Honestly, does anyone use Opera?
And the whole Cocoa conversion sealed the deal for me. That, and the fact that I can control it fully with only the mouse or only the keyboard.
1. Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines. I mean faster in application tasks (launch/switch tabs/go back/etc.), not executing JS.
2. Opera is easy for normal people – it has a ton of features like built in mail reader, etc. but they don't get in your way, it is easy to ignore them if you don't need them. Also, you can't accidentally download a ton of useless Opera toolbars.
3. Opera is free, independent, standards-compliant, secure, etc. - a lot of things that we geeks love.
4. A lot of normal people ask some geek they know to set up their new computer - and we remove the bloat that comes with it and install the basic apps (often including Opera, Avast, ImgBurn, 7zip, etc.). Surprisingly I often hear these normal people saying they actually like Opera way more than IE. I thought they would not care.
I strongly second this. I recently tried Opera for the first time in ages on an old ThinkPad ca. 2001 and it's astonishing what it can do with as little as 128MB of RAM and a Pentium 3. Where Firefox and Chrome struggle with even one tab and no extensions, I routinely find myself with a dozen or more open in Opera without it becoming even slightly sluggish. Whatever its faults, I'm extremely impressed.
Just tried it. Indeed it does!
So sad it allows for very little customization and has different shortcuts than other browsers, otherwise I would have jumped on it right away. Hopefully, the next version will fix this.
http://people.opera.com/dstorey/images/OperaMarketShareEEhov...
(based on StatCounter and Gemius data)
Love it now to where other browsers feel boring. Opera takes a bit of commitment in the beginning because it isn't as "popular thing to use" but once you LEARN how humbly powerful it is (browsing speed wise AND feature set), you sort of end up catching yourself going back to it more and more to where you use it for most of the time. Many small features I take for granted now with Opera others don't have or you need some sort of extension to get (or they end up copying later).
Also, the times of running into sites not compatible with Opera are so far and few between now thanks to the growth of browser wars. It happens once in while, sure... It happens in Chrome too. BUT no other browser has a the simple though out ability to right-click the broken webpage and allow you to select to open it in another browser on your system. That to me is "friendly" and shows Opera has a open philosophy.
Try it