of avoiding the appearance of anticompetitive tying to EU regulators.

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is the Market POWER, not monopoly. Why do people choose Windows? Familiarity, ease of use. Ubuntu-how much crapware is Ubuntu loaded with. And Windows will accecpt almost any software we want to install. Do Linux distros or MAC? So, there is the key. We have Windows with market power, ease of use, familiarity and just plain old name recognition. And the courts will not change that.

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[dingen]

Why do people choose Windows?

Because they are idiots.

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[tepples]

And that is the Market POWER, not monopoly.

Some provisions of competition law kick in at the market power stage: the ability of a firm to control prices.

And Windows will accecpt almost any software we want to install. Do Linux distros or MAC?

Applications are developed for Windows and tested exclusively on Windows because Windows has market power. If Windows did not have market power, more developers would find it profitable to use Wine, Qt, or wxWidgets.

We have Windows with market power, ease of use, familiarity and just plain old name recognition. And the courts will not change that.

The point of competition law is to help mitigate the negative effects of a firm's market power even if it cannot remove that market power. In this case, one of the negative effects of market power over operating systems is the ability to establish market power over web browsers.

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[Kalriath]

Applications are developed for Windows and tested exclusively on Windows because Windows has market power. If Windows did not have market power, more developers would find it profitable to use Wine, Qt, or wxWidgets.

If they didn't all suck, and didn't have licensing that makes it impossible to affordably develop commercial apps for (Qt's GPL license for example)

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[tepples]

Qt is LGPL since soon after Nokia bought Trolltech.

Even otherwise, it's not impossible to build a commercial app that is free software. It can have non-free assets-other-than-code (e.g. Space Trader and Smokin' Guns based on ioquake3), non-free servers (e.g. Second Life, Ubuntu One), advertisements in the compiled executable (e.g. LimeWire, the Google box in Firefox), etc.

Re:Avoiding the appearance of tying

[Kalriath]

Ok, I'll concede that - but the toolkits still don't look all that good (not as bad as Swing for Java, but still).

I hope others improve too.

[Drethon]

Because if only Opera is seeing an increase due to this, it seems likely it is either because people like the name or people like the icon better. Not liking either of those options if true.

Isn't that Web Purpose FAIL: less portability

[jonaskoelker]

Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.

I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?

So when you think about creating an application and you worry about porting it between different clients, the decision "let's make it a web app! We'll have to test fewer platforms" runs counter to your purpose, right? In other words: people have turned the web into something it wasn't meant to be---a portability nightmare.

Yeah, writing desktop apps exposes you to differences between OSes. Okay, but all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth: they do the same things but in slightly different ways. Wrap the differences in libportability and get over it.

Maybe my attitude betrays my lack of coffee, but isn't it basically right? You don't have worse portability for desktop applications than you do for web applications.

Re:Isn't that Web Purpose FAIL: less portability

[Blakey Rat]

Depends on the type of app. For a GUI app, OS X is significantly more different from Windows than IE6 is from Chrome. There are cross-platform libraries that mitigate this, but most are extremely buggy on any platform other than its "native" one.

If you're using a really good cross-platform environment, for example RealBasic, at best I'd say the testing would be on-par with a web app.

For a CLI app, OS differences are trivial. And of course, nothing us cross-platform with iPhone OS, it's a mutant right now.

Re:Isn't that Web Purpose FAIL: less portability

[selven]

I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?

Operating Systems: Win 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS 10.4-6, Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2, iPhone original, iPhone 3G

I'm pretty sure all those OSes have at least 0.1% market share, that's 12 platforms.

The superior portability of web apps is not because there are less browsers but because they all adhere to a common standard, unlike operating systems. You can't run a Linux binary natively on Windows, and vice versa. There are libraries and middleware systems, but not everyone uses them, unlike browsers, which are essentially all mutually compatible middleware.

