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

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

[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

[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!

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

[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

[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.)

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: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!

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

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: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.

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: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.