Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

38 pointstnorthcutt69 comments

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This poll will have a huge bias because Opera Users are going to be more likely to respond to it.

Ironically, "never or rarely" seems to be the most popular choice.

And the fact that that's with the bias really tells something.

That's why every poll is biased.

How else would you ask this question to obtain an unbiased response?

Maybe just ask which browser people use from a selection, obviously including Opera as an option.

Edit: OT, but it would be interesting to do this in the near future to compare and see how much bias there really is in this poll.

Subjectively, Opera manages a large number of tabs much better for me than FF, and has a much nicer UI than Chrome. They seem to do a lot of innovation in browser UI and features, which the other browsers eventually copy (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I really wish it had more marketshare so it would be better supported, but 95% of websites and features work without issue.

Opera is one of those things that I have really tried to like, but that just never really caught on. It's like when you are picking a movie: that intellectual foreign movie has been in your queue for a week, but you are tired so you just grab the nearest retarded Michael Bay movie to relax.

The few times I used Opera I really liked it. I think the guys behind the browser are very innovative and it's a shame that they seem to be always running behind on standards compliance, causing all kinds of problems in daily usage. I have to admit that it has been a while since I last gave it a chance, so maybe things have changed. Right now, there are plenty open source alternatives that are simply better.

> it's a shame that they seem to be always running behind on standards compliance, causing all kinds of problems in daily usage.

It feels a bit to me like you're reiterating a myth. I've used opera for 5 years and I've never run into this, afair. I virtually only get problems when devs use browser detection and then tell me that "this site does not work on opera". I've also had problems with sites that were just only tested on Firefox (used to be IE but the short-sighted devs all switched browser), but there it didn't work on Chrome either.

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but I think comments like yours are what keeps some people from trying out an excellent browser that does what you want and nothing else.

The only thing that I think really rocks more in Chrome is its super-smooth and entirely hidden auto-updating mechanism.

You may be right. Like I said, it has been a while since I last used Opera (several years) and then there were many instances where I had to switch to other browsers to be able to proceed. Most annoyingly, my online banking would work in Firefox (and I'm sure in IE), but not in Opera. These things made it very annoying for daily use.

Maybe it is not fair to blame Opera for quirks and deviations from standards any more than others. The difference is that Opera has such a small market share that developers don't account for Opera's quirks as much as they do for IE, Firefox and Webkit.

I have used Opera a few times, and at the time I was using it, there was no support for SOCKS proxies (something standard in other competitors, always cool to set up a poor's man VPN over SSH). By then, it was important for me to have this in my browser, so I dropped Opera and chose Chrome instead. Nevertheless, I checked the last version and it seems like they implemented SOCKS. Great news, but for now I'll stick to Chrome... BTW, is there any killer feature in Opera ?

Opera's killer features get copied sooner or later (sessions, DOM cache, speed dial, undo close tab, etc.) And what is a killer depends what you care about…

• It's very good if you prefer using keyboard navigation (spatial navigation is a killer not copied anywhere yet)

• Mouse Gestures are still best implemented in Opera IMHO, although Apple's trackpad gestures make that less of a killer feature these days.

• (Fast)Forward button finds and "clicks" on links with labels like "Next page" which makes paged navigation easy.

• Opera handles lots of tabs in a session very well. I often leave tabs open instead of bookmarking pages :)

• The built-in mail client is a killer for me – has "GMail-like" filters (predating GMail), very good threading, 1-key shortcuts and differentiates between "seen" and "read".

In daily use, it seems pretty much the other way around. Opera supports standards, but everyone else goes beyond them.

Also, it's about time feature detection became mainstream because whitelisting certain browsers almost always means forgetting about Opera.

I always thought Opera was very standards compliant.

Potentially there are some shortcomings when it comes to new technologies which I'm going to sweepingly categorise as being HTML5 related, but that gets into a separate argument that HTML5 is still not yet a standard.

At the same time, for "everyday use" (whatever that really means) I've had no issue with standards compliance, and Opera does certainly have support some some not-yet-standardised things. Of course, there's the usual caveat that YMMV.

May I ask what issues you have with their falling behind on standards compliance?

It is most likely because Opera was almost the only lone browser that refused to have 'Mozilla' in its user agent string from the very beginning.

A lot of websites still use UA detection scripts from late 90s(!) which STILL do antiquated UA sniffing which means Opera does not get scripts, styles or markup because it does not seem to have the 'Mozilla' in its UA string leading to broken pages.