Mouse Gestures

[kirill.s]

Opera was the first browser to implement mouse gestures. I only switched to FF, when a mouse gestures plugin was made for it.

Wii has 64 MB of RAM

[tepples]

Opera has always been the low-resource browser. Are there any Free browsers that run well in 64 MB of RAM and no swap, ready for a port to the WiiBrew environment? Fennec for Nokia N810 requires twice that much.

Re:Wii has 64 MB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear Lynx is pretty lightweight.

Re:Wii has 64 MB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

i recommend links2

Re:Wii has 64 MB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

elinks dillo would work

Re:Wii has 64 MB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

You could run linux on the wii. That usually comes with firefox. Runs pretty decently if you can get online.
I've seen stuff on the newer versions of linux for the wii, and it looks like they now have wireless support, but you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work. Or you could buy an adapter that you plug into your wii's usb port.

I still don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

... why anybody thinks the browser ballet was a good idea in regards to what such a move will mean in the long-term. The *only* reason most people are happy about it is because we hate IE - the only reason we care is because this is specifically about the browsers. Why doesn't Mac OSX have to offer a screen for firefox or chrome instead of defaulting to safari? Why are linux distros allowed to bundle firefox? Why has this only happened for browsers, and not text editors/word processors, etc?

I "like" the idea of browser ballet in so far as that some IE usage will drop. However, I don't like the idea that government bodies are starting to dictate how a company should handle their software. It sets a dangerous precedent - this is like Apple hand-picking which apps are allowed in the app store, except on a much bigger scale - the EU hand-picking what software can be included on an operating system install. It's ridiculous.

Re:I still don't understand

[clarkn0va]

this is like Apple hand-picking which apps are allowed in the app store, except on a much bigger scale

And there you have the answer to your own question. Governments regulate how monopolists are allowed to leverage their monopolies. This question comes up in every discussion of this nature. You're either new here or you have a learning disability.

Re:I still don't understand

[MadKeithV]

Microsoft is a *convicted monopoly abuser*. They are being forced to provide a fair alternative to Internet Explorer on installation to make sure they cannot continue unfairly leveraging the monopoly they have (as decided by a court) to make IE the dominant browser.

Re:I still don't understand

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, you must have been living in a cave the past 20 years. You should come out for air a little more often.... ;)

MS is a convicted monopolist. They have been fined more than $2,000,000,000 over the years for illegal business practices. The ballot thing is merely the latest remedy imposed by the EU.
     

Re:I still don't understand

[myrdos2]

False dichotomy.

Re:I still don't understand

[jaavaaguru]

why anybody thinks the browser ballet was a good idea

The Browser Ballet, featuring Waltz of the HTML rendering engine in D minor. Who wouldn't think it was a good idea ;-)

Re:I still don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

He could be both!

Re:Woah

[clone53421]

At least nobody thought he was talking about links... you know, the ones that require you coding an <a href=>.

Re:Woah

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Links? This discussion is about web browsers right?

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

Well, nowadays, Chrome has been taking over that front a bit more, but they're still doing a good job (and the best job on mobile devices).

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Runaway1956]

Opera must be doing something right, that all the other browsers are missing. Go ahead, look at market share in eastern Europe, and especially among people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that a LOT of people take Opera seriously.

I've tested it, in several incarnations now. I'll bet I could still find my license file somewhere, if I tried hard enough. It has some pretty neat features, no matter what language you speak. That sharing thing, for instance - any idiot can share files, photos, whatever with their family, in a reasonably secure manner, without jumping through a lot of hoops.

You should drive it, before you dump on it.

I'm not switching, because Firefox suits my needs and wants, but if I were to switch, Opera would be a good browser to consider. In fact, it comes in side by side with Chrome, in my books.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is.

It's a compass. A typical icon to indicate "navigation", in contrast to big red O's, foxes and swirly colory... things...

Re:Woah

[DaVince21]

So you mean this?

