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You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time?

As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor).

ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.

Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Possibly. But they're also the only browser I'm aware of apart from IE that supports "document.all". And (at least as of 2007), they were still using IE's quirks mode box model if you didn't specify a doctype.

As I said, they did a good job of trying to please everybody. You could code for Firefox or IE and have a reasonable expectation that it would work on Opera too.

That's a good thing, by the way.

What do you mean, "possibly"?

Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time (which is implemented by copying certain quirks--and O isn't the only one that does that--as well as having a large database of popular sites that are fixed with bits of custom JS), or you disagree that Opera aimed and successfully did implement web standards (which is provably false).

Saying "possibly" makes it sound like you don't really know. Did you consider, while typing that remark about the downvotes (bad form, and doesn't add anything to the discussion, except for polarizing it even more), that it might actually be caused by your self-admitted lack of knowledge on the subject?

Sure thing, those people may be "Opera devotees", because those are the people that know what they're talking about maybe?

You claim that top post was "not actually an anti-Opera comment". What about your remark that "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about"? That was you baiting all of those European and Russian Opera users, that you may or may not have noticed are also here on HN. If you had said "the browser nobody in the US actually cares about" then yes, I could not have disagreed. But this general claim is a tad ignorant, the global 1.3% market share is not at all geographically evenly spread, and goes up to 47% in certain countries. That's a long shot from saying nobody cares about it.

(BTW I may be an Opera devotee--a little bit less than I was a few years ago though--but I'm not downvoting you)

>Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time

Noble aim but that doesn't work in the consumer world. I am pretty open-minded, so I am seriously trying to use Opera every 2 or 3 years. And each time I really start to enjoy using it but after one or two days I get horribly disappointed: a significant number of websites I like just doesn't work. Not just loss in function, they are completely unusuable, for instance I get a white page.

Last time I did this try is probably 2 years ago. Last time I observed this behaviour with another non-IE-browser: at least 5 years ago, probably more like 8.

There was a time when certain websites only worked with IE. Somehow Mozilla and friends adapted... but what happened to Opera? I cannot stop thinking that Opera somehow got stuck in the 90s. They are certainly innovative, they were the CSS pioneers, everybody copied tabs and other cool features.

But still... When your rendering is incompatible to the real world, nobody will use you. So I can only agree: smart move. Maybe this will make Opera a serious competitor in the Browser market again.

Anyway, I also agree, Opera still has a user base. I work on an in-house tool and we have users using Opera, so I test against it.

> Noble aim but that doesn't work in the consumer world. I am pretty open-minded, so I am seriously trying to use Opera every 2 or 3 years. And each time I really start to enjoy using it but after one or two days I get horribly disappointed: a significant number of websites I like just doesn't work. Not just loss in function, they are completely unusuable, for instance I get a white page.

You're saying that's the fault of Opera when it's possibly the fault of lazy devs.

You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera.

(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)

>You're saying that's the fault of Opera when it's possibly the fault of lazy devs.

Obviously it's "hobby devs" breaking the standards and Opera having low tolerance for that. As a matter of fact, a large part of the web's success is due to hobbyists. The hobbyists were only able to contribute to the success because it was and still is so easy. You don't have to be a HTML or JS guru to create a dynamic web page. On the other hand this allows for many devs that never even heard of HTML validators, JS linters etc.

I think it's good that most HTML/JS implementations are very fault tolerant. It's good and the decline of XHTML, XSLT and friends underlines that.

>You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera. >(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)

In 2003 Mozilla and friends had the same problem sometimes too.

> Opera having low tolerance for that

Except that is not true. Opera has a high tolerance, probably much higher than any other browser (out of necessity). But that doesn't help much if you're being blocked or sites constantly find new bugs in other browsers they decide to work around and thereby breaking it in any browser that is not one of the top 3.

>What do you mean, "possibly"?

I'm guessing OP meant possibly for the "sometimes for their own bad" part of the comment.

All browsers support document.all; see [1].

It is true that Opera tried to reverse engineer more of the IE DOM than most others, for example we were the only ones to have attachEvent and friends. But in recent years that caused problems with sites that made false equivalences like "has attachEvent -> must be IE" and so non-standard features were being actively removed.

It is also true that Opera has been heavily involved in the standards process; both in codifying the legacy and in more forward-looking initiatives to add novel functionality to the platform. For example Hixie was working at Opera when he started work on what became HTML5. Opera's Simon Pieters wrote a spec for CSS quirks mode [2]. We have also been involved in numerous other specs, and in the beginnings of the effort to produce a comprehensive vendor-neutral testsuite for web platform technologies.

[1] http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/... [2] http://quirks.spec.whatwg.org/

Yea, it is unfortunate that Netscape "Mariner", which was also going to support DOM level 1, got cancelled.

> Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either.

The Chromium Embedded Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) isn't too far from that. I'm not sure if Opera is using this project in particular, but they do mention using Chromium.

It seems you are right, other comments mentioned using V8 as well.

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.

>I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide

I think by far the biggest impact was bundling Chrome and autoinstalling it with Java and Flash updates. Google must have paid top dollar for it which Firefox and Opera had no chance of matching.

Those are all immature web markets. By the time the majority of web users in those countries spend a significant amount of money online, they probably wont be using Opera anymore. If you're looking for more file-sharing users, sure, target these markets. But if you want to make money today then don't waste your time. (I've lived in, started/run businesses, and produced web products in Eastern Europe).

thank god for people like you who spread the word about how you can't make money on the web in those markets :) all I can say that you did not try hard enough :)

The European mobile web market is 'immature'. #shithnsays

Not what I meant at all. I just meant that in my experience, the counties listed have relatively low median disposable incomes, and are generally not inclined to pay for web products.

