Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat | Hacker News Reader

Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat

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36 pointsBrajeshwar13 comments

I am really surprised and many time pissed off ( as a Opera user) that Opera desktop doesn't have as much user share as it should. I don't know what it missed. Many of the new features in browsers these days would trace back to Opera. Many features in Opera are not found in other browsers. But still, it remains flat. Sad.

I use and am a fan of Opera as well, but the features you talk about are UI features. Those are nice, but what matters is standards compatibility and that is where Opera lags behind.

Just to name a few missing things: flexbox (supported by most browsers for years now), no requestAnimationFrame, no IndexedDB, no css calc(), No blob urls, no 3d transforms.

As a developer we still cannot use them until we can drop support for IE8. So it really does not matter at all if other browsers support them or not.

Who is this we you speak of? You can drop support for IE8 any time you want. I'd rather not drop support for the latest version of Opera though, which I've had to do simple because it doesn't have flexbox.

How can you say you can drop support for IE8? Its still hugely popular (13+% of market). While I love opera (my daily browser but only 2% of market) I could see dropping support for Opera before IE8, until IE8 loses more market share.

> How can you say you can drop support for IE8?

Simple, I don't live in a world where the target audience for every site I write is 100% of available web users. Some projects are directed at corporate users with IE8, some are directed at mobile browsers.

You maybe right, but I was talking more about user adoption. It had it in it to be a popular browser for users (IMO, of course) and user adoption would have made the devs not really care about the things that are missing.

Both sets of features are important.

I've used Opera as my primary browser and email client for years. I recommend Firefox to all my family and friends. I too often run into web sites that simply don't work right in Opera, and I don't think anyone else wants to put up with the hassle. (Heck, the site linked from the "CSS Font Stack" item on the front page of Hacker News right now doesn't work in Opera.)

One site, which I use to pay some medical bills, fails with Opera in such a way that the site appears to be down for maintenance. But opening it up in Firefox works fine. That issue had me confused for a while, and I like to think I'm savvier than the average bear, at least.

I understand the appeal of the vision of a truly standards-based web, but I'm beginning to suspect it's just not workable. The various APIs are just too complicated. Perfect compatibility would mean getting even the bugs working the same way. The organizations that create and maintain websites will always have to triage their testing resources, and the smallest browsers will always be left out of the testing, and the smallest browsers will consequently demonstrate problems that will in turn keep their market share small.

It's a situation that makes the success of Firefox and Chrome all the more astonishing, really.

Even though I switched to Chrome, I hope Opera does well. It still has my heart, I've used it for seven years or so.

Even though it can't compete with the marketing of Chrome and Firefox, Opera is still the best browser.

Ok, sales up. How about usage? I had Opera Mini on my Sony-Ericsson a few years ago. Used it maybe half a dozen of times.

I use it all the time - 3G coverage is patchy where I live, and Opera Mini is far quicker and more reliable over a slow mobile connection than trying to load a bloated 300k+ page over a 12kbps GPRS link.

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