Re:That's very nice Opera

[mcvos]

I've been using Opera for ages. For a long time, it was really the only choice for power users. Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl when you had more than a few dozen pages open. Back in my Pentium II 200MHz days, I needed 200 pages open to inconvenience Opera. It's still one of the browsers with the smallest memory footprint, although it's not leading by as much as it used to.

Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many of them users are actually aware of what a browser is and what implications their choice has? Loads of people us the Internet daily, but if you were to ask them (the none techy ones) what browser they use, most of them wouldn't know or would say 'Windows'. Its folly to go forcing this screen on an audience that doesn't understand it.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Herkum01]

For a minute there I thought you were referring to the this "The Big O". I watch too much anime...

A multitude of browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

"A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse" -- because there isn't a multitude of browsers now? And I suppose because all standards are so thoroughly written there is no room for interpretive error?
This could never possibly make the web less usable because all code will function perfectly on the upcoming multitude of 10% market share browsers, the days when sites need to be checked basically on three or four browsers (ie, ff, opera, safari) are will be gone.
Thank goodness.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a compass. A typical icon to indicate "navigation"

Helps me navigate the intertubes. Yay!

Firefox, it just goes around the world to get the pages I want to read. Booo-ring! Like, that’s just a boring description of what it does.

Mhmm I like the intertubes analogy better. Can you make it into a car analogy too? Is it a sort of car that goes through the intertubes, and the Safari is like its map? Like GPS for the internet. I love car analogies. Firefox doesn’t have a car analogy.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to launch a "show the world your O face" ad campaign. They'd be as popular as IE and Firefox very quickly.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

It's like a Volkswagen Fox. It, uh....

Okay, I suck at car analogies.

Re:Woah

[BobMcD]

That'd probably be funnier if I didn't spend so much time out on the links...

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Anime kiddies should be shot.

Re:Woah

[L4t3r4lu5]

That's because Opera is heavy duty.

Re:Woah

[tophermeyer]

No, he said Lynx!

Big Three? You are not a web developer

[SmallFurryCreature]

Okay, let me give you the reality of web development. You build it on firefox because it is simply the fucking best development browser. Then you give a brief test to Chrome/Opera, both of which have high quality dev environments as well (but firebug is just in a class of its own) and are typically fairly easy to debug. If you followed standards, then I rarely run into problems. Then, if you got a Mac, you test Safari. No problem there either usually.

And then, having spend 1% of you project time so far, you go to IE. IE6, IE7, IE8. All three are different.

And where real human beings upgrade their real browsers, the degenerates that use IE never ever upgrade but expect everything to work perfectly on decade old software.

Oh and guess which browser is the least likely to work EVEN if you follow its own "standards"? And then there are the version differences...

So no. Opera doesn't add any significant amount of testing. All of the 4 big other browsers (Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera) put together don't take a fraction of the time to debug that IE does.

Why do you think web developers celebrated when Google recently decided that IE6 was no longer going to be directly supported?

If Google were to put IE on a complete ban, then they could officially for ever change their motto to "do good".

Re:Big Three? You are not a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, hear!

Re:Big Three? You are not a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Having also worked in web development, I'd like to echo what parent said. In our shop, we'd first write/test everything in Firefox with firebug. Once it worked perfectly in Firefox, we'd get to work putting in the various hacks needed to get it to work in the IEs. We'd rarely test other browsers beyond running our code through them once and making sure everything looked right, because if our code worked on Firefox it was essentially guaranteed to work on any other browser with real standards compliance.

Granted, it's been a few years at this point since I worked in web dev, but when I talk to friends still doing it it sounds like things haven't changed much. At the time coding to the "Big Three" was basically company policy. Of course, at the time the "Big Three" were IE6, IE7, and Firefox.

Re:Big Three? You are not a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of crazed and ignorant person thinks that all IE users are "degenerates"? Your comment made me laugh, however I certainly hope it was a joke. The vast majority of IE users simply don't know any better or don't care.