Have you ever heard about ads?

Why wouldn't they be using Opera anymore? They will be used to Opera, and the brand will be well known to most people.

Why do you think Google is desperate to enter these markets right now?

Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301

And Britain at 20% (was surprized myself!) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201208-201301

Edit: my bad, the graph probably didn't refresh properly

20% in the UK would surprise me too, but that graph shows Opera at 0.56%, and seemingly declining.

StatCounter is a terrible source for anything outside of North America and Western Europe.

> Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Not quite. They always made every effort to be as compatible as possible with real world sites.

You are not being downvoted because of Opera devotees. You are getting downvoted because of your passive aggressive tone, similar to every single reddit comment which starts with "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this", nobody like the martyr argument.

And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will tell you another story for Opera, not supporting Opera there "because it only has 1.6% worldwide" would be a dumb reasoning. What matters for your choice is the market share on your properties, not on others' properties.

That's all in the interpretation. I saw nothing passive aggressive about what he said. He just stated his opinions (and what I believe to be many facts too) in a very mater-of-fact way. There's a difference between that and passive aggressive.

As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concerned and preoccupied with complete and totally accuracy (like we often are on HN and miss the forest for the trees because of) Opera really isn't much to worry about. It's a great browser and all but you can bet that if you're building a new web property you're not going to see a lot of Opera users with 1.6% market share worldwide. Sure, you might get lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) and somehow get a swarm of Opera users but I also might win the lottery this week too.

Not passive aggressive?

>the browser that nobody cares about

>Now they see Chrome is going to win

Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate.

>copying Chrome

They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

No, they're literally copying Chromium. They're forking the source tree and including it as the rendering engine in their browser. That is a verbatim copy. There's nothing wrong with that, and I think it's a smart move and does not speak anything less of Opera (in fact it speaks probably a lot more), but it is a copy.

Before, Opera "copied" Trident by implementing the same quirks so pages behaved the same way. They were not standards compliant, and Trident was not standards compliant. Trident failed at certain implementations, and Opera deliberately failed at those same implementations to achieve the desired effect.

Most of the features of modern browsers, which we take for granted, are actually inventions of Opera: http://www.opera.com/portal/15/years/

> No, they're literally copying Chromium. They're forking the source tree and including it as the rendering engine in their browser. That is a verbatim copy.

This is misleading nonsense. You led people to believe that they would just make a copy of Chrome, but they will obviously not just compile Chromium and give it a new name. They will most likely bring the entire Quick framework and their existing UI to the Chromium framework.

> Implies that...

It doesn't actually imply any of that.

No one's saying Opera hasn't innovated. Only that it's not very popular and that, in addition to their innovations, they follow trends. That's not a passive aggressive statement.

> They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

The commenter was suggesting that Opera is now choosing to be "standards compliant" because the current most popular browsers are, as opposed to Opera's choice in the past to be non-standards compliant to copy the top browser of that time, IE. If the top browser is standards compliant, and you want to copy it, what would your browser end up being?

"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore."

Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets.

"They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about."

This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.

History has shown me that if it breaks in Opera it will break in IE. The difference being that Opera will give you more details

Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list

That's probably just me.

I run a site that is not technical at all, it's a legal site related to divorcing fathers. Last year the site had 1,111,795 total visits and 5429 of them were from Opera. So I'm not sure who is this community that cares that much about Opera but they are not in the US.

What is the site? Interesting.

You say 300 million like it is actually a big number in this context. Its not, use a percentage.

I'd also love to know where 300 million is coming from, as it seems extremely high.

>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore.

Hello. Now you know at least one. :)

Of course FF, Chrome/ium, Safari, IE take priority, but I still run everything by Opera too. I just love Opera and have since I discovered MDI > tabs in the early 2000s, among other things.

This change will make all that easier though, so nice to see it.

PS - I didn't downvote you, though don't consider your comment particularly worthy of upvotes either.

Amazing how communities that railed against monolithic implementations and stagnation in the past are perfectly happy with it when it's "their team" that's becoming the monolith.

I'm not perfectly happy, there's not not much impact being unhappy is likely to have. Once a company makes a huge announcement like this, displeasure from the customer base is unlikely to cause them to change their minds until either they discover the change was a HUGE mistake and upsets lots of their customers and they lose significant market share OR they're forced to change because they go bankrupt.

Being unhappy isn't likely to change Opera's decision, of course, but... the reaction to Opera's decision is likely to influence other players.

For example, the difference between "bring on the monoculture" and "this is a sad day for web standards" is likely to influence Mozilla's future direction, both directly and indirectly (via the choices web developers make in supporting or not supporting Firefox).

I've upvoted you because it's the same from us. We have had zero hits from opera for a couple of years.

I'm not sure that you would know. This is my user agent string:

  Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)

...running the current version of Opera. Most other people I know that use opera do the same thing to get around silly sites that won't even try to display their content.

It's moves like that which mean Opera has dug its own grave of irrelevancy. They should have given you the tools to enable spoofing on a per-domain basis only, not browser-wide.

They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.

If it's one browser that have a shit ton of per domain/site options it is Opera.

edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.

You should probably update your stats scripts.

> they're switching to copying Chrome

How so? Like Chrome copied Safari because they're both using Webkit?

> They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it.

That's the problem for you Opera bashers. It will now have room to grow and get a much bigger user base on PCs.

>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore

You don't know very good web devs then. By far the easiest path as a developer is to develop for opera, then test the rest. You end up with far few problems that way. If you develop for firefox or chrome it is easy to write a bunch of stuff that works in that browser, but not in the other, and then you have way more work dealing with fixing it. Opera is strict enough that if it works there, it is almost certainly going to work everywhere else (not old IEs obviously).