There is an easy fix if it is an irritant which is to select 'Edit Site Preferences > Network' from the context menu on a page.

Also, we would be much obliged if you could submit a bug report if you come across a site that does not render correctly in Opera: https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

If you are a web developer, please do consider using feature-detection :)

Opera was the most suited browser for my eeePC (1gb ram, Atom in ecomode most of the time). I originally planed to use Chrome as I thought it was lighter and faster, but quickly found out that Opera fared much better globally.

Beyond the numbers, Chrome seemed to perform worse as my number of tabs growed. I had freezes and the pages didn't scroll smoothly. I don't have such problems with Opera.

I have over a thousand of synchronized bookmarks, 4 email accounts set-up, in the end it just saves me a ton of ressources as I don't have to open anything else for my needs.

Chrome is perfect as the secondary browser who doesn't save sessions, the launch is blazing fast.

I think Opera and Google Chrome combined would make the best browser. Opera has some great UX benefits over chrome, but completely lacks in some obvious ones. The toolbar, homepage setup, settings, buttons, tabs, are all superior in Opera hands down (in my opinion of course). Chrome wins with it's highlight + right-click + actions, obvious hotkeys, developer tools, and many other intricacies that Opera misses or handles poorly (for instance I cannot even stretch out a textarea in Opera).

I use Opera, Chrome and Firefox equally. I use every other browser too for testing.

I used Opera, when it still was paid-for software, because it was light and fast. I left Opera when they started including everything but the kitchen sink (Mail client, etc.) in the browser.

I never quite understood why they did not release the applications separately. They probably wanted to compete with the Mozilla suite.

At the time when such mattered to the single core sub ghz cpu. The binary for Opera was still smaller then Firefox's. And if you didn't enable the mail client, it wasn't enabled. What is bloat, is having an entire browser in an emailclient to render HTML messages, like Mozilla did.

Paid-for version had mail client too. v6 even had ICQ client.

Since then Opera has been hiding these features, but they're not separating them, as they have no noticeable impact and the codebase as a whole is still smaller than less featured competitors'.

Yeah, though I do find having Firefox as well helps occasionally (mostly fb if I'm honest)

Main browser across Windows and Ubunutu (and OSX when I used that)

Having DragonFly - native DOM inspector, built in rather than external like FF is really very good. (In my experience some plugins seem to kill the perf of FF)

Continually recommend it to replace people's bundled mobile phone brower - well Opera Mobile.

I used Chrome for over a year and just recently went back to Opera. I have open bug reports for various bookmark problems in Chrome that have been ignored by the Chrome developers for several versions now. The chrome bookmarks code (and syncing) just needs to be thrown out and rewritten. It's a steaming pile of dung. I've even tried deleting them wholesale and letting chrome resync the whole bunch - it will only sync 100 per day as some sort of throttling mechanism, so it took a month for all of them to synchronize.

I do run into an occasional problem with Opera, for example, in Google docs, you can't upload a document. But for me, bookmarks are very important (I have over 5 thousand of them) and chrome can't handle them correctly.

I fired chrome's bookmark sync and went back to xmarks. Works much better, though even xmarks still complains about chrome bookmark sync interfering (how? it's supposedly turned off) and asks me to redownload my bookmarks to one machine or another.

I voted for main browser (desktop), but it's not entirely true.

At work, IE8 is mandated (though I did manage to score Chromium recently and switch over).

At home, I've kept the same Opera session alive for the past year and a half. I use Opera for the sites that I never really leave, just refresh every morning and evening. Many of the tabs have been open for the entire time.

But when I just want to pop into a site for a little while, like HN or something, I open Chrome. It feels so much faster even though it probably isn't in absolute terms. (Also, I operate one Twitter account from Opera and another from Chrome, so it's convenient to have two browsers anyway.)

The mobile version of opera on android is actually very, very good. I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't. And i'm not an opera desktop user.

I used to, because I loved the keyboard-only navigation (and Vimperator required me to hit number keys accurately, which is kind of awkward). Vimium on Chrome has left me only a few reasons to use Opera (mouse gestures, bookmark syncing), and they just aren't important enough.

Use it only for desktop and mobile (of course). The desktop version is somewhat "heavy" so I tend to use Chrome on lapotops etc. But in a way I feel that Opera is a more complete browser. The speedial is genius, and with the ability to make extensions for it, it has alot more potensial. The other thing I really like, which I have been unable to find in other browser (that is equally good) is mousegestures. After just a bit of use, it gets in your muscles and creating and closing tabs, moving back and forth between pages has never been easier. My 5 cents.