Re:Big Three? You are not a web developer

[tehcyder]

And where real human beings upgrade their real browsers, the degenerates that use IE never ever upgrade but expect everything to work perfectly on decade old software.

Meanwhile, in the real world, most of us "degenerates" who have to use IE at work don't have the fucking chance to upgrade our browsers when we feel like it.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Aranykai]

It really came in handy for me way back in the day when I was constantly using Dial up on the road. Toggling off loading images was a great feature and I could work on multiple pages at once while waiting for background pages to load.

As it went on though, It just ended up getting more and more bloated. Just tried out the newest version though and I have to say I am very impressed with the facelift but its just not fast enough to edge out chrome for the sites I browse. I might dump it on my laptop when the 10.50 version is available for linux though.

Re:Woah

[3vi1]

I was just reading about that via Lynx.

multitude of browsers != more standardised

[AceJohnny]

"A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse".

Hah, that made me laugh. As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft Windows standardized the desktop, and Internet Explorer the Web. Sure, the quality of that 'standard' was terrible, but at least it was a standard.

Every week I see cool new features demonstrated. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.

I hope browser diversity will pull IE kicking and screaming into HTML5, but I certainly don't expect standardization!

Re:multitude of browsers != more standardised

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Every week I see cool new features demonstrated [zurb.com]. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.

The difference is those are features still being developed and in the process of being standardized. Your basic failure of understanding is motivation. A monopolist who can push their browser without working on its merits has little or no incentive to be interoperable with competitors. Every other company, however, has direct financial incentive to make their browser interoperable in order to gain market share. With no one party dominant, standards compliance becomes the lifeblood of every browser.

Opera is the only one that cares

[SmallFurryCreature]

Since Opera is the only commercial browser from the alternatives, it has the most to gain/lose by this battle.

Apple doesn't give a shit about Safari downloads and Google just wants people to use a modern browser, any browser as long as it isn't IE. And firefox, in europe which is the area we are talking about, is already pretty big. If FF doubled their downloads, there would be no more IE.

Aaah... that is a nice thought.

Re:Opera is the only one that cares

[petermgreen]

Opera don't sell thier desktop browser anymore either so they don't directly make any financial gains from having more desktop users.

IMO both apple and opera have a strong interest in "anything except IE" for the simple reason that opera/chrome/firefox/safari are all far closer to each other in behaviour than they are to IE. More users off IE should make web developers more standards friendly which in turn will benefit the non-pc browsers that opera sell and apple bundle.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

There's a Soviet Russia joke here somewheres. Maybe I'll come back after my coffee.

Re:Woah

[Anonymous Coward]

That's silly only Spinal Tap has ones that go to 11.

Re:Woah

[clone53421]

Links can be misleading? Are you calling him a liar?

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Yvan256]

Firefox doesn’t have a car analogy.

Roadkill.

Not noted in statistics

[Kotten]

When checking statistics (http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-weekly-200827-201011) I can not se that people are choosing different browser because of this ballot. Probably it is only causing that everybody is reinstalling whatever browser they have choosen.

Re:Not noted in statistics

[hkmwbz]

It's too bad that those stats are completely unreliable. StatCounter reported a higher market share for Chrome when Chrome had 30 million users and Opera had 40 million users, and they are supposed to get it right this time? Hah. These stats sites clearly have a huge problem detecting Opera properly.

Re:Not noted in statistics

[Kotten]

All statistics are unreliable in one way or another. Do you have something less reliable to offer? Like where you got your information from?

Also remember that the statistics from stats sites are not counting how many users are using certain browser but how much is browsed with each browser. So both you and statcounter could be correct, less people simply browsed more. Two different kinds of market share

Re:Not noted in statistics

[hkmwbz]

There are no reliable statistics. They have all been shown to be false. My information is from Google and Opera. They can count the number of users because browsers nowadays check for updates automatically with regular intervals.

