Opera browser – mobile Web winner, desktop loser
Google’s Chrome browser has barely been out a week and already it’s beaten No.4 browser Opera in usage numbers. Despite excellent critical reception, what’s stopping Opera from being more of a contender in the browser stakes?
Recent numbers show Chrome’s already surpassed Opera. Not that there was much to leapfrog – Opera holds barely one percent of the browser market. Even upstart Firefox hasn’t managed to get anywhere near the 40 percent mark, with IE still the de facto browser for more than half of the Internet.
Internet Explorer isn’t the most used browser because it’s good; it’s just happens to be pre-installed on most Windows PCs. Opera’s even gone so far as to sue Microsoft for that state of affairs. Opera as a browser has a lot going for it, pioneering features that later appeared in other browsers. It had tabbed browsing and saved sessions long before Firefox had even appeared. Chrome’s Most Visited sites feature? Opera has that, but calls it Speed Dial. Instead of extensions, Opera comes with widgets, many of which are user-developed. It comes with its own email, notes and even Bittorrent. Opera’s Opera Mini is likely the best mobile browser out there but it’s a shame it doesn’t get enough press in the desktop market.
As to accessibility for the disabled, nothing comes close to Opera in those stakes what with the browser being fully usable with just a keyboard. Text-to-speech is also integrated into the browser. Opera is also skinnable for those who want to tweak with its appearance. Annoyed with ads and the like? Just right-click on any content on a Web page and have it blocked without needing to install the popular Ad Block. And of all the browsers, Opera is the most standards-compliant. Pity is, not a lot of the sites out there are.
Here lies what might be Opera’s main problem – in many ways it is an ideal browser that panders to ideals like the Acid 3 standards test. But the Web as it is, is far from ideal. I’ve found on many an occasion sites that wouldn’t load properly in Opera, despite not causing any issues at all in other browsers. Thankfully the new version of Opera is slightly kinder on non-standards compliant sites. But it’s likely lost many potential users from this frustrating issue with previous versions.
Opera’s marketing and promotion also needs a lot of help. It’s not good enough to just have your own little ‘community’ with free blogs and so forth. The Internet is vast – it needs a heck of lot of work to get noticed in the huge morass of sites out there. The Get Firefox campaign was sheer genius, especially the whole ‘let’s set a new downloads record’ drive. Google only needed to thrust its new browser out there for the rest of the online news wire to converge in a shark-like frenzy. Chrome isn’t Opera’s problem; Opera is Opera’s problem. Unless it does more to get its browser noticed, it just might end up forgotten in what looks like an IE-Firefox-Chrome three-way fight.
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September 7th, 2008
RE: “Internet Explorer isn’t the most used browser because it’s good; [it] just happens to be pre-installed on most Windows PCs.” I think this makes the Firefox adoption numbers even more astounding. That’s a HUGE advantage that Internet Explorer has in terms of maintaining its footprint, and yet (even my 60 year old father!) for most of us the *very first* thing we do after buying a new pc is to go download Firefox, set it as the default browser, and then disable as many IE functions as we can find in the registry. IE is just among the other crapware that the PC manufacturers suffer upon their “valued” customers. And I would imagine that most of its users are the same type that thought AOL *was* the internet … and only recently discovered there was a way to get out of that mousetrap. Too bad PCs don’t come pre-loaded with ALL of the browser options and present the user with some intuitive pros / cons overviews of each (and allow them to select them at set-up).
December 13th, 2008
Google chrome might be fast but unstable(crushed while reading this topic). It uses whole lot of RAM and goes on increasing the uses with every added tab. Firefox is also damn memory eater it was stable with 2.0.0.x versions but since 3.0 it uses High CPU at times. I don’t think chrome will be able to replace the Opera that soon atleast on my desktop. High resource uses of fx 3 has forced to use Opera as my 1imery browser.(I used fx as default since version 2.0.0.5). So I’m with Opera and eyeing on Chrome development.