I've found Opera to be fairly lightweight. It handles large numbers of tabs with (a bit) less memory usage than Chrome. Admittedly, this is because it's not a multi-process browser. It does mean that it functions well on machines with limited resources.

Opera may have rich functionality, but it's done with very little code footprint:

Opera's Mac executable is 22MB, Chrome's is 57MB! (in their private frameworks, both i386-only)

Opera adjusts RAM usage proportionally to amount of RAM in the machine, so if you have several GB of RAM it might look large, but it scales down to 512MB machines. RAM usage is mostly DOM cache for fast Back button.

Functionality like Mail and RSS used to be in a 200KB DLL on Windows.

I've used it since v5. I love it, but seem to think about switching every once in a while, but no one seems to have mouse gestures which can match Opera's. Also, I love the speed dial.

I don't use Opera and I never test it because the user base is not big enough to matter. My experience with Opera has always resulted in broken websites because of their poor rendering engine (in my opinion). I still can't believe the Opera browser has existed from the beginning of browsers and still exists today and their market share hasn't really gone up significantly.

In places like Russia or the CSI countries, Opera is the leading browser, with between 24% to 40% market share. It's not a browser you want to ignore if you want to appeal to those markets.

Oh well, I never really targeted those countries. Where I worked previously we simply looked at our browser statistics and Opera was below 1% so we ditched it pretty quickly, unless one feature was really broken to the point where the vital tasks cannot be done (1% of a really huge user base still counts a little). We would often have an "if Opera" and replace our pages with a stripped-down version that worked on Opera. For every other minor bug and rendering differences, Opera was completely ignored.

Sadly there's a vicious cycle of Opera having small marketshare, being ignored, causing it to keep small market share.

Opera's biggest problem is lack of support for -webkit-* properties, they only support unprefixed ones or -o-* ;)

Honestly, the engine is quite good. For Opera web standards support is a matter of life and death (they know they don't have market share to get sites being bug-compatible with them) and they put lots of effort into getting things right.

> their poor rendering engine

That's an rather misleading and ignorant thing to say.

Hence why I added (in my opinion) right after. What's misleading and ignorant in stating an opinion? I didn't state that as a fact. For the few times where I had to fix things in Opera (can't remember which version it was but it's no more than 2-3 years ago) the rendering was really off compared to FF, Chrome and even IE.

I tried to get into Opera Mini. I liked it because it is speedier than the stock Android browser, it handles tabs well, and the interface does pretty much what I expect most of the time. But I found that on a weak wireless signal it would just give up on loading the page, and its startup time was just enough to make it cumbersome. It has since been removed from my phone.

You could try Opera Mobile instead. That's a more traditional browser and may perform better.

IMO the fact that Opera Mini doesn't try to grab a GPS signal and integrate itself with my phone is a feature.

Really, I'm quite fond of Opera. It's pretty good about standards compliance and I really enjoy the Opera Portal where I can keep up on all my favorite blogs from my start page. I think where Opera falls short for me is the Dragonfly plugin. Whenever I want to modify CSS live, Dragonfly makes it such a clumsy process. I find firebug to be far more intuitive.

I used to use Opera a few years ago, but its Javascript performance was iffy. By the time they fixed it, I was already hooked on Firefox, and if I recall correctly, Dragonfly wasn't as mature. After switching to Mac, I tried Opera again, but it -still- doesn't support inertial scrolling, so I'm currently using Chrome.

JavaScript performance was iffy? Opera always had the best JS performance by far, except for that year or two when everyone else started using JIT.

That was just an anecdotal comment - it's been too long for me to remember any concrete examples. I haven't had any problems lately though.

I used it from v 5 on, then moved to FF when Opera's lack of plugins and compatibility probs. killed it for me. Then, I went chrome > FF with vimperator > back to opera. Opera is the best keyboard-shortcut-driven experience ever. Try shift-arrows. With addons, it no-contest the best browser for me.

Spatial navigation is indeed great way to navigate with the keyboard. I wonder if anyone seriously uses Tab-based keyboard navigation?

There's more smart keyboard navigation in Opera:

• Cmd+Enter to log in on page which has autosaved login.

• Cmd+Backspace to delete last path component of the URL.

• Space at bottom of page clicks link with "Next" in the label.