Actually, what the statistics show differs. What's interesting, though, is that Opera caches a lot more aggressively than other browsers, so thanks for reminding me of yet another huge source of problem for the stats services! You see, if Opera downloads the same content more rarely than other browsers, it will obviously be under-counted.

So no, the excuse that "less people browsed more" does not hold water, especially since most Opera users are "advanced", and likely browse a lot more than your average Joe.

Re:Woah

[KPexEA]

Ya, but it's got a Big Bottom!

Re:Woah

[imakemusic]

I read it via Lynx on Linux whilst cruising down the Link, listening to Link and watching Link....but then the Link went down.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[rgviza]

I'm kind of partial to chrome, but then again I'm a minimalist. Opera is blazing fast tho, got to give them that.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to launch a "show the world your O face" ad campaign

Looks like you missed last year's April Fool's update:

Adult Web sites
Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions. If Opera keeps opening Speed Dial and Zooming In and Out, please be aware that this not a bug. It may be useful to disable Face Gestures for a better experience. Also remember that wiping your cache is recommend after visiting untrusted websites.

Re:Woah

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

They used to have 4 users, now that have 10. That's one dramatic rise.

Most of the features you're using in your current browser are carbon copies of what Opera brought to the market. Opera affects you no matter what you think of its userbase.

How does GNU/Linux fail to break market power?

[tepples]

The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them.

But they can buy a desktop GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, which have a "Wine" toolkit that can run many applications designed for Windows. In fact, Dell sells a few token Linux boxes in some markets. How does Linux fail to break Microsoft's market power?

Re:How does GNU/Linux fail to break market power?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But they can buy a desktop GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, which have a "Wine" toolkit that can run many applications designed for Windows.

That's absolutely true and Linux is a valid competitor.

How does Linux fail to break Microsoft's market power?

Because Linux cannot run all Windows software and Windows compatible hardware, there are still serious limitations to its suitability for a significant portion of users. But that's not how antitrust law works anyway. There are no antitrust laws that discuss operating systems and application compatibility. Instead the issue is the amount of influence on party has over any market. The most basic and obvious criteria used as an indicator of this is market share. In a typical case anything over 70% and the courts step in and typically companies start segregating their really popular products from other markets long before then to avoid any issue. MS has about 99% of the relevant market to date and it has been reviewed and determined to have monopoly influence by at least three different court systems in different countries that I know of.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[NatasRevol]

IF you like *all* of your web traffic to go through Opera's servers.

Exclusive secure repository

[tepples]

How would offering a secure repository get them into antitrust problems?

If Microsoft had implemented an exclusive secure repository, much like Apple's exclusive secure repository for iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad apps and Microsoft's exclusive secure repository for Xbox 360 games, that might have got Microsoft in trouble.

Re:Exclusive secure repository

[dingen]

The thing is though, with an exclusive repository, they probably would not have a monopoly with Windows right now. Which would have made both Windows and the operating system market as a whole a lot nicer.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

Only if you use Opera Mini. It's a special setting on Opera Mobile. I turn it on or off when it's convenient.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[lxs]

By Gundam mechs.

Its all relative ...

[BitZtream]

Yes, now Opera has grand total of around 400 or 500 users total, as opposed to the 6 people who actually used it before MS was forced to advertise them.

Re:Its all relative ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera had 2.1% browser share in February, so how is it possible that Opera now has 400 users when by your logic there were only 286 Internet users in the world?

Exaggerate much?

Re:Its all relative ...

[hkmwbz]

Actually, Opera already has about 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million Opera Mini users. Compare that to Firefox's reported 300 million users, and you'll get the idea. The blatant lie that Opera has a tiny user base is still being spread by ignoramuses like yourself.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

No you didn't, you just wanted to mention your little cartoon.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[NatasRevol]

Special or default setting? There's a huge difference.

multitude of browsers will _NOT_ make the web

[Anonymous Coward]

"A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse".

