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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."
Opera Software did great work lobbying against software patents in the campaigns on the EU software patents directive. Thanks Opera!.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
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.
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!"
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.
Spinal Tap will start streaming through all 11 copies of Opera simultaneously.
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
When will Opera go after Nintendo for only allowing one "3rd-party" browser on the Wii?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
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
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!
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.)
Comment of the year
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.
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.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
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.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
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.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
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.
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.
Isn't that Amaya?
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
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".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I read it via Lynx on Linux whilst cruising down the Link, listening to Link and watching Link....but then the Link went down.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
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.
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.
Only if you use Opera Mini. It's a special setting on Opera Mobile. I turn it on or off when it's convenient.
I am not devoid of humor.
Special. It's off by default. The option is known as Opera Turbo.
I am not devoid of humor.
That would explain why I'm always pressing it on my iPhone and expecting to get the GPS app.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.