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

[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: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: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: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!

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: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.)

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".