If we all used a single browser, even if it is a broken POS, the web would be more "standardised" and developers would know exactly what everything has to work in. Instead of testing 3+ browsers, just make it work on the only one around.

...but I do like a challenge!

Re:That's very nice Opera

[AlphaBit]

+1
Thank god someone else out there will acknowledge this. Many of the "new" features (Gestures, Tabs, Sessions, popup-blocking, advanced cookie management) all the other browsers are waving at each other were first implemented by Opera, often years earlier. Opera rocks.

And there is NO requirement to use unite.

W3C standards won't fly until IE won't comply?

[ClosedSource]

I think an unstated implicit goal of the W3C standard was to make it as incompatible with IE as possible. The problem these days with many standardization efforts is that the members want to invent new stuff rather than play their traditional role of codifying existing practice.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

Special. It's off by default. The option is known as Opera Turbo.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[QRDeNameland]

It's a Big Red O! There's no stopping the Big Red O once it gets rolling. It'll roll right over your lowercase blue e. It'll roll right over your rat clinging to the blue egg. It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is. Beware the Big Red O! It's the Future!

That just made me think of a great idea for ad campaign for Opera: Morpheus opens his hands to Neo with the Red 'O' in one hand and the Blue 'e' in the other.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[wideBlueSkies]

You forgot to mention Google Chrome's Simon Says knockoff icon...

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Comboman]

It's a compass. A typical icon to indicate "navigation"

That would explain why I'm always pressing it on my iPhone and expecting to get the GPS app.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[nacturation]

PS. Check market share in Russia.

In Soviet Russia, the market shares Czechs. No, wait...

Re:That's very nice Opera

[jim_v2000]

"forefront of web technologies and open standards"
"Russia"

Something doesn't fit here.

Re:Woah

[selven]

Wow, you got all of them except the most obvious

Re:Woah

[mathx314]

Well at least Hyrule's safe.

Re:Woah

[hkmwbz]

Opera has 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million users of Opera Mini. Firefox is claimed to have 300 million users or so.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[hkmwbz]

FUD fail.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[hkmwbz]

Actually, Opera 10.50 is faster than Chrome. Opera is back at the top.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. I stopped using Opera around Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird) 0.8/9. Opera, every now and then, locked up X. Ctrl + F1 would not work, only a hard reboot.

OPERA PERIOD: For BOTH better security & SPEED

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've tried but never really have gotten into Opera on the desktop. However on mobile devices -- dumbphones and smartphones and PDAs -- it's pretty much the only game in town." - by rwa2 (4391) * on Friday March 19, @09:10AM (#31536546) Homepage

Well, then I'd have to say in response to that quote of yours above "Get on it man!", because you'll probably LOVE it...

(That is, IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, is Opera 10.5.3315 (per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"... Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

Re:That's very nice Opera

[DaVince21]

Well, I didn't mention speed. But that's a good thing, at least.

Opera also does BEST @ security AND speed too!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Opera Software did great work lobbying against software patents in the campaigns on the EU software patents directive. Thanks Opera!." - by H4x0r Jim Duggan (757476) on Friday March 19, @08:40AM (#31535908) Homepage

Opera CONSISTENTLY does great @ getting users the BEST SPEED and THE BEST SECURITY RATING (vs. known vulnerabilities) over time also... So, I agree, & say "Thanks Opera" for being consistently the FASTEST & SAFEST WEBBROWSER PROGRAM THERE IS, CONSISTENTLY OVER TIME, Bar-none!

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

How about these #'s over time in SPEED & SECUR

[Anonymous Coward]

"These numbers don't mean too much, because at the time the ballot screen was introduced Opera introduced a new version of their browser as well. Probably at least part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen." - by TSchut (1314115) on Friday March 19, @08:40AM (#31535912)

Per my subject-line above then? How about THESE #'s, over time, in the areas of BOTH SPEED & SECURITY??

