Update: Come on there's no reason to downvote this. At least explain why you're downvoting this, for example, Opera killed your puppy.
The only reason to support Opera is personal good feelings toward Opera. The userbase is insignificant, Opera doesn't further any given political goal as they aren't open-source and they are several more-popular open-source browsers in the market that are tested against. So what's the point of supporting Opera other than just liking Opera and wanting it to be usable with your site? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but rarely is it a cost-efficient procedure.
It's frustrating since I just recently switched to Opera and personally find that it performs great, it feels better to me than Chrome, and overall I really like it. The biggest issue I've experienced and the biggest hurdle Opera has is the wholesale exclusion many sites partake in, usually via a if(opera){ //don't support}, rather than feature testing.
But then again, maybe they _did_ test it in Opera and saw it didn't work, but couldn't justify fixing it from a cost perspective. So, would you rather have the thing just be all broken or have a sign saying "This is broken in your browser, sorry"?
That being said, Opera is a nice browser and has gotten better and better with time. I of course encourage projects that can and should to support opera, but there are plenty of reasons not to support it and in most of those cases they're right not to do so.
I've tried it in Opera, and it's perfectly usable apart from some weird scrolling issues where you can scroll the whole site off the page, and sometimes Opera doesn't seem to want to redraw some items in the songlists without scrolling a bit.
Just click the "Let's take a chance" button when the browser compatibility lightbox opens and the site will let you in.
"We've tested the new Grooveshark in modern versions of Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
It looks like you aren't using one of these browsers."
I guess ask them, but to me that reads like "Recent versions of these browsers have been tested. You aren't using something we have tested on."
Good job, though, Grooveshark folk! I love the updates so far.
What is unfortunately happening is rather than testing to see if the site will work in Opera, developers just exclude it. They've made lots of progress over the past few years to get their browser up to snuff. I just recently switched to Opera after Chrome started lagging during the 1.6 update.
Idealy, developers could target one set of standards and their product would be functional across all browsers that implement them. In general, the bigger browsers all act relatively the same (not IE) when standards-compliant code is used, so if what works for them doesn't in Opera, then that's a problem.
It's not the developers' jobs to make their sites work with Opera (especially when it works in IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari). It is Opera's job to make sure they render sites comparably to other leading browsers.
If that means they rip out their rendering engine and replace it with Webkit, so be it.
Coding wrong and passing the problem to the browser is just mean
BTW, different rendering engines, assure no monopoly, innovation and competence, which is always good.
Go through them and let me know if you still believe that Opera doesn't try hard enough. The problem is that being standards complaint is harder than it soudns. A lot of the nitty gritties aren't explained in standards and diff browsers implement them in diff ways. While developers explicitely implement patches for Fx and IE, they generally ignore Opera. And that's why so many websites don't work in Opera.
And that's wrong, css attributes whose drafts aren't final yet should not be labeled as such by Opera.