• '/', text, Enter navigates link with given label (as opposed to '.' + text which searches page as you type).

• And (a rather quirky) '1' and '2' keys switching previous/next tab. It's much easier to reach with left hand than combos such as Cmd+} or Alt+Cmd+→ used in other applications.

The last two have to be enabled in prefs.

I was not able to use Opera at work for years because of lack of socks proxy support. With each release I would download Opera, install it, check that it still doesn't have socks support and gave up.

Using SocksCap or FreeCap for that was just annoying.

After some time I stopped caring about Opera. Now, I don't even bother to test on it.

It does have socks proxy support now, just FYI.

What about shoes proxy support?

Glad that they finally added it.

If it was available ~8 years ago I might have been using Opera.

Does it have proxy pac file support also?

Only for testing and random surfing when I got too many tabs on Chrome and FF at the same time. Chrome is still to deep in my heart... and it got it's place after kicking FF off there, so i think opera's nice interface will stay off for a while they still have some work to do to get a bigger piece.

I use opera occasionally on my iPhone. Most common use case is when I'm playing a stream or podcast directly in Safari and I want to surf at the same time. Opera is surprisingly fast and works well considering that all the rendering is done remotely.

I used to use it on Symbian, but since moving to an iPhone it’s not an option. Well, there’s Opera Mini but that’s really not a great experience on iOS.

Regarding the desktop browser, I prefer to use open-source browsers, and (imho) Dragonfly isn’t as good as Firebug.

I discovered my biggest complaint about Opera last night: It's not completely obvious how to set up a SOCKS5 proxy.

In Firefox it's as buried as you'd expect, but at least I never give up on it and use ssh/w3m to access private network sites.

I use Firefox/Chrome/Opera, each for different purposes. No option for, "Yes, not my main browser."

For instance, I use Opera for access to my company's Google Apps suite. And I use FF for personal. Chrome for social media for my job.

Whenever I am in low bandwidth connection I use opera with turbo enabled. Plus it has low memory footprint than chrome and firefox. Also it has some unique feature like fit to width and show/hide image.

I might use it on the Desktop more if they would fix the annoying bug where the number of items don't appear next to the feed in Google Reader!

EVERY new version they put out I check and am disappointed.

I really despise all kinds of "built in features". I never use any of them. I much prefer a browser like chrome that is bare minimum. The only plugin I use is Lastpass.

I haven't used Opera for nearly a decade.

I used to use it on my Blackberry Storm, but I have no need for it now that I have a different phone.

i made the switch to opera as my main browser a little while ago, but website incompatibilities (lot of them links from right here!) forced me back to firefox

but for those, the experience was good enough to make me consider switching completely

Yes, while it's not my main browser, I use it for more than just testing.

I only use it for testing.

It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance. It is almost always an order of magnitude slower than IE9, FF5, and Chrome 14.

I use it as my main browser. Never had problems with canvas performance. Most websites don't use canvas anyway.

I tried almost all browsers (except Safari) and the latest versions (>9) got me hooked. I like the screenshots inside the tabs (when you drag them down). It is looking clean, doing what I want, nice developer tools. I like it a lot!

> It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance.

I thought so too, until I added Math.floor(x) to positions in drawImage().

When you give fractional positions, Opera takes it literally and does rendering with costly anti-aliasing for subpixel precision.

Once I rounded the numbers, Opera turned out to be the fastest.

I actually made tests a while ago to show precisely those two things, namely flooring and drawImage, are 10x as slow on Opera.

First let me note that on average using Math.floor(x) results in slower performance than using x | 0. I'd recommend using the latter way instead.

And even then Opera is an order of magnitude slower at flooring numbers compared to FF5, IE9 and Chrome 14:

http://jsperf.com/bit-thingies

Opera's drawImage is also an order of magnitude slower than Chrome 14, IE9 and FF5. Note that in this link the FF8Beta, Ipad, and the first two Chrome versions were ran by someone else's machine, so those results can't be compared with the other numbers.

http://jsperf.com/render-vs-prerender

If you don't believe them, of course, I urge you to run them for yourself.

I stand corrected. Chrome has gotten really fast since worked with canvas (last year).

on Windows Opera is the best option.

I'm a big fan of Opera's attitude even though I only use them for testing.

Their upcoming OpenGL acceleration will really show how stupid Microsoft was for not making IE9 XP compatible under the claim that the OS was limiting them.

I use it for short sessions on mobile, when I know I'll spend less time than it takes Fennec to load.

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