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

For SPEED & SECURITY? Opera RULES! apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'd certainly recommend trying it again - Opera has been continually improved, and it's not really fair to judge it today based on a five year old version." - by mdwh2 (535323)
on Friday March 19, @09:17AM (#31536688)

Per my subject-line above then? I agree, 110%... why?

Well - How about THESE #'s, over time, in the areas of BOTH SPEED & SECURITY?? It's actually quite fair to judge Opera on those areas, especially IF you check the URL's below that have tested Opera in benchmarks for speed (Security ratings are below too):

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

U.R. Speaking to Polish-American here (apk)

[Anonymous Coward]

"How many of those Polish potentially swayed by the "Opera Turbo technology - speed up your Internet connection" are actually going to -stick to- using Opera, rather than going back to IE or using another browser they might have downloaded through that same choice screen?" - by Animaether (411575) on Friday March 19, @09:06AM (#31536478)

You're speaking to one now - Polish-American here, & here are the reasons WHY I stick to Opera (& have since I discovered it ages ago around version 4.x):

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

Opera's the forefront of SPEED & SECURITY, too

[Anonymous Coward]

"You must be lonely, or only know idiots. Opera has been at the forefront of web technologies and open standards for years. PS. Check market share in Russia." - by Anonymous Coward
on Friday March 19, @08:41AM (#31535938)

Great point, so... how about a couple more (important areas - like SPEED & SECURITY)? Ok, here we go:

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

The FUTURE alright (of browser speed & securit

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a Big Red O! There's no stopping the Big Red O once it gets rolling." - by residieu (577863) on Friday March 19, @09:11AM (#31536574)

Per my subject-line above then & what I quoted from you? How about THESE #'s, over time, in the areas of BOTH SPEED & SECURITY (not just "the future" either as you stated, but also consistently GREAT showings in the past, for BOTH better SPEED online AND SECURITY TOO)??

IF you love speed online (fastest renderer around for webpage data AND scripting too, both YEARS ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win , and last year too -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm , is Opera 10.5.3315 (AND, also per the SunSpider benchmarks recently done this month no less, passing FireFox AND EVEN GOOGLE CHROME yet again -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 (which Opera USUALLY owns javascript processing speeds too, but FF passed them BRIEFLY earlier this year is all, for once, in that area)) AND if you love security too!)

====

SECUNIA WEB BROWSER PROGRAM SECURITY STATS AS OF THIS DATE:

====

Opera 10.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 5 Secunia advisories)

----

FireFox 3.6x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/28698/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 1 Secunia advisories - FIREFOX does make a good showing here too though... but, they've consistently over time had more than Opera, & more left unpatched too + for longer usually)

----

Internet Explorer 8.x:

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/

Unpatched 44% (4 of 9 Secunia advisories)

====

"Read 'em & weep"...

Opera's CONSISTENTLY free of security vulnerabilities too, year-in & year-out... (or, moreso typically than the other 2 of the "big 3", that is) - and features?

Opera's got features most browsers need "bolted on" addons for, except Opera has them natively (as well as having a widgets addons set for it as well, IF you need that kind of thing (I really do not, it comes with all the features I like such as popup blocking, script blocks or accepts BY SITE (via its various .ini files it has) too & more, far more).

APK

P.S.=> So, in the end? For better SPEED online (both HTML/XHTML/XML + javascript processing) AND BETTER OVERALL SECURITY ONLINE? Go Opera... apk

Re:Opera's the forefront of SPEED & SECURITY,

[Anonymous Coward]

I fucking hate your writing style, and here’s why.

It looks like fucking ASCII art. That’s for starters.

Second, you generate a million short, discombobulated broken fragments of paragraphs. It feels like a god damn traffic jam trying to read your walls of text because it doesn’t flow smoothly. It moves in little jerks. Some of them are boldface, which just makes them stronger little jerks. The nested parentheses just make it worse.

Another thing... I don’t want to be picking out the fucking URLs from your comment. They make it a pain in the ass to read. If I want to see the URL you linked to, I’ll hover over the link. The URLs break the flow of the thought. Learn to put an easy-to-follow description instead of the whole fucking URL in the link. Your traffic-jam posts are bad enough without links blaring at me like the air horn of a semi-tractor trailer for no fucking reason.

Finally... why the hell don’t you just get an account, nimwit? If you insist on namefagging, at least do it right. Slashdot has this process called “registration”. It makes it so you don’t have to put your name at the bottom of every fucking post, and you can put it in your sig instead where I can hide it if it annoys me.

P.S. I’m not even going to read your reply. I hate reading your posts. It’s like poking myself in the eye with a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Opinions vary (especially from off topic trolls)

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject-line above, and learn to read, as well as learning to stay on topic, you dyslexic fool. I read his reply and found it quite informative.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Xtifr]

Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl

Don't have much experience with Lynx, Links or w3m, do you? :)

(I know what you meant, and even basically agree, but you did say "[e]very other browser".)

Re:That's very nice Opera

[shutdown -p now]

Opera must be doing something right, that all the other browsers are missing. Go ahead, look at market share in eastern Europe, and especially among people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that a LOT of people take Opera seriously.

While I doubt that anyone knows a definite answer to that, I've made an guess as to why it may be so, based on personal experience (as one of those guys using the Cyrillic alphabet...).

To sum it up briefly, it's because Opera was a viable, fast and feature-rich alternative to IE at the time when power users have already started looking for one, and before Firefox got rid of Mozilla's sluggishness.

libportability in C vs. libportability in JS

[tepples]

all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth

You gloss over GUI toolkit differences in "and so forth".

Wrap the differences in libportability

What's the difference between wrapping the differences in libportability written in C vs. wrapping the differences in libportability written in JavaScript? You might as well go for the web because it allows deploying and updating with zero effort, even to PCs whose owner lets the user browse the web but doesn't let the user install software.

Wine is not an emulator

[tepples]

The superior portability of web apps is not because there are less browsers but because they all adhere to a common standard, unlike operating systems. You can't run a Linux binary natively on Windows, and vice versa.

You can run a Windows binary natively on Linux/x86 because Wine is not an emulator. It's a PE loader and a reimplementation of the Windows API, just as NT is a reimplementation of the original Windows 3.x API.

browsers, which are essentially all mutually compatible middleware.

Except IE isn't very compatible with IE. As I understand it, the difference between IE 6 and, say, Chrome is at least as big as the difference between Windows 9x and Windows Vista.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[Runaway1956]

Thanks for the link. Good write up, and it makes sense. And, here I was, trying to make sense of an apparent language/alphabet link, not even guessing at the political perspective. ;^)

Best thing about Opera?

[meatron]

Spatial navigation! No other browser has that. You can use shift+arrow keys to navigate through the links. Simple, but a big reason for me not to change to firefox. I even endured a period of incredible instability on the linux version couple of years ago - the recent versions have been rock-solid.

Re:Best thing about Opera?

[meatron]

rock-solid haha, just after I finished writing this, opera crashed :) still wouldn't change it for anything.

Re:That's very nice Opera

[hkmwbz]

Opera is at the forefront of new web standards as well.

"It's ridiculous."

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you are.

Now go back to the office and sulk behind a closed door, Mr. Ballmer.

Re:Opinions vary (especially from off topic trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn’t say his reply wasn’t informative. I said his writing style fucking sucks, and if I was a teacher and a student tried to hand me a steaming pile of shit like that I’d fail it.

Your off topic hateful attitude is your failing

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, you're off topic. You fail there alone. You also seem to feel that your opinion is the only 1 of import to anyone reading. There again you are wrong. End of subject.